The biography of a medieval layman may not always be easy: there is little chance of being embarrassed by a wealth of evidence, but for a number of reasons the Beaumont twins, the sons and heirs of Count Robert I of Meulan, did not prove unrewarding. They figure larger in contemporary chronicles than most of their fellows, and they left behind a relatively large number of charters. Waleran of Meulan's published and unpublished acts amount to 113 full texts, with notices of a further nineteen; a rich base on which to found a study of the count's following, patronage and administration, particularly when you bear in mind that his great rival, Earl Robert of Gloucester, has left fewer than twenty. The count's dark companion of a brother was a harder case. Robert of Leicester did not blaze across the twelfth-century firmament like his brother, but again, a rich store of acts (some seventy-five) was no bad canvas for a portrait, and the lines of a sober and deeper character can be sketched in.

I am not the first in the field. The great genealogist, Geoffrey White, made the first attempt at a biography of Waleran of Meulan in his study published in 1934. A French scholar, Emile Houth, attempted the same in 1961 and combined it with a sadly incomplete catalogue of Waleran's acta. On many points I could go along with neither White nor Houth.