The Vita Edwardi by Aelred of Rievaulx, dedicated to Henry II and written about 1161–3, is a politically engaged work, designed to bolster the claims of legitimacy of Henry II as descendant of both Norman and English royal families. The Vita Edwardi was twice translated into French verse, first by a nun of Barking shortly after 1163, and almost a century later, by Matthew Paris, in a translation for the court of Henry III, dedicated to Queen Eleanor of Provence.

But it is the twelfth-century life from Barking, of almost 7,000 lines, not the thirteenth-century life by Matthew Paris, that later makes the Channel crossing. The verse life by the nun of Barking is extant in three incomplete manuscripts, all dating from the late thirteenth century. Two are of English origin: the Campsey manuscript copy ends abruptly at line 4240, while the Vatican manuscript lacks a quire containing about 1,500 lines at the beginning of the text. The third verse copy is in a Picard manuscript datable to 1292, where roughly the first 4,500 lines were incorporated into the text of Wace's Brut, inserted seamlessly into the historical chronicle.

In the first quarter of the fourteenth century the life from Barking was rewritten in prose in the French manuscript, now London, BL Egerton 745, created for the de Châtillon family, counts of St Pol, near Amiens. This is the only extant copy that contains the complete narrative, although reworked in prose and slightly shortened, of the life from Barking.