In 1963, in a groundbreaking book, Dominica Legge asserted that ‘the love of the sea and of voyages is characteristic of Anglo-Norman literature’. Over forty years later, scholars are more cautious and more inclined to detect ambivalent attitudes in such literature. Sebastian Sobecki sees, in Anglo-Norman narratives after Benedeit’s St Brendan, a ‘growing uneasiness towards the deep’ and anxieties about the ‘cold, treacherous and tempestuous sea of Northern Europe’, even if this sea enabled communications and carried Christianity. The Vie de St Edmund, by Denis Piramus (c. 1170), and the anonymous romance of Waldef (1200–10), both unfinished, enable us to explore both views. These narratives have many features in common: they are influenced by Wace’s Brut, they write in East Anglia on whose history and topography they are knowledgeable, and they are acutely aware of its coastline’s vulnerability to invasion. But they also have fundamentally different attitudes to the sea, which probably in the end comes down to their different genres: one is a saint’s life, with its undercurrent of optimism in the power and ultimate beneficence of God, and the other is a romance which, though generically uncharacteristic in its lack of optimism – it recurrently portrays disorder and political injustice – sees progress achieved through secular rather than religious means.

The most remarkable feature of the Vie de St Edmund would seem to support Legge’s assertion. By the time Denis Piramus composed his work, there were many versions of the saint’s life in existence, and yet his is the only one to describe with nautical detail Edmund’s voyage by sea from Saxony to East Anglia. It is a pleasing irony that this journey rests ultimately on a fundamental misunderstanding of the earliest known Life of the saint. The Continental scholar, Abbo of Fleury, spent a couple of years (c. 986–8) at Ramsey abbey, where the monks commissioned him to write about the patron saint of Bury St Edmunds, martyred by the Danes in 869–70; the result was the Passio Sancti Edmundi. Abbo (c. 945–1004) claimed to have heard his story of Edmund first-hand from St Dunstan but ‘almost certainly … knew virtually nothing about St Edmund’s death’.