Dominica Legge identified one final lacuna in the Estoire. She argued that Gaimar’s history lacks an overarching theme to its narrative, unlike, for example, Piers Langtoft’s Chronicle, which she interprets as centred on the figure of Edward I. Her view was that historians working on Langtoft have – or had at her time of writing, in 1950 – overlooked this structure due to their decision to study Edward’s reign in isolation, an approach that obscures the chronicle’s larger design. Legge’s own perception of the Estoire as a history lacking a political dimension was, I would argue, made as a result of a similar approach: that is, an analysis of Gaimar’s writing that fails to take him seriously as an historian. This is not surprising, as Bell’s edition of Gaimar’s chronicle was then only in preparation, and the process of reassessing the Estoire’s value as a history was yet to begin. Legge, writing before this reappraisal of Gaimar, was certain that the poet, swayed by his patroness’s tastes, can be pigeonholed as an exclusively ‘courtly’ writer with no concern for larger historical themes. This caused her to overlook the need for his history to be accorded the same thorough examination that she advocates for the work of a chronicler such as Langtoft.

Other scholars have argued convincingly that the Estoire is, in fact, a work rich in meaning for a post-Conquest England struggling to find its identity after a period of intense turmoil. John Gillingham, long an advocate for Gaimar’s importance to the development of history writing in England, sees in it a case for a developing national identity as French speakers began to identify with the culture of their homeland.2 Elizabeth Freeman, another early champion of the Estoire, highlights the history’s significance as a means to assimilate the Norman arrivals of 1066 and its aftermath into the long sweep of Anglo-Saxon and British history.3 Paul Dalton, meanwhile, has made a case for the Estoire as a didactic tool, within which the various episodes of murder, political unrest and rebellion can be interpreted as guidelines for a hoped-for future of peace and unity between king and barons.