On 2 July 1875 a meeting took place of the administrative committee of the Société de l’Histoire de Normandie, chaired by the famous historian, philologist, and librarian Léopold Delisle. In a wide-ranging opening address, Delisle began by thanking his listeners for their scholarly studies of Norman history at a time when, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, ‘the misfortunes of the fatherland have made the memories of an often glorious, ever-interesting past even dearer to us’. After a survey of the chief Latin narrative sources for the history of medieval Normandy prior to its annexation by the French monarchy in 1204, Delisle finally arrived at a neglected, thirteenth-century French prose composition generally known as the Chronique de Normandie. Lamenting that the death of Ernest Lépinois, founder of the Société, had left plans for a new edition of the Chronique in disarray, Delisle charged that:

Despite this exhortation, however, Delisle (who died in 1910) was to remain disappointed in his hopes for a new edition of the Chronique de Normandie. The obvious hesitancy with which his audience evidently approached the text is understandable. Its rather imprecise title, granted by later printers, serves to cover a very broad range of vernacular histories of Normandy composed between around 1200 and 1350, all of which are unified by the reproduction in whole or in part of a translation of the Latin history of the Norman dukes most widely available to medieval audiences: the Gesta Normannorum Ducum (GND).

The first redaction of this work, produced by William of Jumièges in the years prior to 1070, revised and updated Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s earlier Latin chronicle of Norman history and was itself later modified and continued by Orderic Vitalis (c. 1109–13) and Robert of Torigni (c. 1139).