The court of King Henry II has long been a favoured hunting ground for Anglo-Norman prosopography. As has become apparent in recent years, it was a court that, while it recruited few Angevin and virtually no Poitevin adherents, consisted to a large extent of Anglo-Normans and in particular of the scions of Norman families whose chief possessions lay in England rather than Normandy. It is just such a courtier whose career forms the subject of this essay. His name was high de Gundeville, and when ranked among the more regular witnesses to the charters of King Henry II, he occurs towards the bottom of the second division, appearing in the witness lists to nearly seventy royal charters, from the 1150s through to his death c. 1181. Save for a brief notice by Julia Boorman, Hugh de Gundeville has failed previously to attract much attention. There are good reasons for this: he is the first of his family to make any impression upon the documentary record, and the descent both of his family and of his lands after his death is extremely obscure. As such, he represents something of an exception to the rule among Henry II's servants: a man risen, if not from the dust then from very considerable obscurity, whose family, having prospered under the first of the Plantagenet kings, faded rapidly from the scene thereafter, apparently failing in the male line within two or three generations, disappearing from record in the 1230s and hence before the period at which such sources as the Inquisitions Post Mortem might have thrown much-needed light upon their marriages, alliances and influence.