Eadmer of Canterbury's Historia Novorum is a truly remarkable example of the historian's craft: ‘a highpoint of medieval history writing, in terms of method one hardly ever again equalled; in the clear demarcation of the theme and in his carrying it through, Eadmer is far superior to his contemporaries’. This clarity of focus may well derive from the circumstance that, as Martin Rule, the Historia's Rolls Series editor, wrote in 1884, ‘he is less of an historian than a hagiographer’. In other ways too, the Historia is an extraordinary work. As William of Malmesbury noted, ‘Eadmer set down everything so clearly that it all seems to be happening before our very eyes’. In control of material and vivid language, he was unquestionably ‘an artist’.4 But he was an artist in the precarious position of being very close to his hero, Archbishop Anselm. According to William of Malmesbury, ‘after Eadmer had put him to bed, Anselm would not get up, or even turn over in bed, unless Eadmer told him to’.

That in Books V and VI, in which the theme of Canterbury's relations with York became a consuming one, Eadmer ‘took to lying’, is well known. The implication of this judgement is that in Books I to IV, in his treatment of Anselm's archiepiscopate, Eadmer did not lie, or at least not significantly. In his preface to the Vita Anselmi, Eadmer himself, referring to those four books, described the Historia Novorum as a work of ‘uncontroverted truth’ (inconcussa veritate). Indeed, both the Vita Anselmi and the first four books of the Historia Novorum, both in their earliest known versions completed by 1114, have been described as ‘historical sources of exceptional quality and veracity’. They are unquestionably books of exceptional quality. Here I wish to focus on the question of veracity. It is very likely that William of Malmesbury was referring to Eadmer when he wrote of a ‘completely truthful person whom I know well’. But this Eadmer was also the authority for William's acceptance of the notorious Canterbury forgeries as genuine papal documents.

Those historians whose own focus has been on Anselm's life and thought, above all Richard Southern and Sally Vaughn, have on the whole seen Eadmer as a truthful author.