Peterborough Chronicle
The Peterborough Chronicle, one of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, contains unique information about the history of England after the Norman Conquest. According to philologist J.A.W. Bennett, it is the only prose history in English between the Conquest and the later 14th century.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were composed and maintained between the various monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England and were an attempt to record the history of Britain throughout the years AD. Typically the chronicles began with the birth of Christ, went through Biblical and Roman history, then continued to the present. Every major religious house in England kept its own, individual chronicle, and the chronicles were not compared with each other or in any way kept uniform. For example, in the opening paragraph of this chronicle it is said that the Britons that settled in South Britain came from "Armenia". However, whenever a monastery's chronicle was damaged, or when a new monastery began a chronicle, nearby monasteries would lend out their chronicles for copying. Thus, a new chronicle would be identical to the lender's until they reached the date of copying and then would be idiosyncratic. Such was the case with the Peterborough Chronicle: a fire compelled the abbey to copy the chronicles from other churches up to 1120.
When William the Conqueror took England and Anglo-Norman became the official language, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles generally ceased. The monks of Peterborough Abbey, however, continued to compile events in theirs. While the Peterborough Chronicle is not professional history, and one still needs Latin histories, it is one of the few surviving first-hand accounts from the period 1070 to 1154 in England written in English and from a non-courtly point of view.
It is also a valuable source of information about the early Middle English language itself. The first continuation, for example, is written in late Old English, but the second continuation begins to show mixed forms, until the conclusion of the second continuation, which switches into an early form of distinctly Middle English. The linguistic novelties recorded in the second continuation are plentiful, including at least one true innovation: the feminine pronoun "she" is first recorded in the Peterborough Chronicle.
The chronicle from the original copied text through the continuations shows the history of the loss of grammatical gender in West Saxon English, going from the copied portion which while mostly conforming to Old English grammatical gender does have some discrepancies, through the first continuation in which modifiers are re-adapted to other functions and there is a large discrepancy with Old English grammatical gender, to the second continuation in which grammatical gender is completely lost or nearly so.
The fire and the continuations
Today, the Peterborough Chronicle is recognised as one of the four distinct versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but it is not wholly distinct. There was a fire at Peterborough that destroyed the monastery's library, and so the earliest part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Peterborough is a copy of Winchester Cathedral's chronicle. For the 11th century, the chronicle at Peterborough diverges from Parker's, and it has been speculated that a proto-"Kentish Chronicle", full of nationalistic and regionalistic interests, was used for these years; however, such a single source is speculative. The Peterborough copyists probably used multiple sources for their missing years, but the Dissolution of the Monasteries makes it impossible to be sure. Regardless, the entries for the 12th century to 1122 are a jumble of other chronicles' accounts, sharing half-entries with one source and half with another, moving from one source to another and then back to a previous one. This shifting back and forth raises, again, the vexatious possibility of a lost chronicle as a single, common source.It is after 1122 that the Peterborough manuscript becomes unique. Therefore, the document usually called The Peterborough Chronicle is divided into the "first continuation" and the "second continuation" from the time of the fire and the copying. The two continuations are sui generis both in terms of the information they impart, the style they employ, and their language. The first continuation covers 1122–1131. The second continuation runs from 1132–1154 and includes the reign of King Stephen.
The copied portion uses grammatical gender and inflections like in Old English, but there are discrepancies.
First continuation (1122–1131)
Although the second continuation holds the most importance, the first continuation has unique records of events in the Peterborough area and provides an insight into ordinary people's lives. The first continuation records the Conquest, the incursion of Sweyn of Denmark, and rumours of other turbulence about the throne. However, it has no evidence at all for Saxon opposition and rebellion against William and his sons. An arguably eyewitness account describes the burning of Peterborough Abbey itself, due to the drunkenness of the monks. It also covers ecclesiastical scandals, such as the Abbot of Glastonbury bringing in mercenaries to control his religious house. Further, there is a significant change in language from the previous late Old English that begins with the entry for the years 1122–1131, with mixtures of Old English and Middle English vocabulary and syntax.Both the first and second continuation authors have sympathy for the common man. As Bennett suggests, Peterborough is the one source for compassion of the laity found in contemporary accounts. The first continuation expresses as much outrage at the hanging of forty-four thieves in 1122, some of whom were innocent, as at the burning of the monastery at Gloucester. The monastic author suggests that taxes were too high, putting the impoverished villagers in a dilemma of stealing or starving. Therefore, the nobles were guilty of a double sin. First, they executed the innocent and used excessive cruelty with the guilty. Second, it was at least as sinful for the nobles to compel theft with their avarice as for the poor to steal for bread. When the Norman king, Henry I of England foisted his kinsman upon Peterborough as abbot, the chronicler protests at some length at the illegality and impiety of the appointment. He also mentions that the Wild Hunt was seen at the same time as the appointment, as an ill omen. When Henry was eventually removed by death, the monk again takes the position that this was divine remedy, for Henry had tried to make Peterborough part of the Cluniac Order and had attempted to have his own nephew be the next abbot, "oc Crist it ne uuolde".
