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This article reconsiders the value of ‘shorter’ chronicles written in fourteenth-century England through a case study of the most popular of these, the Cronica bona et compendiosa, which survives in more manuscripts than most of the chronicles frequently used in scholarship. It examines the text’s authorship and narrative to show what it can reveal about history writing and ideas of the past, especially as they relate to medieval readers. It demonstrates the text’s influence on contemporary writers by showing how it was slightly adapted by the important chronicler Henry Knighton, which use has so far gone unnoticed. This article also includes an appendix listing twenty-three ‘shorter’ histories and their manuscripts, nearly all of which have not hitherto been identified.
hindsight cannot be made against Henry Knighton, who died about 1396, the year when his chronicle finally petered out. 25 Knighton was a canon of the Augustinian abbey of St Mary in the Meadows, Leicester, from at least 1363. In his later years he went blind and his chronicle effectively ends in 1392. Leicester was dominated by the house of Lancaster, whose castle was an important centre for its
– particularly agricultural wages – soaring. Customary labour services thus became, almost overnight, a more than usually valuable asset for lords with land to cultivate; and an asset which was carefully protected in the ordinance of labourers [ 98 ]. In remitting labour services lords were making a very explicit admission of weakness. The chronicler Henry Knighton was absolutely clear
: Bristol was a favoured, and plausible, candidate; Melcombe (now part of Weymouth) was another; Henry Knighton preferred Southampton [ 21 ]. The difference hardly matters. By this date the plague was spreading on several fronts and these ports may well have been affected more or less simultaneously. The plague raged in their hinterland throughout the autumn and winter. By autumn it
people who had, after the failure of the rebellion of Madog ap Llywelyn in 1294, started to live as Englishmen, gather treasure, and fear the loss of their goods. This was in spite of the fact that his main source was Gerald’s itinerary and description. 7 One sign of this is, in his description of Ireland, a reference to the idea that both Irish and Welsh old women transform themselves into hares to suck the milk of their neighbours. 8 Later historians borrowed heavily from Higden, but often differ from his emphases. Henry Knighton was more
the Power of the Pope , and replace it, within a matter of months, with the defamatory ‘accursed deceiver’ is a vivid indication of how suddenly scholarly opinion shifted. 13 But it would seem that condemnation and academic estrangement, whilst dealing Wyclif a difficult blow, did not entirely overshadow the perception of his earlier brilliance or his later sacrifices. The contemporary Augustinian chronicler Henry Knighton (d. ca. 1396), before carefully enumerating Wyclif’s heretical opinions, chose to describe him as ‘the most eminent doctor of theology in his
. 21. The plague according to Henry Knighton Knighton was an Augustinian canon of Leicester, who produced his chronicle in the early 1390s. He died in c. 1396. J. R. Lumby (ed), Chronicon Henrici Knighton vel Cnitthon monachi Leycestrensis , 2 vols, Rolls Series
heretical, and several of the opinions attributed to him echo those propositions quite precisely. This account of Swinderby’s activities in Leicester comes from the chronicle of Henry Knighton, a canon of the abbey there, and an important (if hostile) source for the early history of Wycliffism. After Swinderby had been forced to leave Coventry, Knighton has nothing more to say about him, but in other sources he turns up again in
pilgrimages of de Deguileville and Dante, respectively. Many of the chroniclers who wrote about the so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 seem to have had this convention in mind.16 In these chronicles, interrupted pilgrimages play 202 Shayne Aaron Legassie a conspicuous role. Henry Knighton mentions that the rebels not only freed prisoners in jails but also compelled pilgrims (peregrinos) to join their ranks.17 Thomas Walsingham accords the disruption of pilgrimage a more prominent place, accusing the inciters of the rebellion in Kent of the following
This account by Henry Knighton immediately precedes his description of the plague [21] and readers were presumably expected to see a causal connection. J. R. Lumby (ed) , Chronicon Henrici Knighton vel Cnitthon monachi Leycestrensis, 2 vols, Rolls Series, 1889-95, II, pp. 57