THE wise dictum of Sellar and Yeatman – that history is what is Memorable – came often to mind while reading this interesting, if sometimes uneven monograph. After outlining the principles on which he has conducted his search, Rouse sifts through a great deal of what those who lived through the three centuries after ‘1066 and all that’ wrote about events purportedly taking place in the era preceding the Conquest. He isolates two principal thematic strands: the deep-rooted Englishness attributed to English law, and the close connection between event and place in the English episodes of the Matter of England romances. Both these elements suggest that, to the people of medieval England, what was most Memorable about the Anglo-Saxon period was not what was different from their world, but what was the same. Much of this idealized continuity was, like the protagonists of the romances, largely imaginary. However, using sources such as verse chronicles (56–60) and toponyms (137–56), Rouse demonstrates that the medieval consumers of such texts as Guy of Warwick and Beues of Hamtoun did believe in the historicity of these narratives – a belief reinforced by the romances’ link to the living landscape of medieval England. In the case of the Proverbs of Alfred, Rouse attempts to connect the text's Seuorde with the persistence of genuine recollections of Anglo-Saxon royal councils in East Sussex, perhaps strengthened by the coincidence that the descendants of Alvred the pincerna of Pevensey Castle controlled estates nearby (35–7). But in the romances of the Auchinleck manuscript, which form the subject of the bulk of the book, Rouse tends to read the anchoring of narrative events to English place-names less as memory than as a means of making both site and story Memorable. Such a process held benefits both psychic and – in the case of the monks of St Swithun's church in Winchester, who attempted to set up a rival claim to possessing the weapons of Guy of Warwick – pecuniary (140–5).