[1] It presents its subject family as a lineage, concentrating on agnatic descent from its founder, William (Guillaume) Taillefer.
It records the legend that Taillefer died defending his lands from the Normans with a magic sword.
It provides a precise record of the "succession of counts and bishops, of their genealogy, their fights and their alliances".
Further fragments were discovered and edited by Dom Martin Bouquet and his collaborators before, in 1858, Eusèbe Castaigne published and edited the full text based, not on the manuscripts, but on Labbe and Bouquet et al. A fourteenth-century manuscript from the Angoumois was brought back from the Vatican Archives by George de Manteyer, and formed the basis for the first critical edition, published by Jacques Boussard in 1957, as an extension of the doctoral thesis he defended in 1956 for the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris.
[2] Boussard speculates that the author was a canon of the cathedral of Angoulême, perhaps the one in charge of the archives or the library, and certainly a contemporary of the last persons he mentions.