The Peterborough text

In the early part of the twelfth century, the Benedictine abbey of Peterborough saw a spate of textual activity. Of principal importance for this study is an example of vernacular historiography acquired and subsequently reworked by the abbey scriptorium. This was a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which started life as a document of national history and West-Saxon military campaigns now known in Chronicle scholarship as the ‘Common Stock’. Peterborough abbey obtained a version of the Northern Recension, a version of the ‘Common Stock’ without any continuations, which was taken north in the late tenth or early eleventh centuries. This text is substantially different from some of the other Chronicle versions in having a Preface from Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, and narratives of the reign of King Æthelred and the opening years of Cnut's reign. In its stage before Peterborough, this text seems to have been located at Christ Church, Canterbury. By then, it had already incorporated annals 1023–1061, (written at St Augustine's, Canterbury), and the unlocalised annals 1062–1121. This composite pre-Peterborough version (the Northern Recension, with annals 1023–1061 and 1062–1121), referred to in Chronicle scholarship as √E or the proto-E text, was extensively used as reference, and modified, by the compiler of a bilingual Chronicle based at Canterbury (the F version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). It is very likely that this proto-E text then moved to Peterborough from Canterbury, and became the basis of the Peterborough Chronicle. Interpolations concerning the early history of the abbey were made in this Chronicle version, and the manuscript was continued further in the twelfth century at Peterborough. This modified text is known as the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

A number of factors are of paramount importance here. The first is that twelfth-century Peterborough obtained a text belonging to an established textual tradition as far as historiography in the vernacular was concerned.