It is customary to consider the Roman de Rou as an unfinished work, abandoned by its author before its completion because Henry II decided to entrust the project to someone else (11419–24):

This is certainly the impression derived from a first reading of these lines, and it must be admitted that the Roman de Rou ends rather abruptly. On the other hand, abruptness is the hallmark of the final section of the Troisième Partie, partly due to the increasingly present (and increasingly censorious) narrator. Moreover, from the battle of Val-ès-Dunes onwards – that is, in the part of the Rou where Wace writes as a historian rather than a historiographer – one senses a reticence, if not outright ambivalence, towards the material treated. Secure in his Bayeux prebend, Wace could easily have continued his work had he wished to do so; but there is nothing in the last 6000 lines of the Rou suggesting that he had ever contemplated going beyond Tinchebray. Bowing to the king's wishes reads as a convenient, non-controversial way of justifying this breaking point beyond which the subject-matter of the poem becomes subsumed under the history of the kings of England.

To this, one must add Wace's apparent disaffection towards Henry II himself. The warmth of the Prologue, where the king is lauded as a worthy scion of Rou, gives way in the Epilogue to an openly critical tone (11425–30):

This unflattering image of the king reneging on his promises is not unlike that of Robert Curthose, who, like Henry II, was generous with his promises but less forthcoming when it came to keeping them.