Normandy and England in the central Middle Ages are exceptionally well provided with chronicles, even though their composition, as we shall see, tended to occur in clusters, leaving gaps for periods of great upheaval and trauma. For example, there are few contemporary indigenous reports on the settlement of the vikings in Normandy c. 900 or on the conquest of England in 1066 or on the ‘loss of Normandy’ in 1204. Conquests are usually reported by the conquerors and not by the victims, while defeats are usually digested over a long time and the victims’ views do not emerge until the second or third generation afterwards. Moreover, as this chapter will show, historians’comments are not static but change over time, sometimes frequently. Hence, as we shall see, many narratives were revised, updated, and altered by their authors as they went along, illustrating the changing perspectives on the (recent) past. The chronicles of Normandy and England also illustrate the interesting change of balance between the two nations. Normandy rose from a small, relatively insignificant, principality to become the dominant political force in France (and England), but then fell out of the English orbit in 1204. England in contrast, having suffered two successive submissions to foreign forces (Danes in 1016 and Normans in 1066), emerged as the dominant partner of the Anglo-Norman alliance before, in 1204, it ‘lost’ Normandy. Conquest and defeat led to the migration of people across national boundaries, with the consequence of Normandy and, especially, England becoming multi-ethnic communities. What political upheaval and social change meant for these countries can be charted through the comments of their historians. This chapter is concerned with the Latin historiography of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Anglo-Norman realm. In England the vernacular Old English was replaced by Latin on a large scale by the end of the eleventh century, while from that time onwards, as Ian Short describes in Chapter 10, vernacular French begins to rival Latin as a language for literature and historiography.

The viking settlement of Normandy and the rise of the house of Rollo, founding father of the principality, was first related by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, himself a Vermandois clerk, who served the dukes Richard I (943–96) and Richard II (996–1026).