In the preface to his second edition of the Vita, Frank Barlow has commented that ‘it has received little critical attention’ in recent years and that ‘its lack of a certain author and indisputable date makes it slightly disreputable, something to be acknowledged only with half-averted eyes’. It is not quite certain that Barlow himself has looked the work straight in the eye. While emphasising the significance of the Life for our knowledge of the reign of Edward the Confessor, he has entered reservations that seem somewhat to undermine his confidence in the work whose ‘evidence has to be used with caution’. Above all, he does not think that the author had access to inside information.

The burden of this paper is that the author did have such access to inside information and that, as a source for the reign of Edward the Confessor, the Vita is to be taken at least as seriously as John of Worcester, William of Malmesbury or the versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. To go further: in those matters on which the author wrote, there should be an a priori presumption that the witness of the author of the Vita be preferred to that of any other source with which it has a clear difference. The Vita contains some forty items of information for which it is either the unique or the original source.