Brut Chronicle

[4] The sheer number of copies that survive and its late-fourteenth century translation into the vernacular indicating the growth in common literacy;[5] it is considered "central" to the literary culture of England in the Late Middle Ages.

Originally a legendary chronicle written in Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth century (identified by the fact that some existing copies finish in 1272), the Brut described the settling of Britain by Brutus of Troy, son of Aeneas, and the reign of the Welsh Cadwalader.

[15] Similarly, there are vast differences in the quality of the surviving manuscripts, and Julia Marvin has suggested that this reflects their "diverse ownership and readership".

[16] A version produced in York in the later fourteenth century was based on official contemporary records, and contains, for example, an eye-witness account of the Good Parliament of 1376.

[4] From the fifteenth century there is "an amorphous, heterogenous group" of texts which are composed of individuals' notes and preliminary workings of various areas of the Brut.

[13] After the "massive scribal activity" that produced over 250 extant manuscripts (a "vast number for a medieval text"[6]), the Brut was the first chronicle printed in England.

As a result, according to Matheson, "it is no exaggeration to say that in the late Middle Ages in England the Brut was the standard historical account of British and English history".

Landowning gentry with a Middle English copy of the Brut include John Sulyard's father, who passed it on to Henry Bourchier, 2nd Earl of Essex's son Thomas.

John Warkworth of Peterhouse, Cambridge, owned a copy (which included the 'Warkworth's' Chronicle, named for him[26]), as did the religious houses St Bartholomew-the-Great and Dartford Priory, among others.

Matheson identifies a number of women owners and readers as well: Isabel Alen (niece of vicar William Trouthe), Alice Brice, Elizabeth Dawbne, and Dorothy Helbartun.

Davies for the Camden Society in 1856, and in 1879 James Gairdner published parts of it relating to the Hundred Years' War in his Historical Recollections of a London Citizen.