Extracts from various archives are found in such collections as RYMER’s Foedera of which the Record Commission’s edition in folio reaches just beyond the end of this period; WILKINS’S Concilia (1737), containing many extracts from episcopal registers and canons of councils; HADDAN and STUBBS’S Councils, vol. i. (for the thirteenth century Welsh Church); CHAMPOLLION-FIGEAC’S Lettres des Rois et des Reines d’Angleterre (2 vols., 1847, Doc.  Inedits); STUBBS’S Select Charters (Henry III. and Edward I.), and BEMONT’S excellent Chartes des Libertes anglaises in the Collection de Textes pour l’Etude et l’Enseignement de l’Histoire.  Equally useful is COSNEAU’S Grands Traites de la Guerre de Cent Ans also in the same Collection de Textes.  The Statutes of the Realm (vol. i., fol., 1810) contains the text of the laws and of the great charters of this period.

Chronicles, with all their deficiencies, must ever be largely used as sources of continuous historical narrative.  For the thirteenth century our chief reliance must still be placed upon the annals drawn up in various monasteries, some based upon little more than gossip or hearsay, others showing real efforts to acquire authentic information.  The greatest centre of historical composition in thirteenth-century England was the Abbey of St. Alban’s, whose chronicles form so important a series that they may appropriately be considered as a whole, before the other chroniclers are dealt with in approximately chronological order.  The fame of St. Alban’s as a school of history had its origin in the order of Abbot Simon (d. 1183) that the house should always appoint a special historiographer.  The first of these whose work is now extant is ROGER OF WENDOVER (d. 1236), whose Flores Historiarum (ed.  H.O.  Coxe, Engl.  Hist.  Soc., 1842, or ed.  Hewlett, Rolls Series, 1886-89—­this latter edition is unscholarly) becomes original in 1216 and remains a chief source, copious and interesting, if not always precise, until 1235.  On Wendover’s death, MATTHEW PARIS, who took the monastic habit in 1217, became the official St. Alban’s chronicler.  His great work, the Chronica Majora, is, up to 1235, little more than an expansion and embellishment of Wendover.  He re-edited Wendover’s work with a patriotic and anti-curialist bias quite alien to the spirit of the earlier writer, whose version should preferably be followed.  Paris’s book is a first-hand source from 1235 to 1259.  The narrative of the years 1254-1259 is considerably later in composition to the history of the period 1235-1253, since on reaching 1253 Paris devoted himself to an abridgment of what he had already written, called the Historia Minor.  On completing this he resumed his earlier book, and carried it on to the eve of his death in 1259, though he did not live to complete its final revision; that was the work of another monk who added a picture of his death-bed.