SOURCE: Eley, Penny, and Philip E. Bennett. “The Battle of Hastings according to Gaimar, Wace, and Benoît: Rhetoric and Politics.” Nottingham Medieval Studies, XLIII (1999): 47-78

In the following essay, Eley and Bennett compare three accounts of the Battle of Hastings, including that by Wace.

According to Jean Blacker, the Norman Conquest was ‘the most visible cause of the upsurge in historical writing in twelfth-century England’ and in the continental territories controlled by successive Anglo-Norman and Norman-Angevin rulers.¹ Her recent study of the historical writings of Gaimar, Wace, Benoît de Sainte-Maure and their Latin counterparts pays little attention, however, to the narration of the Conquest itself, focusing instead on the authors' conception of the role of the historian, techniques of characterisation, and the relationship between writer and patron. Given the importance of the events of 1066 in providing the impetus for Anglo-Norman historiography, it is interesting to consider...