Peterborough Chronicle

The Peterborough Chronicle (also called the Laud manuscript and the E manuscript), one of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, contains unique information about the history of England after the Norman Conquest. According to philologist J.A.W. Bennett, it is the only prose history in English between the Conquest and the later 14th century.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were composed and maintained between the various monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England and were an attempt to record the history of Britain throughout the years AD. Typically the chronicles began with the birth of Christ, went through Biblical and Roman history, then continued to the present. Every major religious house in England kept its own, individual chronicle, and the chronicles were not compared with each other or in any way kept uniform. For example, in the opening paragraph of this chronicle it is said that the Britons that settled in South Britain came from "Armenia". ("Armenia" is probably a mistaken transcription of Armorica, an area in Northwestern Gaul.)[1] However, whenever a monastery's chronicle was damaged, or when a new monastery began a chronicle, nearby monasteries would lend out their chronicles for copying. Thus, a new chronicle would be identical to the lender's until they reached the date of copying and then would be idiosyncratic. Such was the case with the Peterborough Chronicle: a fire compelled the abbey to copy the chronicles from other churches up to 1120.

When William the Conqueror took England and Anglo-Norman became the official language, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles generally ceased. The monks of Peterborough Abbey, however, continued to compile events in theirs. While the Peterborough Chronicle is not professional history, and one still needs Latin histories (e.g. William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum), it is one of the few surviving first-hand accounts from the period 1070 to 1154 in England written in English and from a non-courtly point of view.

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