This module studies the explosion of historiography following the Norman Conquest of England. The core sources will include historical narratives, in the broad sense of the phrase, written within and outside England and dealing with the matter of English and British history from post-1066 perspectives. The course will initially raise some fundemental questions about how history was written in Europe and England prior to 1066, its different subjects, genres, rhetorical modes and truth claims, what the writing of history meant to contemporary authors and how different audiences used it. At the centre of the course will be a study of the corpus of Anglo-Norman historiography produced in the century after the Norman Conqest. The critical teqniques and the rhetorical sensitivities acquired in the first section of the course will eqip the class to attempt fully contextualized readings of these sources, in order to assess, not only their contribution to our knowledge of the past, but their role in shaping what has been called the matter of subsequent English historiography.