From the start the fourteenth century was filled with crisis and change, from plague to rebellion, amid political conflict and increasing literacy. Historical writing changed accordingly, although new stable forms appeared in the Prose Brut and Higden’s Polychronicon. Elsewhere, more innovative chronicles in French and Latin jostled with new kinds of English ones, for and by secular as well as clerical readers and writers. This chapter focuses on three from the century’s first half: Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle, Geoffrey le Baker’s Chronica, and Thomas Gray’s Scalachronica. Some historical writing, however, clung to antiquated forms and outlooks down to the century’s end, when both the century’s social conflicts and historiographical diversities came to a head in the 1381 Rebellion. That revolt can best be appreciated against the earlier decades rather than as an abrupt start of major change, and it was with long familiarity with the rebels’ fundamental (and already partly successful) challenges that Thomas Walsingham denounced them using the most traditional monastic genres he could muster.

Medieval historiography in Britain was written in all of the languages of the island. Latin and vernacular texts engaged in sophisticated intertextual dialogues throughout the period. This essay considers how vernacular history writing deployed its vernacularity to make political and imaginative interventions in the dominant traditions of historiography. The essay surveys how the Middle English chronicles of Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng, and the Short Chronicle, and the Anglo-Norman chronicles of Piers Langtoft and Nicholas Trevet engaged with ideas of intertextuality, authority, citation, and translation in order to craft narratives of insular history often at odds with each other.