Amazon.com description: Product Description: Six of the greatest twelfth-century historians - William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey Gaimar, Roger of Howden, and Gerald of Wales - are analysed in this collection of essays, focusing on their attitudes to three inter-related aspects of English history. The first theme is the rise of the new and condescending perception which regarded the Irish, Scots and Welsh as barbarians; set against the background of socio-economic and cultural change in England, it is argued that this imperialist perception created a fundamental divide in the history of the British Isles, one to which Geoffrey of Monmouth responded immediately and brilliantly. The second theme treats chivalry not as a mere gloss upon the brutal realities of life, but as an important development in political morality; and it reconsiders some of the old questions associated with chivalric values and knightly obligations - home-grown products or imports from France? The third theme is the emergence of a new sense of Englishness after the traumas of the Norman Conquest, looking at the English invasion of Ireland and the making of English history.