This chapter addresses Chaucer’s chief model for the writing of universal history: the early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trevet. The first section sketches out the overall nature of Trevet’s world history, indicating its scope and showing what view it presents of English national identity, especially in terms of genealogical descent and territorial claims. It then turns to the Constance narrative that provided a model for the Man of Law’s Tale, illustrating how Trevet’s version highlights the role of language in the establishment of national identity, and in the mediating of fundamental changes in that national identity. Selected other passages in Trevet’s work also illustrate the role of language in articulating the boundaries that separate nations and, sometimes, bring them together. The chapter closes by identifying what it is that Trevet’s historical vision offers readers of Chaucer’s histories, such as Troilus or the Knight’s Tale: namely, a capacious temporal scope that makes room for a plural vision of multiple historical contexts—biblical, apostolic, Trojan, Roman, Theban, British, Saxon, and English.