Walter of Coventry and the Barnwell Chronicle

Abstract

The so-called Barnwell chronicle contains “the best, the fullest and most sophisticated annals” written in England for the years 1202–25. Bishop Stubbs made its reputation, declaring it to be “one of the most valuable contributions in existence to the history of that eventful period,” and those who have used it since agree; J. C. Holt, for instance, thinks it is the “most perceptive” narrative source. Because the text has never been printed from the “Barnwell” manuscript, the chronicle is better known from theMemoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria, which reproduces these annals almost verbatim. But their origin remains shrouded in mystery. Although many questions have been raised about them, the essential one is: Where were they written? To answer that question, one must first determine the interrelationship of the existing manuscripts that contain the text; then one can try to establish the provenance of the oldest manuscript and hence of the chronicle itself. Stubbs, of course, attempted to do just that, but with insufficient evidence and little concern for the canons of textual criticism. The present study will demonstrate that the “Barnwell” manuscript is in fact not the earliest; instead, it derives from British Library MS Add. 35,168, which was written at Crowland Abbey and which was probably copied from a lost original that was both composed and written at Peterborough.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.