This extract from Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana, recording the death, marriage and then birth of Edmund Mortimer (d. 1409), includes several examples of overt and subtle references to time. The entire series of narrated events is framed by the notion of them occurring ‘at that time’ (eo tempore). While we are not provided with the exact date, the events are placed at the end of the entries for the year 1402, which had been signalled earlier in the narrative by the temporal phase, ‘Anno gratiæ millesimo quadringentesimo secundo’. Here ‘eo tempore’ functions as a stable marker of time for these two entries on Mortimer, yet the narrative that follows jumps around chronologically; Walsingham looks backwards to events of the past, as is signalled by the terms ‘we mentioned previously’ (‘quem retulimus ante’) and ‘then’ (‘tunc’), as well as references to present time, as is signalled by ‘since’ (‘dum’) and ‘so it is said’ (‘ut fertur’).

The treatment of time and chronology in the chronicles is, in fact, far from simple or naïve, and it is the range of effects that such choices have on the presentation of the revolt of Owain Glyndŵr with which this chapter is concerned. To return to the example of Thomas Walsingham: the stable underlying chronological structure which is signalled by overt markers of time allows Walsingham to reorder historical events to construct a narrative that is multifaceted and meaningful. In Walsingham’s extracts, for instance, there are two examples of analepses (flash-backs).