A set of rhetorical commonplaces or topoi are shared by the prologues to classical and medieval works from many literary genres. Medieval chronicles are frequently introduced by prologues which draw on these topoi, taking as their examples the prologues of classical historians such as Sallust and Livy, and those of early Christian historians. The topoi include providing an outline of the work's content; referring to the need for brevity; citing precedents to the work; a declaration of the modest status of the author or the work; and for historical texts, an assertion that the function of historical writing was to show God's purpose in the world and to encourage righteous behaviour. E. R. Curtius enumerated these topoi, and their use in historical prologues has been examined by Bernard Guenée and Antonia Gransden.

In this chapter, I will discuss the prologues to Anglo-Norman prose chronicles, focusing on one rhetorical commonplace, or rather its absence: an expression of modesty. As Curtius has noted, it was conventional for those medieval historians who wrote in Latin to express the relatively unimportant nature of their work in their prologues. William of Newburgh, in his introductory letter to his Historia Rerum Anglicanum, says that he is not going to devote himself ‘altis scrutandis mysticisque rimandis insistere, sed in narrationibus historicis praecipiat spatiari ad tempus tanquam pro quadam ex facilitate operis recreatione ingenii’ (‘to the investigation of lofty matters, nor to the exploration of the mysteries, but to stroll for a while in the paths of historical narrative, an easy task offering a form of mental recreation’).