Two years before he died duke Richard I of Normandy commissioned Dudo of St Quentin to compose a work describing ‘the customs and deeds of the Norman land and also the laws introduced by his grandfather Rollo'. Dudo, canon and since 1015 dean of the chapter of St Quentin, had been a frequent visitor at the ducal court since he first came to Normandy in 986/7. After Richard I died in 996 his son and heir Richard ll and his half-brother Raoul d'Ivry asked Dudo to continue writing his Norman history. The completed work is known as De Moribus et Actis Primorum Nomanniae Ducum. This title is a rephrasing of Dudo's own words in his dedicatory letter to bishop Adalbero of Laon, and was first used by Andrté Duchesne when he published the text in his collection of Norman historiography. When a second edition appeared in 1865 the editor, Jules Lair, had kept this long title. However, those manuscripts which supply a title call the work Gesta Normannomm or Historia Nomannorum. Two eleventh-century manuscripts of Dudo's work explicitly call the text Gesta Normannomm. The entry for a codex containing a Gesta Numannorum in the twelfth-century library catalogue of Fécamp can be identified with one of the surviving manuscripts of Dudo's work. Therefore I propose to replace the long and certainly not original title invented by Duchesne with Gesta Normannorum.

Much has been written about Dudo's abilities and faults, both as historian and as writer, and judgments have not always been favourable. I do not now wish to enter into this particular debate, but I propose to discuss some problems concerning the study of the manuscripts which contain Dudo's Gesta Normannorum. As my study is still in progress this paper necessariIy must be read as an interim report with some hypotheses and conclusions which are still tentative. I begin with a discussion of the editions of the Gesta Nonnannorum. This is followed by some remarks on the manuscripts in general and by a discussion of each manuscript. Because the collation of the manuscripts has not yet been finished or evaluated it is too early to present a discussion of the textual relationships between the manuscripts, but some lines in a future stemma can be drawn already from the material presented here.