THE MAKING OF CHRONICLES AND THE MAKING OF ENGLAND: THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES AFTER ALFREDProthero Lecture

Abstract

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.