Poetry is rarely a first choice for linguists investigating language phenomena. The genre can certainly be indispensable in studies of sound, including metrics and phonology. But because of its highly structured and sometimes atypical diction and grammar, it is often treated as a highly marked register. In my early studies as a graduate student, a linguist once recommended to me that, if at all possible, poetry be excluded from historical studies since it presents grammatically “weird” constructions that are unlikely to reflect everyday language use. When I discussed this comment with Karla Taylor, we agreed that part of why we study medieval poetry is because it's weird – but also because it has important things to tell us about language, culture, and thought in earlier historical periods.

The Venerable Bede, England's frst historian, lived and wrote in the early eighth century in Northumbria, a long way from the River Deben and a century later than the events I am about relate. But he was by no means ill-informed, taking evidence, as he tells us, from learned persons and the descendants of some of the main players. He was a champion of Christianity writing about pagans, and while he considered them to be wrong about the moral purpose of life and whatever was to follow it, he still gave them a history. His book would hardly have lasted if it had spoken inaccurately of the ancestors of his contemporaries. So he is at least a reliable purveyor of some of the widely held memories of his time. His History of the English Church and People was presented in thematic rather than consecutive sections (like a modern museum) and is reworked here into a plain narrative with an emphasis on places, people, travel and ships. The dramas are played out within and between British- and English-speaking communities, especially in the areas of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent and Wessex (FIG 1.1).

The chief characters are kings and monks, queens and abbesses – since the making of Christian England (Bede's theme) was considered to be in their hands. The names of the players present a considerable obstacle to an easy read since they often seem unfamiliar, unpronounceable, or even too like each other to tell apart. Most names of ordinary folk were acquired in early England based on what they did or where they were from: Cooper, Shipman, Baker, French, Dane, Moor.

Melibee is framed in complex ways by its inclusion in fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales, where the formal limits of reading and storytelling are overtly thematized, even strictly policed. Showing a concern for proportion and narrative scale, Chaucer tells us to expect something suitably manageable in size, yet goes on to deliver a lengthy prose treatise, held together – just barely, some would say – by numerous proverbial sayings and quotations from the auctores. Drawn mostly from familiar classical and biblical sources, these authoritative references share the concentrated moral force and selfenclosed singularity of medieval proverbia more generally, and their function in Melibee is comparable to that of learned sayings and quotations in a wide range of compilatory texts from the period, including Chaucer's immediate source, Renaud de Louens's Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence, a French version of Albertanus of Brescia's Liber consolationis et consilii.

Acentral focus of Mathilda of Flanders’ energy was her construction of a Benedictine abbey for women, Holy Trinity in Caen, dedicated in 1066. Mathilda's choice to establish her new monastic foundation in honor of the Trinity, as opposed to a saint or the Virgin Mary, was an early indicator of her spiritual preference for the Holy Spirit and, through it, apostolic authority. The mysteries of the Holy Spirit were connected in scripture to prophesy, which would be another fascination for her. Historians have long argued that Holy Trinity was founded as a penance for Mathilda's marriage in the face of a papal ban. Yet her creation of Holy Trinity eventually swept over the past to embrace a breathtakingly uncertain venture: the Norman invasion of England. In what follows, I consider Holy Trinity in light of the Norman conquest. Holy Trinity was Mathilda's frst contribution to Norman victory. Mathilda established the monastery's connections to the military ofensive from the beginning, despite the uncertainty of its success, and the conquest remained a central element of its character long afer her death. The second contribution was the Mora, the ship she had constructed for the invasion, that carried William to England. Tus, through the work of her hands, she placed herself at the heart of the Norman Conquest. To these two conquest gifs, one must add the most notable – her daughter, Cecelia. Given as an oblate on the day of Holy Trinity's dedication, Cecelia's role in the family's success was a critical one. Her career as the second abbess of Mathilda's new foundation was surely planned from the start.