No independent copy of the annals survives, but they have been partially reconstructed from later sources that incorporated or drew on them.
Their authenticity is proved by their inclusion of material unlikely to have been invented by later chroniclers and astronomical observations that could only have been made by contemporaries.
[2] The York Annals were a continuation of the annals contained in book V, chapter 24 of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which covered the years from 60 BC to AD 731.
[3] About the same time, material from the York Annals entered the northern version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
The anonymous History of the Saxons and Angles after the Death of Bede, preserved by Roger of Howden, who copied it into his history, and the Chronicle of Melrose also contain material from the York Annals.