The ‘work’ to which Wace is referring is war. I begin with this pragmatic comment because it sums up his attitude to warfare. The unpredictability of war was a truism apparent to its practitioners. His military, aristocratic audience would have known exactly what he meant. Wace is very knowledgeable about many aspects of warfare. Most of his two largest works, the Roman de Brut and the Roman de Rou, are concerned with campaigns, battles and brave deeds. This was the contemporary fashion – presumably what his audience wanted to hear – but also part of the poet’s popularising and propagandising purpose. His tracing back of legitimate authority from Henry II to Brutus, the legendary Trojan conqueror after whom Britain is named, necessarily involved the description of how successive wars were waged. It does not really matter that Wace was a faithful copyist of earlier sources in this context, for he often has additional and original information to add on military matters. It does not matter that his phoney chronology spans three millennia, for he makes almost no attempt to look beyond his experience of contemporary warfare.

I use the word ‘experience’ deliberately. Recently, it has been suggested that his use of the: word ‘vaslet’ to describe himself may indicate that Wace had a military training in his youth. Certainly, we know very little about his early life. If he was born around 1100 and produced his literary works c. 1150 to c. 1175, we only have an insight ipto the last third of his life. What did he do for the other 50 years? He certainly lived, in the words of the Chinese curse, in ‘interesting’ times. In his mid-thirties began the sporadic but long-drawn-out civil war for the English Crown, which led to the conquest of Normandy by her old enemy, Anjou. What did he see of warfare? What did he know of it? Did he do any soldiering himself? Did he suffer the pangs of hunger, blows in battle, the elation of victory and the humiliation of defeat he describes so vividly?