The Second Continuation

By Author: Henter White
Total Articles: 73
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Kingsford was strongly inclined to suggest that the mysterious author was Piers Curteys, who, like the supposed chronicler, 'was in the service of Edward IV till his death, was present in London at the time of Richard's usurpation, and went into retirement till after Bosworth'; 'The coincidences in the careers of Curteys and the Chronicler are sufficiently curious. But the difficulties in the way of identifying them are great. Therefore the Continuation of the Croyland Chronicle must be left anonymous'. That note of uncertainty proved a challenge to the many scholars (including the present writer) who have been led into a wild goose chase after the well-informed man of Replica Breitling affairs who might have provided the monks of Crowland with a continuation of their existing chronicles.

All these endeavors depended upon Kingsford's assumption that the author must have been an outsider, because 'It is curious that the author of a third continuation, who was apparently a monk at Croyland in 1489 [sic, for I486], does not seem to have known ...
... who the second continuator was; this suggests that the second writer [read, presumably, either 'first writer', or 'second continuator'] of 1486 was not a monk'. The text that has survived solely in the transcript made for Fulman shows, however, that the third continuator's remark did not apply to the second continuator. One of the communities updated the narrative, saying that 'the aforesaid writer' had ended his work with the death of Richard, because it is usual, in writing history, to remain silent about the actions of living people. It should only be added that Henry VII had been crowned on 30 October 1485, and had married Elizabeth of York on 18 January 1486, but an insurrection arose in the north immediately after Easter.46 The 'third continuator' then disagreed with Breitling Replica Watches the premise of his fellow monk (which nowhere occurs in the Second Continuation), saying that 'although the immediately preceding narrator of events, never mind who he be, had stopped his work, not wishing to continue for the reasons that he gives; I, on the other hand, have set an example to those who follow by recording further events in our accustomed manner. As the text has come down to us, at least, the immediate superioris descriptor was not the second continuator. More nostro also recalls the significant statement by the first continuator that much information about earlier times had been lost, except for a few records written quibusdam senioribus nostris, not in the form of any coherent history, but just at intervals as new things occurred over the years. Such seems to have been the case with the various additions entered after the text of the Second Continuation by monks who were concerned to keep the records up to date.

The 'second continuator' was certainly a skilful and well-informed author, who could draw upon good sources. It becomes entirely explicable that he wove into his 'secular history' those periodic accounts of local events under Crowland's successive abbots that Kingsford dismissed with a casual reference to 'the occasional insertion of matter relating to Croyland' when the Second Continuation is seen to have been the work, not of Kingsford's postulated outsider, but of one of Crowland's well-educated senior monks. A possibility is Richard Cambridge, OSB, a Cambridge graduate who succeeded as prior in November 1485.