9 - Networks of Chronicle Writing in Western Britain: the Case of Worcester and Wales

Summary

Perhaps more than most of the other monastic chronicles produced in medieval England, those from Worcester cathedral priory demonstrate sustained interest in Wales and Welsh events. The chronicles produced at Worcester, particularly the Chronica Chronicarum (hereafter CC) and later the fourteenth-century Annals of Worcester, demonstrate extensive knowledge of Welsh politics and events, some dependent on Welsh written sources, and others reporting independently of the extant Welsh Latin and vernacular chronicles. Historical writing from medieval Worcester and its textual connections to Welsh chronicles provide evidence for a monastic network of communication that spanned the Welsh marches and the conquest lordships and independent kingdoms of North and South Wales. This network was able to uphold a healthy exchange of written sources transmitted through the medium of Latin. The following chapter considers evidence for textual connections between Worcester and Welsh centres producing chronicles. First, I analyse the use of Welsh sources and knowledge of Welsh events on the part of CC and the Annals of Worcester. Then I speculate about how textual contact may have occurred, whether through movement of monastic personnel, information spread by newsletter, or some other means. Finally, I evaluate evidence for Welsh use of Worcester sources in Latin chronicling from medieval Wales. These examples provide evidence for transmission patterns based on geography and political interest on the part of monasteries of the West Midlands and South Wales.

Before the discussion of the evidence for CC 's use of Welsh sources, it is useful to provide an overview of the corpus of Welsh chronicles from the period, which survive in both Welsh and Latin. These include the Breviate Chronicle and the Cottonian Chronicle (the B- and C-texts of Annales Cambriae, respectively; both in manuscripts written in the second half of the thirteenth century), both written in Latin and extant in one independent medieval manuscript each, and three related versions of Brut y Tywysogyon (‘History of the Princes’), translated into Middle Welsh from Latin. I will address each briefly in turn.

The Breviate Chronicle (extant in TNA, E 164/1, fols. 1r– 13r, s. xiii/xiv) was probably written at Neath, a Cistercian abbey in Glamorgan. The chronicle, which advances to the year 1286, was compiled in the second half of the thirteenth century using annals from several different sources, including annals from Whitland and Strata Florida Abbey.