Martin Brett once observed that ‘the practice of history in England was almost dead’ in 1066, the year of the battle of Hastings and the beginning of the Norman Conquest. Much the same could perhaps be said about 1096, the year when the earliest crusaders set out from western Europe on a massive armed pilgrimage that would shape the eastern Mediterranean for centuries to come. The scarce fuel that was left in the historiographical fire in England at that time simmered mainly in the complex series of interrelated Old English annals now known by the umbrella term ‘the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’. Surviving in nine separate manuscripts written between the late ninth and mid-twelfth centuries, the different versions of these annals are usually labelled alphabetically as ‘Chronicles A–I’. When read in their entirety, they encompass the history of Britain, as refracted through an Anglo-Saxon (and, later, Anglo-Norman) lens, from the invasion of Julius Caesar until early 1155, soon after the coronation of King Henry II (r. 1154–89). Most scholars agree that the annals forming the ‘common stock’ of this tradition were compiled during the reign and possibly under the auspices of King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871–99) at the end of the ninth century. Over the next 250 years, they were sporadically updated, and occasionally reframed, at various sites throughout England.

This more or less ongoing process of annalistic compilation played a central role in keeping history-writing alive in England around the turn of the twelfth century. It also laid the groundwork for what R. W. Southern described nearly fifty years ago as ‘the first historical revival’ after the Norman Conquest. The forerunner of this revival was Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury's biographer, Eadmer, whose Historia novorum in Anglia, written between c. 1093 and the late 1120s, ushered in a vibrant new phase in the creation of Latin histories in England and Normandy. William of Malmesbury's Gesta regum Anglorum (completed c. 1125–26, then revised until 1134), Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum (completed before c. 1133, then revised until c. 1157), John of Worcester's Chronicon ex chronicis (completed in 1140) and Orderic Vitalis’ Historia ecclesiastica (completed in Normandy in 1141) exemplify the richness and sophistication of historiographical works produced by English (or Anglo-Norman) chroniclers in Eadmer's wake.