INTRODUCTION: MANUSCRIPTS, SOURCES, STRUCTURE

When Wace set out to produce his verse account of the history of the dukes of Normandy, in 1160, he was confronted by a very different set of problems from anything he had encountered before. The preparatory phase of collecting his materials would have been much more complex, and the task of selecting those suitable for inclusion in his work would have been far more delicate. The subject matter itself was heavily charged politically, and some of the events he had to deal with were still within living memory. There was no one, single work whose structure he could adopt to provide the framework for his own narrative, as the sources for the Rou were diverse, open-ended and compilatory. We are far from the Roman de Brut, where the entirety of the material was available in a compact, thought-out form; and while Wace was not inexperienced in combining disparate sources to create a logical whole (witness his Conception Nostre Dame), the Roman de Rou presented him with the problem of a subject matter that was difficult to circumscribe due to the increasingly close links between Normandy and England in the course of the period he was to present. To this, one might add that whilst the Historia Regum Britanniae enjoyed widespread popularity and had the advantage of recounting politically ‘safe’ accounts of a semi-legendary past, the chroniclers and historians of the rulers of Normandy were not granted outstanding prestige; their subject matter was too recent for it to be endowed with the authority of the Classical historians, too easily verifiable for it to be idealised with impunity, too recent to escape partisan tensions. Wace had to evolve new strategies and find a suitable narrative model.

The resulting work is unlike anything else by Wace to have come down to us. The manuscripts of the Roman de Rou have transmitted four poems, almost free-standing and in two different metres, that in conjunction recount the history of the dukes of Normandy from their Viking origins to Henry I of England. The Chronique Ascendante is a genealogy of the dukes, starting with Henry II of England and moving back in time to the founder of the dynasty, Rou.