The mobility of elite secular women due to marriage, exile, or ambition is often a key feature of genealogical narratives in medieval chronicles and genealogical rolls. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a particular literary interest in the political consequences and legacies attached to women’s movements, evinced by the prevalence of mobile female founders, such as Albina, Inge, and Margaret of Scotland. This chapter examines how transregional genealogies are constructed in the relationship between text and diagram in works associated with Queen Eleanor of Provence; her mother, Beatrice of Savoy; and her granddaughter Mary of Woodstock. It focuses first on female ancestors and strands of matrilineage in royal genealogical rolls, including the prominent ribbon between Margaret of Scotland and Edith/Matilda. It then turns to Nicolas Trevet’s little-studied Les Cronicles, dedicated to Mary, to discuss an unusual story of Margaret of Scotland’s mother, Agatha of Hungry, accompanied by a matrilineal diagram.

The theme of forests includes here a twelfth-century description of the legal concept of the forest, a letter of mandate concerning a forest near Worcester under his jurisdiction by Count Waleran of Meulan, some of the clauses containing regulations, rights and responsibilites in the Charter of the Forest of 1217, related to the Magna Carta, a possibly criminal incident recorded among the Pleas of the Forest, a patent roll recording the grant of firewood to his daughter at her monastery of Amesbury, by king Edward I.

Medieval historiography in Britain was written in all of the languages of the island. Latin and vernacular texts engaged in sophisticated intertextual dialogues throughout the period. This essay considers how vernacular history writing deployed its vernacularity to make political and imaginative interventions in the dominant traditions of historiography. The essay surveys how the Middle English chronicles of Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng, and the Short Chronicle, and the Anglo-Norman chronicles of Piers Langtoft and Nicholas Trevet engaged with ideas of intertextuality, authority, citation, and translation in order to craft narratives of insular history often at odds with each other.