Introduction

The Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre is an Old French prose chronicle charting the period between the arrival of the legendary Viking, Hasting, in Normandy in the ninth century and the translation of the relics of St Thomas Becket to their new shrine in Canterbury Cathedral in 1220. The Histoire des ducs was penned after 1220 by an anonymous writer. This writer was also associated with the Chronique des rois de France. These two Old French texts are closely related and contain continuations to sources known as the Chronique de Normandie. The Anonymous of Bethune is also identified as the author of a parallel text to the Histoire des ducs, the Chronique des rois de France. This takes the early thirteenth-century Geste de France as its base. Historians using the Histoire des ducs have long relied on the edition published by Francisque Michel in 1840, which provides the basis for the present translation.