Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 10

Scholars have long recognized that the earliest texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have not survived but 'The Abingdon Chronicle' edited here from British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B.i represents the first published attempt to reconstruct the textual source of several of the most important extant manuscripts in the Chronicle tradition (including MSS B C D and E) and to define as clearly as possible the contribution of Abingdon Abbey to its development. In his extensive detailed introduction Professor Conner explains why MS Cotton Tiberius B.i provides the best base text for this reconstruction and breaks into logical groupings or `fragments' the series of annals he find there. He then develops the textual history of each fragment separately and from that work creates an edition of Abingdon's contribution to the most significant historiographical enterprise in pre-Conquest England. He also offers an alternative theory arguing against current thinking for the relationship between MSS B and C; locates evidence for a lost Abingdon `house tradition' in the Abbey's twelfth-century cartularies; and suggests that the phenomenon of poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle owes its origin and development to the efforts of Abingdon's tenth- and eleventh-century chroniclers. Professor PATRICK W. CONNER teaches in the Department of English West Virginia University.