The first continuation shows a major change in grammatical gender and inflections from how they were used in Old English. Though there are still 3 genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, several nouns seem to have been shuffled among the categories in a manner that can't be completely explained by a move towards natural gender or the gender of French nouns, as the inflections marking gender are re-purposed for other functions.
Second continuation (1132–1154)
The second, or final, continuation is remarkable for being in one authorial voice, and it relates the events of The Anarchy in England. Scholars speculate that the second continuation is dictated or written as the recollections of a single elderly monk. It is a highly moving account of torture, fear, confusion, and starvation.Henry I died in 1135, and Stephen and Matilda both had a claim to the throne. The monastic author describes the rebellion of the barons against Stephen, the escape of Matilda, and the tortures that the soldiers of the baronial powers inflicted upon the people. The author blames Stephen for the Anarchy for being "soft and good" when firmness and harshness were needed. When Stephen captured the rebelling barons, he let them go if they swore allegiance. According to the author,
The barons then attempted to raise money as quickly as they could. They needed money and manpower to build castles, and so they robbed everyone they met:
The monastic author sympathises with the average farmer and artisan and talks about the devastation suffered by the countryside. He is outraged by the accounts of torture he relates and laments,
Death and famine followed, as the farms were depleted and farmers murdered. If two or three riders came to a village, the monk said, everyone fled, for fear that they were robbers. Trade therefore came to a standstill, and those in want had no way to get supplies. Those travelling with money to purchase food would be robbed or killed along the way. The barons said that there was no God. The chronicler records that people said openly that Christ slept, along with His saints; he states that "this — and more than we can say — we suffered 19 winters for our sins."
After the account of The Anarchy, the chronicler goes on to church matters. He speaks of the abbot Martin, who replaced the illegitimate Henry, as a good abbot. Martin had a new roof put on the monastery and moved the monks into a new building. He also, according to the author, recovered certain monastic lands that had been previously held "by force" by noblemen. Which lands these are is unclear, but they had probably been claimed by the nobles through the practice of placing younger sons in monasteries, making and revoking gifts of land, and by some early form of chantry. The Chronicle ends with a new abbot entering upon the death of Martin, an abbot named William. This abbot presumably halted the writing of the Chronicle.
Grammatical gender is almost completely gone, though Jones notes some authors consider the word that to still function as a neuter definite article here.
Unique authorial voice
The two Peterborough continuations sympathise with the poor, and this makes them almost unique in Latin or English history. They also focus more on life outside of the abbey than other Chronicles. The general Chronicle is somewhat insular. While most versions note the national events, such as a progress of the king or a change in sovereign, discussion of the countryside around the monastery is limited. Portents and omens receive coverage, but rarely do the chroniclers discuss political alliances or the legalities of monastic rule. The monks who compiled the continuation at Peterborough were either consciously striking out in a new direction or continuing a type of chronicle that was confined to their own monastery. It does not seem likely that Peterborough was in any sense a lax or secular monastery, as the description of drunkenness causing the fire would not have made the abbey singular in the age.The continuations are also unique in their linguistic shifts. When copying from Winchester, they preserve the orthography and syntax of late Old English, and when they get to events for which they have no copy text the language abruptly changes to a newer form. Given that the loan would have taken place just before the continuation, the change in language reflects either a dramatic attempt at greater vernacular by the continuation authors or a significant and quick change in the language itself as Norman influences spread. Because the chronicle is in prose, the artificiality of verse form does not entail the preservation of linguistic archaisms, and historians of English can trace the beginnings of Middle English in these pages.