The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle __TOP__

This national chronicle, or annual record of events, was originally compiled around 890 during the reign of King Alfred the Great. It was the first attempt to give a systematic year-by-year account of English history, and it was later maintained, and added to, by generations of anonymous scribes until the middle of the 1100s. This version is an 11th-century copy, probably made in Worcester.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle

Nine manuscripts survive in whole or in part, though not all are of equal historical value and none of them is the original version. The oldest seems to have been started towards the end of Alfred's reign, while the most recent was written at Peterborough Abbey after a fire at that monastery in 1116. Almost all of the material in the Chronicle is in the form of annals, by year; the earliest are dated at 60 BC (the annals' date for Caesar's invasions of Britain), and historical material follows up to the year in which the chronicle was written, at which point contemporary records begin. These manuscripts collectively are known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Two manuscripts are recorded in an old catalogue of the library of Durham; they are described as cronica duo Anglica. In addition, Parker included a manuscript called Hist. Angliae Saxonica in his gifts but the manuscript that included this, now Cambridge University Library MS. Hh.1.10, has lost 52 of its leaves, including all of this copy of the chronicle.[13][30]

As with any historical source, the Chronicle has to be treated with some caution. For example, between 514 and 544 the Chronicle makes reference to Wihtgar, who is supposedly buried on the Isle of Wight at "Wihtgar's stronghold" (which is "Wihtgaræsbyrg" in the original) and purportedly gave his name to the island. However, the name of the "Isle of Wight" derives from the Latin "Vectis", not from Wihtgar. The actual name of the fortress was probably "Wihtwarabyrg", "the stronghold of the inhabitants of Wight", and either the chronicler or an earlier source misinterpreted this as referring to Wihtgar.[36][37]

The manuscripts were produced in different places, and each manuscript reflects the biases of its scribes. It has been argued that the Chronicle should be regarded as propaganda, produced by Alfred's court and written with the intent of glorifying Alfred and creating loyalty.[39] This is not universally accepted,[notes 4] but the origins of the manuscripts clearly colour both the description of interactions between Wessex and other kingdoms, and the descriptions of the Vikings' depredations. An example can be seen in the entry for 829, which describes Egbert's invasion of Northumbria. According to the Chronicle, after Egbert conquered Mercia and Essex, he became a "bretwalda", implying overlordship of all of England. Then when he marched into Northumbria, the Northumbrians offered him "submission and peace". The Northumbrian chronicles incorporated into Roger of Wendover's 13th-century history give a different picture: "When Egbert had obtained all the southern kingdoms, he led a large army into Northumbria, and laid waste that province with severe pillaging, and made King Eanred pay tribute."[41][42]

The Waverley Annals made use of a manuscript that was similar to [E], though it appears that it did not contain the entries focused on Peterborough. The manuscript of the chronicle translated by Geoffrey Gaimar cannot be identified accurately, though according to historian Dorothy Whitelock it was "a rather better text than 'E' or 'F'". Gaimar implies that there was a copy at Winchester in his day (the middle of the 12th century); Whitelock suggests that there is evidence that a manuscript that has not survived to the present day was at Winchester in the mid-tenth century. If it survived to Gaimar's time that would explain why [A] was not kept up to date, and why [A] could be given to the monastery at Canterbury.[13]

A manuscript similar to [E] was available to William of Malmesbury, though it is unlikely to have been [E] as that manuscript is known to have still been in Peterborough after the time William was working, and he does not make use of any of the entries in [E] that are specifically related to Peterborough. It is likely he had either the original from which [E] was copied, or a copy of that original. He mentions that the chronicles do not give any information on the murder of Alfred Aetheling, but since this is covered in both [C] and [D] it is apparent he had no access to those manuscripts. On occasion he appears to show some knowledge of [D], but it is possible that his information was taken from John of Worcester's account. He also omits any reference to a battle fought by Cenwealh in 652; this battle is mentioned in [A], [B] and [C], but not in [E]. He does mention a battle fought by Cenwealh at Wirtgernesburg, which is not in any of the extant manuscripts, so it is possible he had a copy now lost.[13]

Originally compiled in the ninth century during the reign of King Alfred the Great, its original manuscript intended to be a national chronicle of events giving a detailed yearly account of English history.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is among the earliest vernacularchronicles of Western Europe and remains an essential source forscholars of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England. With the publication in2004 of a new edition of the Peterborough text, all six majormanuscript versions of the Chronicle are now available in theCollaborative Edition. Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicletherefore presents a timely reassessment of current scholarlythinking on this most complex and most foundational ofdocuments.

