Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - Relationships Between The Manuscripts

Relationships Between The Manuscripts

The manuscripts are all thought to derive from a common original, but the connections between the texts are more complex than simple inheritance via copying. The diagram at right gives an overview of the relationships between the manuscripts. The following is a summary of the relationships that are known.

• was a copy of, made in Winchester, probably between 1001 and 1013.
• was used in the compilation of at Abingdon, in the mid-11th century. However, the scribe for also had access to another version, which has not survived.
• includes material from Bede's Ecclesiastical History and from a set of 8th-century Northumbrian annals and is thought to have been copied from a northern version that has not survived.
• has material that appears to derive from the same sources as but does not include some additions that appear only in, such as the Mercian Register. This manuscript was composed at the monastery in Peterborough, some time after a fire there in 1116 that probably destroyed their copy of the Chronicle; appears to have been created thereafter as a copy of a Kentish version, probably from Canterbury.
• appears to include material from the same Canterbury version that was used to create .
• Asser's Life of King Alfred, which was written in 893, includes a translation of the Chronicle's entries from 849 to 887. Only, of surviving manuscripts, could have been in existence by 893, but there are places where Asser departs from the text in, so it is possible that Asser used a version that has not survived.
• Æthelweard wrote a translation of the Chronicle into Latin in the late 10th century; the version he used probably came from the same branch in the tree of relationships that comes from.
• Asser's text agrees with and with Æthelweard's text in some places against the combined testimony of, and, implying that there is a common ancestor for the latter four manuscripts.
• At Abingdon, some time between 1120 and 1140, an unknown author wrote a Latin chronicle known as the Annals of St Neots. This work includes material from a copy of the Chronicle, but it is very difficult to tell which version because the annalist was selective about his use of the material. It may have been a northern recension, or a Latin derivative of that recension.

All the manuscripts described above share a chronological error between the years 756 and 845, but it is apparent that the composer of the Annals of St Neots was using a copy that did not have this error and which must have preceded them. Æthelweard's copy did have the chronological error but it had not lost a whole sentence from annal 885; all the surviving manuscripts have lost this sentence. Hence the error and the missing sentence must have been introduced in separate copying steps, implying that none of the surviving manuscripts are closer than two removes from the original version.