More than fifty years ago Vivian Galbraith sketched in a single paragraph a scene of frenetic historical industry in the generations after the Norman Conquest.

Meanwhile, in England ‘On all sides there was a movement to record the facts in writing, and the Domesday Inquest was only the largest of many royal efforts to move towards a written law … The great bishoprics were driven to find or to make documentary proof for their immemorial estates … For these reasons the twelfth century was the hey-day of forgery …’ He went on ‘To this age belongs the bitter struggle between the archbishops of Canterbury and York … and the contests of the great “exempt” abbeys, like St Edmundsbury, with their diocesans.’ In certain respects the evidence to be discussed in this paper merely reinforces the generalisations which Galbraith set out so picturesquely half a century ago. The historical activities of the communities of twelfth-century St Albans andWestminster illustrate with particular clarity the ‘local and practical basis’ of ‘curiosity about the Anglo-Saxon past’, and they were orchestrated in direct response to pressures of the sort to which he alluded, namely the need for title to estates and defence against diocesan aggrandisement. But the cases of St Albans andWestminster also suggest something else: that the brilliance and sheer bulk of writing about the pre-Conquest past which survives from post-Conquest England has cast the preceding period into shadow. The extent of the indebtedness of twelfth-century monastic historians to earlier written tradition is easily underestimated.

In the last few generations much reflection on the historical culture of post-Conquest England has broadly conformed to Galbraith’s depiction.