One of England's lesser known twelfth-century historical writers is Alfred, sacrist of the collegiate church of Beverley in the East Riding (ER) of Yorkshire, and author-compiler of a Latin prose narrative recounting the history of Britain from its supposed foundation by the Trojan Brutus to the time of Henry I. The work is arranged in nine capitula, ‘chapters’. The first five abbreviate Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae ( HRB), incorporating the newly discovered British history within a narrative that draws also on the accounts of conventional historical authorities of the time: Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, Paul the Deacon's Historia Romana, and Orosius’ Historiarum Adversus Paganos amongst others. Compiling his work only a decade or so after the appearance of Geoffrey's history (c. 1148 x c. 1151–1153, see below), Alfred is the first historical writer to attempt to integrate the HRB within a comprehensive history of Britain; Henry of Huntingdon's 1139 epitomization of that work in the form of the Epistola Warino Britoni (Letter to Warin the Breton) is inserted only as a stand-alone piece in book eight of the Historia Anglorum. Only one printed edition of Alfred's history exists. This was published in 1716 by the Oxford antiquary, Thomas Hearne, who attached to the work the title ‘Aluredi Beverlacensis Annalium’: thus ‘Alfred's Annals’ is how the compilation has, misleadingly, come to be known. The compilation is not written in annalistic form and its chapters each address an historical period with a given theme. In his prologue Alfred gives us his reasons for designing the work in this way:

Alfred's history has attracted very little interest from modern scholarship and what little has been written has often been unflattering. J.S.P. Tatlock described Alfred as a ‘dullard’ and his ‘Annales unimportant’. Charles Gross described the work as ‘a worthless compilation’ and John Taylor called the history ‘uninformative’.