If this image of the Normans as proud, restless warriors seems familiar, this should not surprise us, Wace was an unashamed propagandist drawing on, a wide range of Norman and Anglo-Norman sources which chronicled the establishment of Normandy and the expeditions of expansion. By synthesising these views in the vernacular, did he intend to popularise them, to make them more accessible to a wider audience? For how far were the inhabitants of Normandy, or their descendants in their far-flung conquests, seen as possessing special virtues by observers in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries?

R. H. C, Davis has suggested that Nortnanitas, a sense of racial and cultural self-identity, producing a group with a mission of conquest, was a myth, He identifies a process of justification after the event and image creation at its height in the middle of the twelfth century. This interpretation has been challenged by G, A, Loud, here at Battle, who cites examples of a self-conscious gens Normannorumf especially amongst the conquerors of Italy, well before the compilatory works of Orderic Vitalis, Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, Both he and M. Chibnall stress the oral nature of many of the legends that made up Norman history recorded by the chroniclers. Two detailed stories in Orderic: Bohemond’s adventure with a Muslim princess, and the description of the battle Fraga (1134), bear all the hallmarks of having been transmitted in romance form.