Traditionally, the court of Henry II has been viewed in stark and ‘English’ contrast to the artifice and ceremony, the peers and plumage, of Capetian France. Only in recent years has it become apparent that Henry's reign witnessed the emergence in England of an ever-widening gap of privilege between the high aristocracy and those lower down the social pecking order. The chief authors of this revolution in our understanding – David Crouch and Judith Green (herself a product of the Prestwich training academy) – have demonstrated the degree to which the outer trappings of appearance and conduct mattered to the social elite of twelfth-century England, who dressed differently, ate differently, adopted different titles and insignia and generally comported themselves in a manner distinct from that of their social inferiors.

If there was one group within this social elite whose titles, wealth and conspicuous consumption marked them out as the very crême de la crême, then we need look no further than the English earls: that group of a dozen or so individuals whose titles and landed resources set them apart from mere barons in just the same way that archbishops were distinguished from bishops, and barons from the rest of society in the address clauses to several thousand royal writs and charters. To French observors, convinced of the necessity of blood and breeding as prerequisites for nobility, the English earls, some of them sprung from distinctly non-noble families, may have appeared less crême de la crême than a somewhat unprepossessing confection of crême anglaise.