This chapter examines elements of French-language culture in Britain between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries which reveal the cross-Channel ties fostered by a shared language. It focuses on the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (ANPB), part of a medieval historiographical tradition charting British history from its origins to the contemporary era, considering it alongside related texts such as Wace’s Brut and the Roman des Franceis of André de Coutances. Surviving in over fifty manuscripts, along with more than 200 copies in English translation, the ANPB influenced the development of English historical consciousness up to and beyond the time of John Milton. The shifting of borders throughout the Middle Ages means that the terms ’England’ and ’France’ need to be understood as more mobile than the modern nation states they designate. From the Norman Conquest in particular, the Channel became as much a conduit as a barrier to cultural and political cohesion. Through the French-language Brut tradition, the chapter considers how Britain’s history was contextualized for literate English society within the wider cross-Channel environment of Anglo-French cultural and political entanglements.

Romance was created in twelfth-century England and France for aristocratic patrons and audiences whose courtly lifestyle it idealized and celebrated; as the earliest genre to celebrate love as life’s goal, it was revolutionary. Initially translating Latin sources, romance authors innovatively combined pre-existing genres: classical epic’s historical drive was disrupted by the lyric’s focus on individual emotional experience, creating a new kind of narrative fiction. Where earlier heroes had sacrificed their lives fighting for great causes, the romance hero suffers and fights to prove his worthiness to a beloved, and wins marriage, wealth, and reputation as confirmation of his value. Here the fictional genre betrays its real-world ideological role: to justify the patriarchal, misogynistic, exploitative and exclusionary structures of aristocratic chivalric society, representing – literally romanticizing – its values as morally admirable. Within decades the romance took multiple paths: in the creation of pseudohistorical heroes and legendary pasts; in the limitless proliferation of fictional quests from King Arthur’s court; and in parody and critique, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s helplessly subservient Lancelot, or Marie de France’s assertive female protagonists. Finally, Thomas of Britain’s Tristan transforms the romance into tragedy, another new development in this most capacious and influential genre, forerunner of the novel.

This chapter uses a gendered lens to examine how individuals' identity changed over the course of their life-cycle in two of Wace's poems: the Roman de Brut – his retelling of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Brittonum – and the Roman de Rou - his verse history of the Normans. Following Patricia Skinner's challenge to consider the potential for rupture and repetition in the life-cycle, the chapter examines the following themes evident in both poems: the uncertainty surrounding succession, the conduct of rulers, the effects of old age, the order of marriage and children and the importance of otherwise anonymous groups (peasants, old women) at moments of crisis.

This chapter's thesis is that it is only through an analysis that integrates personal, contextual, ethical and literary factors that we can understand the place of the eleventh- and twelfth-century historians of the Normans within the identity and the history – and the identities and the histories – of the Normans. It is about the dialogue between the personal and the public. To do this, what we can know of the personal biographies, life experiences and beliefs of the historians must be combined with an analysis of genre and context. Viewed in this way the historians become the reflectors of events as well as their recorders. Cultural memory and analyses associated with the so-called 'Vienna School' are of great importance to the argument. The historians are also seen as working within contemporary forms of moral discourse that sought to make sense of, and even to improve, the disturbed and often violent world of their times. The chapter concludes with some references to interaction with contemporary historians writing in England.