This chapter sees Edgar in peak career, a seasoned director and company secretary, but with continuing financial anxieties and resentments against his employer as he approached retirement. His last two years in Baghdad, in company with Winifred, illustrate the close relationship of the British imperial administration with Middle East shipping companies, and Edgar’s role in both. Winifred fostered the development of the Baghdad Anglican church, mainly for expatriates, and missionary activity, extending her St Albans church work. For Edgar, as for Winifred, their subsequent decade in the 1930s in St Albans before retirement offers a case study in expatriate transition to life at ‘home’, to domesticity and engagement in public life and local society, along with lingering Persian associations and nostalgia for their expatriate past. While expatriate service succeeded in cementing their class transformation, they remained vulnerable to middle-class economic austerity which characterised peacetime 1930s and wartime 1940s. The Wilsons’ longed-for stable settlement in England contrasted with the adoption of expatriate careers by all their children, with daughters as overseas missionaries and sons as overseas mining engineers, a tension between the continuation and rejection of expatriate mobility concluded in the next chapter.

This chapter takes the writings of the thirteenth-century chronicler Matthew Paris of St Albans (c.1200-1259) as a case study for recurring themes in this volume. In particular, it draws attention to the complex interplay between the author, his community, and a wider circle of patrons, dependents and visitors. It starts from the premise that historical writing was both a cultural and a social practice. That is, chroniclers did not operate in isolation, but as part of a broader network of those providing models, support and information. In Matthew’s case, a distinctive authorial voice and an equally distinctive manuscript tradition prove especially fruitful. They allow us to gain deeper insights not only into his own approach towards writing about the past, but also the expectations of his fellow-brethren and their benefactors, and into shifting practices in thirteenth-century historical culture at St Albans as well as in England and Latin Europe at large. Key themes include the salvific, hermeneutical and devotional aspects of historical writing, and conventions of genre and historiographical practice.