Volume IV: The Peterborough Chronicle

Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile Finding Aid Home

v. I     v. II     v. III     v.IV     v. V     v.VI     v.VII     v.VIII     v.IX     v.X

v.XI     v.XII     v.XIII    v.XIV     v.XV     v.XVI     v.XVII     v.XVIII     v.XIX    

v.XX     v.XXI     v.XXII     v.XXIII     v.XXIV     v.XV     v.XVI     v.XVII    

v.XXVIII and XXIX    Other resources

Volume IV: The Peterborough Chronicle

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE, another of the great enterprises in English prose that were undertaken in the reign of King Alfred, is our most important source for the political history of the long period it covers. All the versions of it extant today have a complicated textual history, and the Laud manuscript, commonly cited as E, is no exception. It is one of the two which represent what is known as the northern recension of the Chronicle, a compilation which contains in the early years much material of northern interest and which, as Professor Whitelock argues convincingly in her introduction, was put together almost certainly at York. But by the middle of the eleventh century the associations of E’s text are with Canterbury. E itself is a copy made at Peterborough in 1121. Further annals were added to it there until 1155 or soon after. Thus it is the version of the Chronicle which continues some three quarters of a century longer than any other (except for a fragment). Its interest to the historian and to the linguist cannot be overestimated.