may be noted that C is strongly anti-Godwinist, while E is equally pro-Godwinist, D occupying an intermediate position.  C extends to 1066, where it ends abruptly, and probably mutilated.  D ends at 1079 and is certainly mutilated.  In its later history D is associated with some place in the diocese of Worcester, probably Evesham.  In its present form D is a comparatively late MS., none of it probably much earlier, and some of it later, than 1100.  In the case of entries in the earlier part of the chronicles, which are peculiar to D, we cannot exclude the possibility that they may be late interpolations.  E is continued to 1154.  In its present form it is unquestionably a Peterborough book.  The earlier part is full of Peterborough interpolations, to which place many of the later entries also refer.  But (apart from the interpolations) it is only the entries after 1121, where the first hand in the MS. ends, which were actually composed at Peterborough.  The section 1023-1067 certainly, and possibly also the section 1068-1121, was composed at St. Augustine’s, Canterbury; and the former is of extreme interest and value, the writer being in close contact with the events which he describes.  The later parts of E show a great degeneration in language, and a querulous tone due to the sufferings of the native population under the harsh Norman rule; “but our debt to it is inestimable; and we can hardly measure what the loss to English history would have been, if it had not been written; or if, having been written, it had, like so many another English chronicle, been lost.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY.—­The above account is based on the introduction in vol. ii. of the Rev. C. Plummer’s edition of Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel (Clarendon Press, 1892, 1899); to which the student may be referred for detailed arguments.  The editio princeps of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was by Abraham Wheloc, professor of Arabic at Cambridge, where the work was printed (1643-1644).  It was based mainly on the MS. called G above, and is the chief source of our knowledge of that MS. which perished, all but three leaves, in the Cottonian fire of 1723.  Edmund Gibson of Queen’s College, Oxford, afterwards bishop of London, published an edition in 1692.  He used Wheloc’s edition, and E, with collations or transcripts of B and F. Both Wheloc and Gibson give Latin translations.  In 1823 appeared an edition by Dr. Ingram, of Trinity College, Oxford, with an English translation.  Besides A, B, E, F, Ingram used C and D for the first time.  But both he and Gibson made the fatal error of trying to combine the disparate materials contained in the various chronicles in a single text.  An improvement in this respect is seen in the edition made by Richard Price (d. 1833) for the first (and only) volume of Monumenta Historica Britannica (folio 1848).  There is still, however, too much conflation, and owing to the plan of the volume, the edition only extends to 1066.  A translation is appended.  In 1861 appeared Benjamin