Annales Cambriae

Welsh History Review, 2010

The Introduction to the Annales Cambriae and the possible sources and construction of the same.

2008

For many years, there has been debate over the authorship and origin of the annals of Manuscript E of the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', in the years between 1080 and 1121. This paper starts a little earlier, however, examining the changes of authorship within the entries of MS. E between 1070 and 1121, and comparing them with those of MS. D, as applicable. The conclusions are that a northernised text, reaching to 1084, was used in the compilation of D and in the updating of the exemplar of E, and that the text behind E was later continued on to 1090, to 1110, and to 1121. The article also raises the possibility of an ongoing Canterbury connection for the 'Chronicle'. Indeed, given that the annals between 1070 and 1084 appear to have existed in an earlier source as a discrete block, then it would seem that MS. D (which arguably contains only part of that block) is a copied text in its later parts. And, considering that some of its entries have been drawn directly from MS. E, it would seem that both D and E were together at Canterbury, during the compilation and/or updating of the two texts. One further implication would be that MS. D was compiled as an exercise in scribal training -- given that the blocks of text do not match up with the various blocks of handwriting.

The object of this work is to provide materials for a full investigation of versions of the Welsh Chronicle of the Kings to uncover their relation to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (HRB) and its source material. To this end a concordance of the texts is included, preceded by an introduction containing a guide to the organisation of the concordance, and discussion of the preliminary conclusions on the on how this array of texts emerged in the years between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The Welsh texts are organised by six stemmata, implying several original versions of the narrative of the succession of ancient British kings. One conclusion developed here is that a large proportion of the Welsh texts, the stemmata labelled Groups I through IV, are likely to be translations of Geoffrey’s Latin version. Substantial parts of the narratives in Groups V and VI, however, are based on a shorter version of the historic narrative created before Geoffrey’s version. The existing traces of this version in Groups V and VI are referred to here as the ‘Short Version’. Thus in addition to the distinct translations underlying the stemmata (‘Groups’), there are two larger meta-narratives, one represented by HRB and Groups I – IV, the latter recognised as translations of HRB, the other an independent ‘Short Version’ narrative embedded inside the material in Groups V and VI. The introductory part of this work lays out the organisation of the concordance pages, and introduces the argument for the existence of this independent Short Version. This argument is based in part on several lines of evidence, namely 1) a verbal identity between Groups V and VI; 2) the testimony of Welsh scholars over the periods in which these manuscripts were produced or copies; 3) the existence of similar texts on the Continent (witnessed by Henry of Huntingdon in his letter to Varinus) and in Wales (witnessed in the works of Gerald the Welshman); 4) internal analysis of HRB revealing Geoffrey of Monmouth’s methods of adaptation, showing how his book contrasts with the Short Version; 5) a closer look at some features of the construction of Group V in particular, which shows that this textual stemma is founded on a Short Version text, while also importing material from a translation of HRB, included repeated versions of the same statements. Amongst other ideas, the work brings forward the importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s collaborator Walter the Archdeacon as a translator and advisor, and of their social circle in distributing the two meta-narratives, initially in the form of HRB itself and a shorter Latin draft of the source material. Above all, the model of events developed here implies that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s claim to a unified narrative source for his HRB is likely to be true. The samples of evidence in each of these areas is not intended to be exhaustive. Full development of all these points are left to future work. The introduction ends with a brief discussion of future directions from this base, including an additional concordance with textual excerpts; also included is a preliminary analysis of the manuscript Jesus College 141, showing that it is a complete text in the tradition of universal history, and that the Chronicle of the Kings version incorporated into it belongs to Group V. Thereafter follows a source list and other apparatus, and the concordance itself.

2024

This paper dismisses the theory of a common archetype for the different versions of the Saxon Chronicle-an edition which extended only to 891-and argues that the shared source was a 'Base Text', perhaps from the Winchester Old Minster, which was copied at various times between 909 and 920, and sent out to the newly-formed sees at Ramsbury, Crediton, Wells and the New Minster-and, probably, to the existing one at Sherborne. An examination of the extant Chronicle-texts, and a simultaneous consideration of their purported sources, suggests that there was a degree of interaction between these establishments around 946, and again in the 970s, as the different manuscripts came to be updated. Two major corrections are necessary: 1. For 'working both alone in unison' (p. 12), read 'working both alone or in unison'. 2. For 'appointment as Suffragan to Archbishop Eadsige in 1043' (p. 29), read 'appointment as Suffragan to Archbishop Eadsige in 1044'.

The Medieval Chronicle, 2018

In 1216, or soon thereafter, a Welsh nationalist chronologist created a version of the St David's chronicle that was an ancestor of the late thirteenth-century chronicle in London, British Library, Cotton MS Domitian A.1, known as Annales Cambriae C. The chronicle consists of a set of annals to which a universal chronicle has been prefixed, and the earlier compiler's work is preserved within this surviving late thirteenth-century edition. This paper examines the evidence for the early thirteenth-century compiler's overt and covert use of the 19-year lunar-solar (or 'decennovenal') cycle, to encode a powerful statement about the significance of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (c. 1172 – 11 April 1240).

2009

"This paper looks at the scribal practices of MS ‘A’ of the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', and at some of the confusions resulting therefrom. It attempts to show that the sequences of dates which precede the Mercian Register in MSS ‘B’ (816-817-818-819-900-901) and ‘C’ (896-897-898-899-900-801) are derived from a set of annal-numbers (916-917-918-919-920-921) which once formed a postscript to the annals of the (shared) source-text of B and C (or '/BC'). It also suggests that the annals of A from *912 to *914 were derived from a source like the (shared) source of B and C, which continued only to 914 or 915; and that the annals of A from *915 to *920 were taken from this same source, after that text had been continued by the same author for a further six years. Addendum: The implications are that there was either a programme in which continuations were sent to associated religious centres, or there was a close connection between MSS A and /BC, with one copyist perhaps working on two chronicles and then sending one of them elsewhere. As it happens, the divisions of the available texts show some level of coincidence with the times at which new religious centres in Wessex were set up. And the fact that the copyist of B and the first compiler of C take the run of annal-numbers in question to be an Introduction to the 'Mercian Register' would suggest that the 'Register' was physically attached to (or copied into) /BC. Moreover, if /BC contained a copy of the 'Register', which relates to King Alfred's daughter, who was known as the 'Lady of the Mercians', then we might ask how a Mercian text came to be available to the compiler/s of /BC. Perhaps /BC was located at Ramsbury, one of the new religious centres set up in Wessex in the early tenth century. Alfred's daughter had her centre of power at nearby Gloucester. The Ramsbury-theory might allow a system of borrowing and/or provision of information -- specifically between the different houses of Mercia and Wessex, as a continuation of the blueprint for English chronicling (arguably) established by Alfred. Manuscript A, which does not contain the 'Register', might theoretically have remained at Winchester."

The term annals/annales as it is generally used by modern medievalists -to describe Easter tables with infrequent historical notations or similar works without the Easter table apparatus -is inaccurate and can be dangerous, because it can give us a false idea of the development and nature of medieval historiography. The word was

Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne, eds., Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and Their Heritage, Ashgate, 1998

National Library of Wales Journal, 2014