Preface

Summary

The History of Alfred of Beverley narrates the history of Britain from its supposed foundation by the Trojan Brutus down to the death of Henry I in 1135. The History of Alfred of Beverley is the more appropriate name for the Latin text which has become known, from its previous edition in 1716, as Alfred's Annals. The text, for its greater part, is not written in annalistic form but is comprised of self-contained chapters which each address a distinct narrative theme. Within the chapters, dating is predominantly supplied by regnal year.

Compiled over the years c.1148–c.1151, and at a time of crisis and schism in the church of York, the work was sparked by the appearance in c.1136 of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, and by the astonished reaction in literate circles of the time to that work. What appears to have been Alfred's original intention, to make excerpts of those parts of the work which did not ‘exceed the bounds of credibility’, developed into a more ambitious attempt to integrate Geoffrey's History into an existing understanding of Britain's early history, based largely on the accounts of classical authorities such as Orosius, Eutropius and Suetonius, and on Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica. The historian Henry of Huntingdon, a decade earlier, had written an epitome of Geoffrey's History, the Epistola ad Warinum, including it in copies of his Historia Anglorum (HA) which circulated from the early 1140s, but he inserted it only as a stand-alone piece. Henry made no attempt to revise the early sections of the HA in the light of Geoffrey's newly revealed history – an indication, perhaps, of misgivings about its veracity. Alfred is the first Insular chronicler attempting to do so, and his abridgement and general handling of the text therefore provides valuable insight into the very earliest reception to Geoffrey's History.

To assimilate the History of the Kings of Britain within existing historical understanding required its content to be significantly adapted. Alfred therefore reworks its two-thousand-year continuous narrative, dividing it into five distinct historical periods, designated the quinque status, and these occupy the first five chapters of the book.