In his The English Church, 940–1154, Henry Loyn remarked that central features of the Church in England and Normandy in the eleventh century were Ottonian. When it came to a subject as quintessentially central to his interests as the making of Domesday Book, Henry's instincts again told him to look for Continental parallels. Henry always insisted that English and British history be taught and written against a European canvas. This fundamental belief was the stimulus for The Reign of Charlemagne which he and John Percival published in 1975. It shaped the syllabus which we taught at the then University College, Cardiff, when I arrived there in the early 1970s in the form, for example, of the final year option ‘Europe, 1050–1250’ which Henry, Clive Knowles and I taught together for several years. In retrospect this insistence on teaching outside one's research specialism set my career on a productive path and was for me a crucial formative element at a vital early stage. His influence on Normandy before 1066, which set out to place the Norman experience in context, was, if memory serves me rightly, indirect, even if his generous editorial contribution was fundamental. He had left Cardiff for Westfield some years before I was writing the book, but the idea was imbued in the intellectual world of 1970s Cardiff.

Born in the late 1020s, William the Conqueror was not the most travelled of men. There is no evidence from France that he ventured beyond the borders of Normandy after September 1052, when he visited the French King Henry I's residence at Vitry-aux-Loges on the Loire, except to make war. After 1070 his itinerary in England scarcely took him outside the old kingdom of Wessex. He made just one visit to Scotland in 1072 and just one to South Wales in 1081. Both were military expeditions, although the latter also involved a pilgrimage to St David’s. And, although it is expressed slightly differently in the two versions, according to both texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1072, ‘he led his land force in over the Forth, and there he found nothing that he was any the better for’.