The Life of Saint Waldef by Jocelin of Furness is the only surviving account of a man who would seem to have played a prominent part in the political and ecclesiastical affairs of the north in the middle years of the twelfth century, and who acquired a reputation for conventional sanctity. Apart from Jocelin’s account, written almost fifty years after his subject’s death, there are only a handful of contemporary references to Waldef. If the historian was limited to these Waldef would be a shadowy figure indeed, and the annals of the twelfth-century church would lose a man who appears, both in Jocelin’s narrative and the pages of modern historians, almost as a second-rank Ailred.