The apparently random use of Arthurian names for characters in the Anglo-Norman Roman de Waldef may be a deliberately negative response to the Matter of Britain.

Any reader, medieval or modern, of the Anglo-Norman Roman de Waldef, could be disoriented by the apparently random occurrence of names from disparate traditions. Amongst the names redolent of earlier English tradition (Bede, Edwin, Erkenwald, Hereward) are several Arthurian ones – Uther, Merlin, Hoel, Morgan and Morderet. The editor Holden's understandably impatient dismissal of this – ‘banalité … peut être due au hasard’ suggests a carelessness, even ignorance, on the part of an author requiring a cast-list of hundreds. However, I would suggest that this judgement be reconsidered in the light of recent work on the purposes and the reception of the dominant British history of Geoffrey and Wace in twelfth-century England.

Waldef is a long, multi-layered narrative, eclectic to a fault but conspicuously well-informed of contemporary narrative developments. Its rambling account of factional wars between the petty kingdoms of an imagined pre-Conquest England has at first sight little to do with the carefully structured providential history of Geoffrey and his followers. Indeed, the Anglo-Norman romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can be seen to distance themselves from the contemporary fashion for Arthurian material, offering what scholarship would later identify as a Matter of England legendary history as an alternative to the Matter of Britain. There is no comparable use of Arthurian names in other insular romances.