‘Gaimar, dull though he sometimes may be, is a writer whose achievement in both form and content is magnificent’. Such is the verdict of Dominica Legge on the Estoire des Engleis, the sole surviving work of the poet and historian Geffrei Gaimar, in her seminal study of Anglo-Norman literature. Legge highlighted the fact that Gaimar is the first writer, as far as we are aware, to have created a vernacular Brut (history of the British people), written in Old French. ‘In so doing, Gaimar set the pattern of popular history for something like three centuries. This is a fact for which he has never been given sufficient credit’. Legge had earlier described Gaimar as a writer whose aims were shaped by the ‘courtly’ tastes of his patroness, Constance fitz Gilbert, and expressed the view that the Estoire ‘is not animated, like Langtoft’s chronicle, by having any particular end in view, national or political’. She contrasted this with her view of Piers Langtoft’s work as ‘an epic whose hero was Edward I, just as the hero of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s prose epic was Henry I’.

I share Legge’s opinion on the extent and significance of Gaimar’s achievements in his Estoire and agree with her assessment of his influence upon the development of historiography in England. What this book will challenge is the widely held belief that Gaimar is an apolitical writer. The Estoire’s relative inaccessibility prior to the Anglo-Norman scholar Ian Short’s 2009 translation and edition has undoubtedly impeded scholarship.No systematic, holistic study of Gaimar’s history has so far been attempted; previous scholarship has focused upon individual episodes, divorced from the larger work and examined in isolation. When the Estoire as a whole is subjected to a detailed analysis, patterns in Gaimar’s depiction of kingship – and in the transmission of power between kings, their children, and their rivals – soon emerge. Historian Paul Dalton has questioned Legge’s view of Gaimar’s political mindset, arguing for a reading of the work as a veiled criticism of the conduct of the opposing sides in the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda.