Knighton's Chronicon - Continuator of Knighton's Chronicon

Continuator of Knighton's Chronicon

The Continuator of Knighton (or "Knighton's Continuator") was a supposed late 14th century continuator of Knighton's chronicle.

The Continuator's existence was first supposed by the nineteenth-century historian Walter Waddington Shirley, who noted a lengthy break in events described by the Chronicle, and concluded that the later section had been written by a different and unnamed author, commencing in 1377. Shirley also posited that the Continuator had been a foreigner of Lancastrian sympathies, though with little affection for the English language, who had managed to obtain a position in Leicester Abbey.

Shirley's theory was taken up by Joseph Rawson Lumby, a classicist and Hebraicist who edited Knighton's Chronicle in the 1880s for the Rolls Series. Despite some reservations about the Continuator's existence, Lumby also concluded a different author had written the post-1377 sections. His division of the Chronicle's authorship was followed by later authors, with the result that the Continuator was referenced in subsequent historical study footnotes of learned historians that followed him.

The existence of the Continuator was not questioned until 1957, when the historian Vivian Hunter Galbraith published an in-depth study of the Chronicle's chronology. In particular, he was able to prove that the section of the Chronicle covering later events, from 1377–95, was actually written before the earlier section, confirming Knighton's probable authorship of both sections. The current academic view agrees with Galbraith in that the Continuator most likely never existed, and Knighton wrote the entire Chronicle.