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2 - ‘To destroy and ruin the whole English nation and language’: The chronicles of the Hundred Years War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2016

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Summary

The discussion begins with the English chronicles of the Hundred Years War: the Brut, Gregory's Chronicle, Hardyng's Chronicle, John Capgrave's Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, Robert Bale's Chronicle and the London annals. Most have not been edited for over a century, and have suffered from verdicts such as Friedrich W. D. Brie's of the Brut, that, ‘as literature, the Chronicle is as worthless … as a mediaval Chronicle possibly can be’. Arguably, however, as Gransden notes, ‘the rise of the vernacular chronicle’ was ‘the most remarkable historiographical development in the fifteenth century’. ‘At no time since the Anglo-Saxon period had the vernacular chronicle achieved such importance.’ The situation was different in France, where the Grandes Chroniques were officially compiled by the monks of Saint-Denis from the thirteenth century. But in England, the surge in the production and popularity of historiography in English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a cultural and linguistic phenomenon: England may not have boasted an ‘“official” history-writing project, in the manner of the French monarchy's Grandes chroniques’, but ‘this did not mean that English kings failed to recognise the value of history and historiography. Chronicle writers … were not unaware of the possibilities of history for creating a sense of a shared national past.’

The manuscript situation, in fact, suggests quite the opposite. William Marx and Raluca Radulescu write,

The evidence of the manuscripts – not only the numbers that survive but also the ways in which they were used – argues that the prose Brut was central to medieval English culture. At the same time, it is ironic that the prose Brut … holds the distinction of being, until recently, the most seriously neglected of the texts produced in medieval England.

The Brut survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts, more than any other Middle English text apart from the Wycliffite Bible, as well as in over twenty versions and continuations. Lister Matheson comments, ‘The amount of time and labor that went into the production of such a sheer number of manuscripts – let alone the probably greater number that have failed to survive – must have made the Brut omnipresent for those engaged or interested in the book trade in the fifteenth century’.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2016

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