The decades following the Norman Conquest of England are often regarded as a time of intense national trauma. Within months of the Battle of Hastings, the crown was firmly in Norman hands and the lands previously held by the English were redistributed amongst William the Conqueror's followers. The twelfth-century historian Orderic Vitalis describes the humiliation suffered by the English after their defeat:

Elisabeth van Houts argues that English writers suffered from the ‘traumatic effects of shock’ in response to the events that had recently befallen their country and they were too ‘stunned’ to write about the Conquest until well into the twelfth century. The Gesta Herwardi, written between 1109 and 1131 by a monk or clerk probably called Richard of Ely, is an exception to this assertion. It manifests an ‘attempt to cope with the trauma of defeat’ by means of epic narrative and through the depiction of heroic behaviour and ‘honourable surrender’. In addition to displaying England's post-Conquest coping mechanisms through the repetition and remodelling of traumatic events, the Gesta also explores how individuals and communities adjust to political upheaval by recalibrating their identities, and asserting the importance of local, rather than national, histories, communities, and heroes. The text depicts a hero and community retreating to a local sense of identity as a way of mitigating greater political changes sweeping over England.

The Gesta reveals the fragility of the eleventh-century English ‘nation’ by presenting regions on the margins of England splintering off from the heartland after the Conquest, providing alternative, community-oriented nodal points around which the English people could construct their identities. Literary accounts of English resistance to the Norman Conquest, the Gesta chief among them, draw models of England that diverge from those of a unified country.