Alfred the Great by Asser

Author:Asser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE, 888–900 (pp. 113–20)

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides the foundation for our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon secular history from its traditional beginnings in the middle of the fifth century to its conclusion in 1066; indeed, the Chronicle was still kept up at certain places after the Norman Conquest, and one version extends as far as 1154. Before using it as a source, however, it is important to have some understanding of the manner of its composition and of the stages of its growth. Its title is potentially misleading, in two ways. First, it seems to suggest that the work as we see it printed is in some sense a single continuous text, composed by a presumably long series of chroniclers writing year by year and each responsible for a certain part of the whole. Secondly, it can be taken to imply that the work in some sense embodies an ‘official’ view of Anglo-Saxon history, an inference seemingly strengthened by the terseness and apparent objectivity of the language often employed by the chroniclers, who are themselves personally unobtrusive and anonymous. At first sight, therefore, the Chronicle creates the impression that it has a consistent character and uniform authority throughout, but one does not have to penetrate its surface very far to realize that the reality is rather different.

The ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ is in fact a term applied by modern scholars, for the sake of convenience, to a group of chronicle texts, now represented not only directly by the several manuscripts which preserve the annals in their original Old English form, but also indirectly by material embedded in various Latin chronicles and histories, which can be shown to derive from manuscripts of the Chronicle that have not survived. There are seven manuscripts of the Chronicle itself, conventionally designated as follows: M S ‘A’ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College M S 173), also known as the ‘Parker Chronicle’, first written in the late ninth or early tenth century and continued thereafter by a succession of scribes, at Winchester and (in the late eleventh century) at Christ Church, Canterbury; M S ‘B’ (B.L. Cotton Tiberius A. vi), written by one scribe in 977 or 978, probably at Abingdon (though the manuscript seems later to have been at Ramsey, and then at Canterbury); M S ‘C’ (B.L. Cotton Tiberius B. i), written by two scribes in the 1040s, apparently at Abingdon, and continued intermittently thereafter up to 1066; M S ‘B’ (B.L. Cotton Tiberius B. iv), written by several scribes around the middle of the eleventh century, possibly at Worcester; M S ‘E’ (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 636), written at Peterborough in the 1120s, with a continuation extending to 1154; M S ‘F’ (B.L. Cotton Domitian viii), a bilingual (Latin and Old English) version written by one scribe at Christ Church, Canterbury, towards the end of the eleventh century; and MS ‘G’ (B.L. Cotton Otho B. xi, almost entirely destroyed in the fire of 1731), a direct copy of M S ‘A’ made at Winchester in the early eleventh century.

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