The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The documents referred to under this title are not one single continuous work, but were written independently in various English monasteries. Taken as a whole these manuscripts form the oldest and most complete annals in any European vernacular tongue: only the Russian and the Irish chronicles can compare with them for antiquity. The difficulty in publishing them in compact form has always been to show the differences in the way they deal with events without repeating a large amount of matter common to all or most of the manuscripts. The nearest practicable solution was that devised by Earle and Plummer in their edition of the original texts entitled Two of the Saxon Chronicles, published by the Oxford University Press, who have kindly given permission for the arrangement of the texts in their edition (consisting mainly of the Parker and Laud MSS. Of Winchester and Peterborough, two versions of the Abingdon Chronicle and extracts from the Chronicles of Worcester and Canterbury) to be used as the basis for this new translation, which is the only version in modern English available to the student and general reader, covering the whole period A.D 450 - 1150. The fifty pages of editorial introduction contain, with the notes, much matter which is the fruit of original research and an important contribution to knowledge in this field not hitherto published, even in journals.