AS IS WELL KNOWN, there was an apparent dearth of indigenous literary talent in England in the first half of the eleventh century, when relatively little by way of historical or hagiographical work was produced in Latin. The gap is particularly striking when compared with the flourishing centres of Canterbury, Winchester, Ramsey and around Wulfstan of York and Ælfric at the turn of the millennium, and the growing interest in the past witnessed in the early twelfth century. The political upheavals of the eleventh century, in the form of foreign occupation by the Danes and Normans, could easily be blamed for the lack of written records. Interestingly, it was another group of foreigners, the Flemish, who filled the vacuum left by the unproductive English. The Flemish biographers had relatively little impact on what we now might call the formal art of the written portrait, which after all had been well practised all over western Europe. Yet what made the Flemish immigrants in England stand out in the Latin tradition was their remarkable degree of sympathy for women (and in particular queens), lay and ecclesiastical, alive and dead. Moreover, we can add to this their linguistic expertise, narrative style and eye for detail.