The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.  Copies of these annals, differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere.  The yearly entries are mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated.  The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries.  Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster.  One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish king Cnut was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely.

  Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely
  Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by;
  Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land. 
  And here we thes muneches sang.

  Merrily sung the monks in Ely
  When King Canute rowed by. 
  ’Row boys, nearer the land,
  And let us hear these monks’ song.’

It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold outlaw Hereward, “the last of the English,” held out for some years against the conqueror.  And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burgh or Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead), that the chronicle was continued nearly a century after the Conquest, breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen’s death.  Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, “a very stern man,” and the entry in the chronicle for 1070 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered.  The English in the later portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical Anglo-Saxon.  It is a most valuable historical monument, and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of William the Conquerer put down in the year of his death (1086) by one who had “looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court.”  “He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet....Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will....  Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt.  He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he should be blinded.  As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father.”