Rosalind Field notes that Anglo-Norman romances often have a ‘powerful feeling of locality’ as they function as histories for ‘a country, a family, a city’. This is certainly true of the romances explored thus far, and Gui de Warewic and Boeve de Haumtone are no exception. These texts are frequently seen as proto-nationalist romances, but have a local element, given that they were probably written ‘to celebrate, or create, founding English heroes for two of the great medieval aristocratic dynasties, those of the Albini family of Arundel and of the earls of Warwick’. Botah of these stories value regional matters above national ones, especially Boeve, which, like Fouke, critiques the imposition of royal rule onto matters of inheritance. While they do provide foundation stories for particular localities, it is clear that both Boeve and Gui were also written for more general audiences and the identities they present are complex: they are local and proto-national as well as religious. While these texts do perform their function of creating ‘a country’, they do so from the outside-in; they position England as a site of foreignness and exoticism, centring the perspectives of those from elsewhere. Like many other insular exile-andreturn romances, Gui and Boeve are set predominantly outside England, and so the Englishness they construct is necessarily predicated on interaction with cultural others. In establishing multi-layered English identities that are at once dynastic, local, national, transnational, exotic, and religious, these romances grant audiences imaginative access to the world beyond England's shores. They situate England as a region within the rest of the world, a place as exotic and alluring to others as the East was to those in England.

The embrace of exoticism was not unusual in High Medieval England. In one of his many attempts to infiltrate King John's court, Fouke le Fitz Waryn's John de Rampaigne disguises himself as an Ethiopian minstrel: ‘se atyra molt richement, auxi bien come counte ou baroun’ [he dressed himself very richly, as well as a count or baron].