It was with great pleasure and pride that I accepted David Bates’s kind invitation to give the annual Allen Brown Memorial Lecture on this, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies. I remember the first time I was invited by Allen to Battle in 1983. It was at Pyke House, and it was my first time giving a paper at a British conference. When I arrived, I was taken on to the battlefield, and Allen gave me a helmet and a mail coat that I had to put on as if I was a warrior at Hastings. I thought it was very heavy! It was a baptism of fire into Anglo-Norman studies. The next day I met David Bates, who suggested that we should write a paper together on the foundation of the Norman abbey of Grestain. But I should say that Allen’s invitation in fact came from Marjorie Chibnall, whom I had met for the first time in 1982 at the Anselmian conference at Bec. Marjorie had given a paper on the estates of Bec in the British Isles, and my paper was on the abbey’s continental estates. Marjorie always encouraged my research, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to her because of her edition of Orderic as well as all her other works, without which my studies on the abbots would not have been possible. My debt to David Bates is also great. I am particularly grateful for having had the opportunity to work on identifying the French place-names in the Index of his Regesta of William the Conqueror as well as for the work we did together on the history of Grestain and for the links that he encouraged between students and scholars in England and France at a time when French studies on the Anglo-Norman world were rather restricted in scope.

This paper is both a new challenge, following on from the prosopography of the Norman abbots that I first presented at the twenty-sixth Battle Conference, and the start of a new project on Norman nuns.

L’archevêque de Rouen Hugues d’Amiens confirma une église paroissiale à deux abbayes féminines, la bénédictine Saint-Amand de Rouen et la cistercienne Bondeville, ainsi que la fondation de la fontevriste Clairruissel.