The proposed title for this study, with due deference to Ann Williams, was ‘The English and the Norman Conquest – according to Wace’, but that implied yet another skirmish in the Hastings ancestry stakes or, perhaps, a Domesday database-style dot map of his inventive gazetteer of King Harold's towns and counties. However, the cultural re-orientation is intentional and, in the spirit of independent vernacular scholarship so well-represented by Wace (Magister was, surely, the equivalent of Doctor today), there is also a shift in time. His Roman de Rou is re-assessed as the source of an English prosopography for the twenty-year period between the accession of Stephen of Blois in 1135 and the first years of the reign of Henry II.

The purpose is to identify those of the so-called ‘Conqueror's Companions’ exclusive to Wace who occupy a no-man's land in surname history (albeit a vigorous virtual life). His work had been read as a tenurial mapping exercise but he was discredited – solely on the basis of the ‘1066’ section translated in 1837 – because so few of the personal or (presumed) locative names were found in the orthodox literature. Wace was the first to use the Anglo-Norman term surnons in what would now be considered a prosopographical context (lines 8659–60) and almost all of them correspond with twelfth-century hereditary English family names. This is more than a co-incidence of adopted feudal identifications: his neighbourhood contemporaries, either from choice or service obligation, were becoming ‘Domesday Descendants’.

This paper deals with the acts of Henry II as a source for the production and use of charters by laymen in the twelfth century. Its starting point is the British Academy ‘Acta of the Plantagenets’ research project, and the immense value to historical research of this corpus of the acts of the early Plantagenet rulers.

The subject index currently in preparation will illuminate, among other things, the seemingly endless variety of customs, always interesting and sometimes picturesque or bizarre, mentioned in the royal acta. Some of these only occur in one single text, whether because they represent customs that were highly localized, or anachronistic and redundant, or because of misspellings of the names of customs that were unknown to the scribes or to later copyists. Others are very common, at least in documents concerning land in England, such as the award of ‘soke and sake, toll and team, and infangenthief’, the award of immunity from geld and danegeld, and the award of immunity from ‘toll, passage, pontage, and all customs’.

Such curiosities are few and far between in documents issued actually under the seal of Henry II because of the advanced bureaucratic tendencies of the royal chancery. This paper concentrates not on the curious and extraordinary, but rather on the routine and bureaucratic, thus going with the grain of the development of chancery practice rather than against it. Its topic is a commonplace phenomenon, the confirmation of charters.

Within the historiography of the ‘Angevin empire’ the subject of the duchy of Brittany as a province within that ‘empire’ has been all but overlooked. Nevertheless, no general survey of the ‘Angevin empire’ or of the reigns of the Angevin kings can altogether ignore Brittany, since it was one of the several territorial principalities which came under the domination of the Angevin kings of England during the reign of Henry II. In need of some concrete piece of evidence from Brittany in this period, historians have gratefully embraced a single act of Angevin government, the so-called ‘Assize of count Geoffrey', ‘count Geoffrey’ being the younger son of Henry II who became duke of Brittany by marriage in 1181. This to the extent that, in more general works on Brittany or the Angevin empire, the promulgation of the ‘Assize’ is often the only aspect of Duke Geoffrey's reign to be noted, usually uncritically. In contrast, the ‘Assize’ is not well known amongst that vast majority of legal historians whose primary interests lie outside twelfth-century Brittany, but who would be better qualified to place it in its historical and legal context. There are numerous editions of the ‘Assize', mostly after the ‘Vitre'’ version published by Pierre He'vin in 1684. Those most accessible outside France are the editions published by Marcel Planiol and more recently in the collected charters of Duke Geoffrey.

There are in fact other acts of Angevin government from Brittany, in the form of charters and writs, and there is also contemporary evidence for more such acts which have not survived. The ‘Assize’ is, in diplomatic terms, almost indistinguishable from other charters of Duke Geoffrey, but it is unique in that the provisions of the ‘Assize', which deals with succession to baronies and knights’ fees, retained the force of law in Brittany until the French Revolution. Consequently, the existence of the ‘Assize’ was common knowledge amongst the cadre of ancien régime legists and administrators such as Bertrand d'Argentre’ and Pierre He'vin whose scholarly endeavours produced the first modern histories of Brittany. In contrast, the other Angevin acts remained buried in the archives and cartularies of the monasteries, material of purely antiquarian interest. Not only was the ‘Assize’ well known to these scholars, but it was of great interest to them, not so much for its substance as for its form.