The great majority of the common stock annals up to c.892 were written as simple and ostensibly objective records of important events in either the history of Britain, early Christianity or the English people. These annals vary greatly in length, but they mostly share the same brief style, narrating events in straightforward syntax, with only the rare use of adjectives or adverbs, or the development of any relationship between events in terms of cause and effect. This does not mean that they do not tell a story or stories, though even their wider narrative almost always prioritizes the recording of events over an interrogation of the role of personality, motivation or causation within or across them. Nevertheless, even among the briefest annals the choice to include certain events while ignoring others reflects a range of authorial assumptions about their historical and ideological significance, in such a way that all the entries contribute to the common stock annals’ overarching narrative. Nevertheless, elements of more reflective historical writing are not entirely absent, and occasionally emerge in the few longer annals among the common stock. Many of these variations can be identified with the change of authorship between the first compiler and the revising chronicler described in the preceding chapter.

A consistent trend towards more detailed entries begins with the annal for 825 (A(B)CDE823), though these are generally written in the same terse style as shorter entries.