WHAT SORT OF WORLD VIEW did a twelfth-century man possess? A lot hinges on the answer to that particular question. As we now know, medieval aristocrats travelled very widely and travelled constantly. They knew the roads of their world well, and there is no doubt that they compiled mental maps of it, maps by which they navigated also their political world. Both Gerald of Wales and Bertran de Born give us in their writings excellent examples of how they visualized the world in which they lived: Gerald in his topographical writings, and Bertran in his sketch of the components of the Francophone cultural world that he drew up in 1183. So if we wish to talk in terms of Stephen of Blois's geopolitical vision of his world, then I do not think we are begging questions. Such a vision was possible. Born in the Loire valley, at home from the frontiers of the Empire to the borders of Brittany, well-known in Paris, Bruges and London, Stephen of Blois could very easily have acquired a mental map of the world in which he was, from his adolescence, a significant player.

Whether he had the capacity to generate any sort of policy out of that vision is a different matter entirely. We should beware what Martin Aurell calls the ‘statist’ suppositions of earlier generations of historian, the suppositions that generated for English schoolboys the rather eccentric idea of an ‘ecclesiastical policy’ of Henry II of England, or for that matter the ‘centralising policy’ of Henry I.