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Between c. 900 and the mid-twelfth century, a series of Old English vernacular chronicles were produced, growing out of the text produced at the court of King Alfred. These chronicles are collectively known as ‘the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’. They have long been accorded fundamental status in the English national story. No others have shaped our view of the origins of England between the fifth and eleventh centuries to the same extent. They provide between them the only continuous narrative of this period. They are the story that has made England. This paper deals with the relationship between that story, these texts and England: how they have been read and edited – made – in the context of the English national story since the sixteenth century; but also their relationship to, the part they may have played in, the original making of the English kingdom. The focus is on developments during the tenth and eleventh centuries, when a political unit more or less equivalent to the England we now know emerged. It is argued that these texts were the ideological possession and expression of the southern English elite, especially of bishops and archbishops, at this critical period of kingdom-making. Special attention is given to their possible role in the incorporation of Northumbria into that kingdom. These chronicles were made by scribes a millennium ago, and to some extent have been reworked by modern editors from the sixteenth century on. They are daunting in their complexity. The differences between them are as important as the common ground they share. Understanding the making of these foundational texts has its own light to shed on the making of England.
Between c. 900 and the mid-twelfth century, a series of Old English vernacular chronicles were produced, growing out of the text produced at the court of King Alfred. These chronicles are collectively known as ‘the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’. They have long been accorded fundamental status in the English national story. No others have shaped our view of the origins of England between the fifth and eleventh centuries to the same extent. They provide between them the only continuous narrative of this period. They are the story that has made England. This paper deals with the relationship between that story, these texts and England: how they have been read and edited – made – in the context of the English national story since the sixteenth century; but also their relationship to, the part they may have played in, the original making of the English kingdom. The focus is on developments during the tenth and eleventh centuries, when a political unit more or less equivalent to the England we now know emerged. It is argued that these texts were the ideological possession and expression of the southern English elite, especially of bishops and archbishops, at this critical period of kingdom-making. Special attention is given to their possible role in the incorporation of Northumbria into that kingdom. These chronicles were made by scribes a millennium ago, and to some extent have been reworked by modern editors from the sixteenth century on. They are daunting in their complexity. The differences between them are as important as the common ground they share. Understanding the making of these foundational texts has its own light to shed on the making of England.
Three points by way of introduction. The first concerns the definition and delineation of the subject. Because kingship is but one ill-defined kingdom in the shifting intellectual heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, I have been rigorous almost to the point of ruthlessness about excluding topics just at or beyond our boundaries. Not only scholarly contributions and scholars but also whole fields and subfields of historical inquiry have been precluded from consideration: the list of neglected, ignored, and relegated topics is very long indeed. Then I come to the question of whether this survey has any hopes for originality. What dreams I might have harbored for a new clarion call were quickly dashed when, early in my preparation of this article, I came on Eric John's comment that “more books have been written about Anglo-Saxon kingship than about Anglo-Saxon kings.” Once I got my torch alight I quickly realized how many footsteps already covered the path. And last, this article in some sense is offered as a memorial to Dorothy Whitelock, our greatest modern Anglo-Saxonist after Stenton. Though she did not live to complete her study of Alfred the Great, we have been assured that it will soon see the light of day. The frequency with which Whitelock's name appears in the bibliography gives some idea of her versatility and her relentless intellectual curiosity. To the study of kingship alone her first postwar contribution appears in the 1954 listings; her last—the reedition of her magisterialEnglish Historical Documents, volume 1—in 1979.The long postwar generation of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, of which we now must be standing at the far chronological end, begins with the publication of Frank Merry Stenton'sAnglo-Saxon Englandin 1943. Stenton was sixty-three when his great book appeared. Rarely has a large synthetic treatment simultaneously presented the state of the existing question and set the agenda for the next thirty or forty years.
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