Peterborough Chronicle

Typically the chronicles began with the birth of Christ, went through Biblical and Roman history, then continued to the present.

When William the Conqueror took England and Anglo-Norman became the official language, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles generally ceased.

The Peterborough copyists probably used multiple sources for their missing years, but the Dissolution of the Monasteries makes it impossible to be sure.

This shifting back and forth raises, again, the vexatious possibility of a lost chronicle as a single, common source.

An arguably eyewitness account describes the burning of Peterborough Abbey itself, due to the drunkenness of the monks.

It also covers ecclesiastical scandals, such as the Abbot of Glastonbury bringing in mercenaries to control his religious house.

The first continuation expresses as much outrage at the hanging of forty-four thieves in 1122, some of whom were innocent, as at the burning of the monastery at Gloucester.

The monastic author suggests that taxes were too high, putting the impoverished villagers in a dilemma of stealing or starving.

The monastic author describes the rebellion of the barons against Stephen, the escape of Matilda, and the tortures that the soldiers of the baronial powers inflicted upon the people.

He is outraged by the accounts of torture he relates and laments, Death and famine followed, as the farms were depleted and farmers murdered.

The chronicler records that people said openly that Christ slept, along with His saints; he states that "this — and more than we can say — we suffered 19 winters for our sins."

Grammatical gender is almost completely gone, though Jones notes some authors consider the word that to still function as a neuter definite article here.

While most versions note the national events, such as a progress of the king or a change in sovereign, discussion of the countryside around the monastery is limited.

Portents and omens receive coverage, but rarely do the chroniclers discuss political alliances (as the author of the second continuation does with his denunciation of the bishops who were allied with Matilda) or the legalities of monastic rule (as the author of the first continuation does in his lament over Abbot Henry).

It does not seem likely that Peterborough was in any sense a lax or secular monastery, as the description of drunkenness causing the fire would not have made the abbey singular in the age.

It was donated to the library by William Laud, who was then Chancellor of Oxford University as well as Archbishop of Canterbury, on 28 June 1639.

Laud included the manuscript together with a number of other documents, part of the third of a series of donations he made to the library in the years leading up to the English Civil War.