The historical tradition associated with the abbey of St Albans was remarkable not only for its longevity – spanning a full four centuries – and for the authority of its reportage but also for the fact that more than once, and in fact often at critical periods, it carries the sustained voice of a single commentator. Matthew Paris (d. c. 1259) was a vocal contributor for more than thirty years; John Wheathampstead (d. 1465) continued his singular commentaries on the figures of the age from the minority of Henry vi until after the succession of Edward iv. Yet even their industry was exceeded by Thomas Walsingham (c.1340–c.1422), who, it would appear on the evidence of the surviving manuscripts, maintained a record of his own times over six decades, from the declining years of Edward iii until the sudden death of his great-grandson in the Bois-de-Boulogne. It is perhaps the scope of his narrative, an unrivalled guide to the Lancastrian revolution, which has made it the very first of the St Albans chronicles to be recovered from the Rolls Series transcripts and reconstituted with the critical apparatus of a modern edition. After many years of preparation, John Taylor, Wendy Childs and Leslie Watkiss, published the first, eighteen-year portion, from the time of the Good Parliament (1376) to Richard ii's campaign in Ireland (1394), under the Oxford Medieval Texts imprint in 2003. Now, after almost another decade, they provide the second, larger portion, in which Walsingham recounts the escalation of Richard ii's tyranny, the troubled years of his usurper, Henry, and the external conquests and internal challenges of his celebrated son.

The break in the chronicle is largely circumstantial. In 1394 Walsingham demitted his office of precentor, in which he had presided over the (re-)making of a central writing-room, and left St Albans for its dependency at Wymondham (Norfolk) to serve as its prior. Although returning to what was in all probability his home territory, it was an exile enforced when he and a number of senior St Albans men fell from the grace of the aged abbot Thomas de la Mare; it endured until the latter's death in September 1396. This hiatus in his St Albans career may have affected the redaction of the chronicle. Certainly the present editors are inclined to follow their predecessors in positioning manuscripts, and the recensions that they carry, either side of this frontier. Surely a secure understanding of their inter-relationship can come only with a systematic analysis of their palaeography, with reference to the whole corpus of St Albans manuscripts in this period (for which the careers of copyists are documented in some detail).

If the significance of this moment in the production of the chronicle remains unresolved here, this edition does focus clearly on the changing character of the narrative – and of the outlook of its compiler and his brethren – in these later years. Walsingham's early reportage had been shaped by Abbot de la Mare's personal affinities, to the Black Prince, to his widow and the guardians of the young Richard, and the opportunities that they afforded for the ready transmission of acta and dicta. De la Mare's successors could not match his personal network among the political nation and it is notable that in the narratives of Richard's last years, and of the reign of Henry, there is a greater reliance on the documentary record. Notwithstanding any change in its political stock, St Albans was still close to the centre of government and at the deposition, and in the difficult years of sedition that followed, was called upon variously as temporary court, chancery and prison. The preoccupations of the narrative in this period also shifted. The hostility to Gaunt which had so coloured Walsingham's earliest contribution to the chronicle had moderated before 1394 and the later narrative conveys a (largely) conformist Lancastrianism; only the scale of Henry v's ambitions in France awakens his critical sense, although it is less apparent in the Chronica maiora than in his self-contained chronicle of Normandy, Ypodigma Neustriae. These years are also marked by a concern for the challenges of the Church which is more consistent than it was before 1394. Walsingham had first responded to Wyclifism as an academic phenomenon, which was how his brethren had first confronted it as disputants in the schools, but now he was conscious of its wider threat to pastoral and social order. The local scene, it seems, transformed his view, as heterodox cells, conspirators and, finally, their fugitive captain, Oldcastle, appeared to encroach on the abbey and its liberty. He also renewed his case against the anticlericalism of the magnate class, first voiced when reporting the early years of Richard's majority, adding substance to those early suspicions with the vivid drama of Robert Waterton's curry-comb gesture (1406) and a digest of the ‘Disendowment bill’ (1410). At the same time, he kept a closer watch than before on the struggles of the schism, capturing detail, such as the address of the archbishop of Bordeaux (1412), which eluded his contemporaries.

The narrative of this period is also marked by a shift in prose style. Always expressive, at times splenetic, Walsingham's prose now also acquired a somewhat self-conscious literary quality: passages of (particularly) classical prose and verse were woven into his descriptions, especially in dramatic set pieces, such as the field of Agincourt, and deliberate archaisms were adopted, most notably in respect of the protagonists of the Anglo-French conflict. Walsingham's literary enthusiasm was as enduring, and productive, as his historical enterprise and the role of such rich and complex allusion in his contemporary reportage merits further examination. The present edition provides only the customary index of cited authorities.

In its distinguished, senior coadjutor, John Taylor, this edition can claim a direct link with a pivotal moment early in modern scholarship on the St Albans tradition: the post-Rolls revisionism of V. H. Galbraith. The mid twentieth-century magister of monastic historiography focused sharply on the faults of the Victorian transcripts and offered a new account of the descent of the narratives from the first continuators of Matthew Paris at the turn of the fourteenth century down to Walsingham's own contributions a century later. Perhaps Galbraith's most important work was to bring to general attention the recension of the chronicle preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford: ms Bodley 462, a variant account for the years 1406–20, which he published in 1937. This present edition (the latter portion of which incorporates the version of ms Bodley 462) is cast self-consciously in the Galbraithian mould. The title itself, which privileges the post-medieval appellation, recalls the 1937 volume. The discussion of the manuscript witnesses and the later development of narrative reaffirms Galbraith's analysis with only minimal alteration. Here the ‘programme’ for the production of greater and lesser chronicles in the mould of Matthew Paris remains an objective reality, notwithstanding the inconsistent testimony of the manuscripts. And, like his venerated tutor, Taylor, and his colleagues, have little concern to consider the context in which these codices and their texts arose, and the diverse authorial or editorial interventions which perhaps played a part in the way they are now. This second volume completes a project which has offered a sincere coda to a formative phase in modern criticism but it fails to adumbrate a new course through this rich and complex tradition.