Chronicle D: Crossing Conquest

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the manuscript and last stages of Chronicle D, the relationship of work on D to 1066 and the problem of where and for whom this chronicle’s last stages were written. It covers the complex palaeography and layout of Chronicle D, and the difficulties caused by its loss of several folios and their later replacement. The chapter argues that the core of D is pre-1066, in large part probably produced in the 1040s, but that much copying and some rewriting occurred post-1066. Key English survivors are central to Chronicle D—descendants of the pre-1066 dynasty, Edgar the ætheling and his sister Margaret, who married the Scottish king; Ealdred, last Anglo-Saxon archbishop of York; bishops of Durham in retirement at Peterborough; and Earl Waltheof. No single home is suggested for Chronicle D’s last stages whose writing may reflect the diaspora of these pre-1066 survivors.