The critical assessment of the lives of people from recent history which was evident in the compositions of Baldwin's and his contemporary writers, gave way to mostly laudatory accounts of the distant legends of the early Britons. What was once a politically contentious book, examining lives offering warnings to the present on the errors of the past, was now a work displaying national pride in England's history; many of which were taken from the largely mythical "Historia Regum Britanniae". This focus on England's supposed glorious past and often defiance of Rome had much to do with the country being alienated from much of the rest of Europe because of its Protestant religion.