In the early summer of 2004, to mark the 800th anniversary of King John's loss of Normandy, a series of conferences was held, in Caen and Rouen, at Poitiers and Fontevraud, and at the Public Record Office in Kew. The Kew conference, in part financed by a grant from the Pipe Roll Society, itself then commemorating its 120th anniversary, was organized on an altogether less lavish scale than the great jamborees held in France. This was wholly appropriate, given that the French have a great deal more to celebrate than the English from the outcome of the events of 1204. The fact that the present volume is only now going to press, some years after both of the French conferences, held in Normandy and in Poitou, were published, is likewise an appropriate reflection of English ambivalence towards the ‘Loss of Normandy’. There are parallels here to the way in which the momentous happenings of 1204 were recorded by the chronicler of Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire. In his entry for 1204, the Dunstable writer reported first and foremost that King John had granted the canons houses and a garden in Dunstable. Secondly, he reported the taxation of a vicarage in the church of Pulloxhill by the bishop of Lincoln. Thirdly, he recorded the deaths of the bishops of Winchester and Chichester, and of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the king's mother.