This chapter explores the ties that bound the abbey and monks of Saint-Évroul with the peninsula of southern Italy, focusing on the ways in which Orderic repeatedly linked the two regions in Books III to VII of his Historia ecclesiastica. Beginning in Book III of the Historia, the material on southern Italy constitutes the first major outward movement of the narrative beyond the borders of the Normandy. The discussion that follows considers why and how Orderic wrote about this region. It suggests that the close links between Saint-Évroul and southern Italy were established and maintained by the movement of many monks, patrons and founders of the monastery to and from the peninsula, and of various relics and other physical objects that came into the possession of the extended network of houses associated with Saint-Évroul, both in southern Italy and in Normandy. These movements of people and material, and the memorial culture in which they were understood, encouraged Orderic to narrate the activity of Norman families and church men in southern Italy and enabled him to do so in such a way as to link this material to the remainder of the work. While the works of authors such as William of Apulia, Geoffrey Malaterra and Amatus of Montecassino can be used to corroborate and occasionally enhance our understanding of individuals related to Saint-Évroul, it appears that these medieval chroniclers were unaware of the majority of these links. Only in Orderic's Historia are such connections stressed.

Orderic had already written on events in southern Italy while copying and expanding William of Jumièges’ Gesta Normannorum ducum, between c. 1109 and c. 1113. There Orderic chronicled the exile of Robert of Grandmesnil, one of the co-founders of Saint-Évroul and also its second abbot, and the foundation of the abbey of St Euphemia in Calabria. Such episodes meant that the story of Saint-Évroul overlapped with that of the Norman conquest of southern Italy by Robert Guiscard and his brothers in the second half of the eleventh century. Each of these episodes was later used by Orderic in Book III of the Historia, along with other information not found in the Gesta Normannorum ducum.