Narrating Henry I's attempts to recapture Robert of Bellême in 1102 in Book XI of his Historia, Orderic describes the surrender of Bridgnorth and Henry's subsequent journey with his 60,000 troops north-west to Shrewsbury via the road across Wenlock Edge, widening the cutting as they went. This cutting was a bare ten miles south-east of Orderic's birthplace in Atcham, and it is therefore no surprise that he is well informed about the troops’ movements. It is also no surprise that Orderic knew the English name of this pass – ‘Huvel hegen’ – glossing this as ‘malum callem vel vicum’ (translated by Chibnall as ‘evil path’ or ‘road’). Orderic's inclusion of the English road name raises questions about not only how much knowledge of English he retained in later life, but also his reasons for including this detail in an account of a conflict over English territory between two primarily French-speaking adversaries, written for a Francophone monastic audience within his home monastery of Saint-Évroul.

Chibnall reconstructs the road name given by Orderic as Middle English uvel hege, ‘evil hedge or undergrowth’, but given that Orderic describes it as ‘a deep cutting […] overshadowed on both sides by a thick wood’, it would be preferable to connect the second element with ege, ‘ridge’. There is, moreover, reason to believe that hegen should be construed as a plural, so that the road name should in fact be ‘evil edges’. Orderic's translation of this name is thus doubly wrong: first in that renders hege with callis or vicus, both of which essentially mean ‘road’, thus missing the topographical significance of the name; second, in that he translates as singular a noun that is plural, implying a somewhat shaky recollection of his childhood language. But, as his very inclusion of this phrase suggests, writing in English, and getting it right, seem to have remained important to Orderic. This is apparent from his hypercorrection here. Francophones like Orderic would have been unused to pronouncing [h] at the beginning of words; thus, if they tried to speak English, they would have struggled to pronounce words beginning with [h].