The period of the crusades and the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean was an important one for medieval historical writing. Indeed, it has been recently suggested that the chroniclers of the First Crusade (1095–99), faced with the need to couch events in a more overtly exegetical register, ‘pioneered a new way of writing about the recent past’. Whether or not one accepts the notion that such writers adopted a fundamentally new mode of composition, there can be little doubt that this initial expedition left a significant imprint on medieval literary cultures. For a start, the vast number of extant narratives is unusual by medieval standards. More than this, though, the enterprise is renowned for popularising the medieval monograph format, with many writers electing to compose standalone histories characterised by a narrow focus on the crusade. As the crusading movement progressed, some embedded crusade accounts into works with wider chronological and geographical scopes, but the free-standing ‘crusade’ history was an outcome of nearly all subsequent expeditions (or at least the major ‘numbered’ ones). It is perhaps a by-product of this textual tradition – among other factors, such as modern historians’ propensity to compartmentalise evidence to facilitate historical analysis and the hangover of nineteenth-century scholarly conventions – that crusading expeditions are often treated in isolation: a discrete series of holy wars related to, but somehow distinct from, the Latin Christian settlements established in the wake of the First Crusade, known collectively as the crusader states, the Latin East or, when viewed from the West, Outremer (‘the land across the sea’). One need only cast an eye over the many modern general histories of the crusades to appreciate that most devote comparatively little space to the crusader states. Instead, the history of those polities on the fringes of Latin Christendom has usually been detailed separately, so much so that even the validity of the long-standing descriptor ‘crusader states’ has been disputed.

Consequently, the historiography of the crusades and the crusader states has developed along slightly different contours. For the purposes of this volume, the most significant difference, to be discussed in greater detail below, is that whereas texts – especially historical narratives – pertaining to the crusades have been subjected to an unparalleled degree of literary scrutiny in recent years, the textual evidence for the Latin East has less frequently been examined through the same interpretative lens.

Modern historiographical discussions of the dissemination and reception of First Crusade histories in the Middle Ages have long centred on the textual tradition linked to the anonymous Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum. This focus is understandable: the Gesta Francorum, or a very similar text, influenced an array of early twelfth-century chroniclers, most notably the northern French Benedictines Baldric of Bourgueil, Robert the Monk and Guibert of Nogent, and several of these so-called ‘Gesta-derivatives’ went on to enjoy fairly wide – in the case of Robert's Historia Iherosolimitana, exceptionally wide – manuscript circulations. However, as historians have gradually exposed the role of other early crusade accounts in transmitting the venture's narrative, the importance of the Historia Hierosolymitana by the northern French cleric Fulcher of Chartres – which is linked to, but often diverges from, the Gesta Francorum tradition – has become increasingly apparent. Much of this scholarship has focused on Fulcher's homeland, France, where his work was consulted by Guibert of Nogent and, as recent studies by Susan Edgington and Andrew Buck have elucidated, served as a foundation text for the chroniclers known as ‘Bartolf of Nangis’ and ‘Lisiard of Tours’. We also know that the Historia reached England in the twelfth century because, as Heinrich Hagenmeyer established in his 1913 critical edition, both Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury named Fulcher as a source, though only William demonstrably utilised his text.

This chapter draws attention to neglected evidence suggesting that Fulcher's Historia achieved a wider dissemination in England than its use by these two famous Anglo-Norman chroniclers implies. It does so by exploring London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 51 – the sole surviving witness to the Liber revelationum, compiled c. 1200 by Peter of Cornwall, prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate. The Liber, an enormous collection of revelatory material (mainly concerning visions) divided into two books, was assembled by three scribes working under Peter's supervision. While the prologue and the most original chapters, especially those written by Peter himself, recounting tales he had heard, were transcribed and translated by Robert Easting and Richard Sharpe in 2013, those transposed from Fulcher's Historia (and most deriving from other identifiable written sources) remain unedited and unstudied. To begin to redress this, the first part of this chapter seeks to identify the recension of Fulcher's work that was available at Holy Trinity, while the second considers how Peter and his scribes approached and utilised the text.