4 - Beyond the Chronicle: the perspective of house history

Summary

The Second Continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle ends on a note of hope and victory, with a new king, Henry II, on the throne of England, and a new abbot, William of Waterville, installed at Peterborough abbey. For the history of the abbey, as well as for historiography at the centre, this is a moment of equilibrium. In the text itself, the new abbot represents the possibility of a better future for the abbey, after it has recovered from the effects of internal and political upheavals, just as Henry II represents the same for the war-torn country. From a wider, and more ideological perspective, the vernacular and Latin articulations of abbey history are poised in harmonious co-existence, with the Latin documentation providing part of the material that was inserted in the Chronicle, and the vernacular text revalidating their existence. The conclusion of the Peterborough Chronicle marks the end of a period that simultaneously witnessed the writing of the vernacular Chronicle, the construction of the Latin Relatio Heddae, and its further incorporation into the Liber Niger, the abbey's first complete cartulary. But the narrative of the abbey does not remain poised at this point forever. In the second half of the twelfth century, very soon after the second phase of the Peterborough Chronicle, the narrative of abbey history and fortunes is documented in another extended house-history in Latin. Like the vernacular text which preceded it, this narrative draws heavily on the documents contained in the Relatio Heddae and the Liber Niger to convey an ideologically motivated account of the abbey's glorious past, but also made use of later and more contemporary documentation not used by the two compilers of the Chronicle. This process of accretion continues well into the thirteenth century, when the composite body of earlier charters and documentation, supplemented with updated versions of this late twelfth-century Latin house-history, are compiled in the Peterborough cartularies of Robert of Swaffham and Walter of Whittlesey.