Edward Hall was one of the leading historical writers of the early sixteenth century, a chronicler whose work has remained of great importance both as an eyewitness source for the events of Henry VIII's reign and as an early example of the development in the sixteenth century of an English vernacular tradition of historical writing. This tradition drew on its medieval chronicle antecedents but was also strongly influenced by humanist notions of the civic usefulness of history, of the historian's duty to criticize and evaluate his materials, and of the need to write about the past in a style that was plain and clear but also entertaining and persuasive. While retaining the annalistic framework of a medieval chronicle, Hall nevertheless provided an important bridge between the urban chronicles of his fifteenth-century predecessors and the humanist political histories of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Hall (or Halle...