Verum ea, quae temporum distinctione latius digesta sunt, ob memoriam conseruandam breuiter recapitulari placuit.

Across more than 250 years from the later ninth century to the mid-1150s, the annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were authored and compiled, copied and augmented, collated and deleted, in a vast collective endeavour of remembering English history. These annals were first created at a moment when viking raiders and settlers were remaking the political map of England. They were copied and extended across the following centuries: as a new English kingdom extended its power in Britain across the tenth century; when this fell into Danish hands at the beginning of the eleventh century; was then conquered by the Normans after the Battle of Hastings in 1066; and into the twelfth century until a moment of relative peace after the anarchy of civil war during the reign of King Stephen and the accession of Henry II in 1054, the date of the Chronicles’ last entry. Some of the scribes involved in the ongoing enterprise of copying the annals were probably also makers and authors of the Chronicles, while some borrowed and revised the work of others. Across more than two-and-a-half centuries commitment to the Chronicle would wax and wane; it is difficult to know whose interests drove the ongoing work of chronicling, but some degree of patronage, ecclesiastical or lay, is likely, especially at the moment of the Chronicle's genesis.