The chronicle remains the best source of the national narrative and is the only surviving document which is a true representation of the attitude of the people and also to a significant bundle of accurate historical events.

In order to write a chronicle at that age where the resources were scarce and the literate people were hard to be found, you needed to be a king, a powerful and determined King Alfred the Great . He was not literate as a child but he learned in his 20s and he wanted his elite to learn to write and read. Even may have contributed to the chronicle himself.

Old Anglo-Saxon language or old English is the language used. In order to study the chronicle we have to rely on the translation. This study is based on translation by Rev. James Ingram (London, 1823) with additional readings from the translation of Dr. J. The register and the diction are regular. The language that has been used is a language that has all the elements of standard language representing a professional document which has an important value even thou at that time the concept of a standardized language was foreign for the Anglo-Saxon of the age

Even though the chroniclers identify the raiders as Danes, the term, like Northmen or Norsemen, was used generically to signify all Scandinavian invaders. In fact, the early Vikings tended to be Norwegian, but it was from the Danes, who began their pillaging in AD 835, that the English suffered the most. With their defeat by Alfred at the Battle of Edington in AD 878, the Treaty of Wedmore later that year established the Danelaw, with Wessex free of further attack but the country to the north and east of Alfred's kingdom subject to Danish law.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The annals were initially created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alfred the Great. Multiple manuscript copies were made and distributed to monasteries across England and were independently updated. In one case, the chronicle was still being actively updated in 1154.

Almost all of the material in the chronicle is in the form of annals, by year; the earliest are dated at 60 BC, and historical material follows up to the year in which the chronicle was written, at which point contemporary records begin. These manuscripts collectively are known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Many volumes derived from conference proceedings are published, and often they struggle to sustain a conceptual coherence with the diversity of material they contain. Thankfully, this volume is not bedevilled by such problems and the quality of each of the contributions is consistently high. This is a coherent and thematic collection that benefits immensely from being concerned with just one particular set of manuscripts that are commonly treated as singular. The lenses through which Chronicle is studied here are many and highly varied. In the opening chapter "Margaret and Malcolm," Thomas A. Bredehoft discusses and prepares a preliminary edition of a hitherto unrecognised poem in the D manuscript. Elsewhere, comparisons are made with continental writing of annals, references to Northern Britain, Ireland, and Scotland are considered, Norse lexical influence is assessed, and the orthography of Anglo-Saxon coinage is compared with that of Chronicle to gain an understanding of popular language changes that were not necessarily reflected in the written material. Curiously, the inter-disciplinarity on display here does not manifest as theoretical or methodological separation. Instead, the historians, geographers, literary scholars, and linguists each present their work in a way that is mutually reinforcing of the other. For example, Scott Thompson Smith's "Marking Boundaries," while part of "The Anglo Saxon Chronicle as History" section of the volume, delivers not just a contextual and historical analysis of the spatiality of Chronicle, but provides a contextual treatment of the poems The Battle of Brunanburh and The Capture of the Five Boroughs, rendering their presence, their subject matter, and their stylistic roles in Chronicle as entirely consistent with the surrounding material. Likewise the literary analyses in this volume each seek to locate their reading and understanding of the different annalistic writing styles in terms of varied influences and contexts within which the chronicle manuscripts were prepared, revealing authorial and historical tensions in the literary content of the manuscripts. This collection is compelling because of its avowed intent to not treat the multiple manuscript sources as different versions able to be collectively synthesised into a clear and seemingly objective early "history" of England. Rather, due in part to the multiple authorship of this volume and because it is figured around a theme of multiple readings, embracing the diversity of influences and seeking contextual explanation for divergence across manuscripts A to H of Chronicle, what we have here is a sound, and indeed, accessible analysis of key issues in the field, across a variety of disciplines. 041b061a72