Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T15:44:24.859Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Observations on the Twelfth-century Historia of Alfred of Beverley

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2022

Get access

Summary

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:

… For in this work, described as if in a little notebook, the scholarly reader will be able to learn of events which can otherwise only be read about scattered here and there in the writings of several different authors, covering more than two thousand years, from the first inhabitants of Britain until the times of the Normans. The reader will also be able to find the events of different times divided into chapters, for ease of reading.

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’.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Haskins Society Journal 27
2015. Studies in Medieval History
, pp. 101 - 128
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×