This chapter considers the maintenance of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Christ Church Canterbury in the first decade of the twelfth century, as well as the acquisition, adaptation, expansion and recopying of earlier manuscripts of the Chronicle contemporary with it. It argues those involved were of both English and foreign descent and worked with a knowledge of the template for vernacular annalistic writing laid down in King Alfred’s reign and developed over the succeeding 150 years. However, in their overt monastic chauvinism, length, use of first person pronouns and direct speech and disregard for chronological organisation, their additions, especially of documents, also anticipated developments in twelfth-century historiography. The Chronicle tradition in effect came to an end at Christ Church by the 1120s, elsewhere by the 1130s, a consequence of changes in the twelfth-century linguistic ecology, the success of Latin translations and, arguably, the innovations introduced by its early twelfth-century adapters.

The vernacularity of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can seem to isolate it from contemporary European history-writing and to invite literary interpretations which emphasize its preoccupation with ‘Englishness’. This chapter focuses on form and social networks at three key points in the keeping of the Chronicle: its inception in Alfred’s cosmopolitan court, Æthelweard’s late tenth-century Latin translation for his cousin Matilda, abbess of the Ottonian nunnery of Essen, and the bringing together of the Old English Orosius and the Chronicle in the mid-eleventh century to create an ambitious universal chronicle. The Chronicle emerges as embedded within the multilingual fabric of Europe, from Ireland to the Bosporus, and alert to the linguistic politics of history-writing across the Latin West.