In 1155 Wace of Bayeux completed the Roman de Brut and began his verse chronicle, the Roman de Rou. Of the two, the Rou has in general been less extensively studied. In order to set this study into a secure analytical framework the discussion will explore the way Wace has been evaluated by historians and literary scholars to clarify some of the approaches that may be taken to reading him. It will build on this discussion to explore the way that Wace portrayed women in the Rou, in order to consider whether they were central to family power and Norman identity and interests. The presentation and function of women and the family in the Rou will then be analysed to consider how such portrayals function in the text and whether they are sites of tension and/or anxiety which relate to his concerns more generally about the trajectory of Norman history.

Wace was a Jerseyman, educated at Caen, who was given a prebend at Bayeux by Henry II. He was a clerc lisant, literally ‘reading clerk’, although the definition of this role remains unclear. Although he had clerical training, he may not have progressed into the beneficed clergy. This in part may account for the detachment that seems to characterize some of his approach, yet he wrote as a Channel Islander whose representation of the Cotentin reflects an area of mainland Normandy of which he was knowledgeable and to which he was sympathetic. Certainly, as Elisabeth van Houts has argued, Wace was a historian who drew on oral sources, and in so doing he captured the memories of those with connections to the Cotentin. He had a wide range of interests; he was sensitive to the importance of place, of social hierarchies, geography, hagiography and history. It is possible that Wace’s approach to the writing of history was conditioned by an ‘alienating environment’ which caused him to become less interested in contemporary problems, and, further, the acute discord within the family of Henry II may have shaped his response to the history of the Normans.

His writings are significant not only for the range of texts he produced, but also because of his choice of form and themes addressed. Wace composed three saints’ lives; these are extant and date from the earlier part of his career: the Vie de Sainte Marguerite (c.1130–40), the Conception Nostre Dame (c.