[1] Orderic was born on 16 February 1075 in Atcham, Shropshire, England, the eldest son of a French priest, Odelerius of Orléans.

[2] Odelerius had entered the service of Roger de Montgomery, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, and had received from his patron a chapel there in 1082.

[4] When Orderic was five, his parents sent him to an English monk, Siward by name, who kept a school in the Abbey of SS Peter and Paul at Shrewsbury.

[6] At the age of ten, Orderic was entrusted as an oblate to the Abbey of Saint-Evroul in the Duchy of Normandy, which Montgomery had formerly despoiled but, in his later years, was loading with gifts.

[7] The parents paid thirty marks for their son's admission; he expresses the conviction that they imposed this exile upon him from an earnest desire for his welfare.

Odelerius's respect for the monastic life is attested to by his own entry, a few years later, into a monastery which the earl had founded at his persuasion.

His book, though written many years later, shows that he never lost his English cast of mind or his attachment to the country of his birth.

[8] His narrative is full of digressions that surprise readers who expect a strictly chronological ordering of events, but it has been argued that the digressions reflect Orderic's sense of the connections between events (between the foundation of Saint-Evroul and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy, for example) and his desire to include as much of his monastic colleagues' memories in his History as possible.

He throws a flood of light upon the manners and ideas of his own age, and he sometimes comments with shrewdness upon the broader aspects and tendencies of history.

[8] The Historia Ecclesiastica, described as the greatest English social history of the Middle Ages,[15] falls into three sections: The historian Marjorie Chibnall states that Orderic used now-lost pancartes (cartularies or collections of charters) of various Norman monastic houses as sources for his historical writings.

[18] Orderic addressed both contemporaries and future generations, intending for his work to be studied by monks and novices learning about the history of the monastery and its benefactors.

Throughout his writings, Orderic spoke on a great deal of secular topics ranging from the violence of Norman conquest, the right to rule and inheritance, the strength of government, the make up of various courts and their military structure.

[23] Knights that frequented the Abbey of Saint-Evroul often were waiting for their inheritance to come about or others who hoped to increase their standing through their service to a household.

[24] On the subject of plunder, Orderic stands out amongst his peers for his critique of Bohemond I of Antioch whom he believed to have used the mission of the crusades as an excuse to gain power for himself.