While the Gesta Herwardi examines the impact of national political events on local communities, Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis operates inversely: it makes local stories nationally relevant by eliding distinctions between England and the individual regions that constitute it. Regional writing is often concerned with the ‘representation of difference’ between the local and the national, the periphery and the centre. To create a narrative that is distinctively regional, cultural boundaries must be drawn between the spotlighted area and the remainder of the country: ‘A regional identity then, is a sense of belonging, an awareness of similar traits among people living under similar conditions, or not coincidentally, of how their cultural patterns are distinctive in comparison to other regions or places.’ While this sense of isolation or distinction from other regions – or from the country as a whole – may apply to the Gesta, which demonstrates a retreat to a more local imagining of England in the face of political turmoil, the Estoire operates quite differently, even though its focus is unmistakably regional. This chapter will show that instead of highlighting the uniqueness of the areas in which he was writing, Gaimar appropriates local stories and uses them to construct his history of England. Even when it purports to discuss England as a whole, the Estoire mostly focuses on events in Lincolnshire, taking the region to be representative of the nation. Unlike an overtly regional text, such as the Liber Eliensis, the Estoire does not claim to be restricted or bounded by a sense of place, and it does not focus on a single locality through time. Rather, it is concerned with the place of regional history in the greater context of England's past.

Gaimar brings together a range of sources from different regions, namely Hampshire, which had been in the kingdom of Wessex, and Lincolnshire, one of the boroughs of the former Danelaw. The confluence of these sources from different parts of England enables the text to construct an English identity and a regional identity simultaneously.