he placed too much emphasis on the exploits of relatively minor barons associated with the south west, including the de Tracy family. The writer appears to have been a scholar, and his work omits dates and extraneous detail for the sake of literary effect, while employing classical terms to offices and positions rather than their Mediaeval Latin equivalents. Scholars agree that he was a supporter of Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester. However, historians differ over their exact relationship: Howlett suggested the author was Henry's chaplain, but Davis believes that the criticism he gave to Henry in the Gesta makes this unlikely. Davis instead suggests that he was a bishop, based on his style of writing, his perspectives on the events he writes about and the places he visited; he goes further to speculate that it may have been Robert of Lewes, Bishop of Bath, who was the author. Robert Bartlett states that he was "perhaps" the author and Hushcroft writes that it was written either by him "or someone close to him". Manuscripts Two manuscripts of the Gesta Stephani have been known to scholars, but one is now lost. The first, housed in the episcopal library at Laon, was printed in the seventeenth century, but subsequently disappeared. It stopped at 1147, was damaged, with some pages illegible, and included gaps in the text. The second manuscript was discovered in the Municipal Library at Valenciennes and was originally from the Abbey of Vicoigne; it includes all of the original manuscript's content, but carries on the work until the end of Stephen's reign and is legible where the original one was damaged. It contains the same four gaps as the first but, where pages appear to be missing in the first, the second manuscript includes gaps in the text, which leads R.A.B. Mynors to suggest that second was copied from the first. Publication A manuscript of the Gesta Stephani was discovered in the libraries of the bishop of Laon in the early seventeenth century, and was first printed in 1619 at Paris by the French historian André Duchesne (1584–1640) in Historia Normannorum Scriptores Antiqui. It was incomplete at that time, and was lost after Duchesne's death. This text was reprinted in England by R.C. Sewell (1803–1864) in 1846 and by Richard Howlett (1841–1917) in 1886; the latter has been praised for its improvements to Duchesne's version and its useful preface. There