The Chronicles Of Crowland Abbey

By Author: Peter King
Total Articles: 73
Comment this article

120 was almost certainly Alice Drayton, not Jane Stonor. But Kingsford was not to guess that the husband who refused to disobey the queen's commandment might have been the same Richard Drayton who was a squire in the service of Margaret of Anjou in 1452-1453. Without in any way belittling Kingsford's extensive contributions to fifteenth-and sixteenth-century studies, it remains true that Cartier Replica Watches he misled social historians into believing that William Harleston had advised William Stonor not to 'over-wish' nor 'over-build' himself. His conclusions about two of the chronicles that he examined in English Historical Literature also had long-lasting effects.

One of these was 'the second continuation' of the chronicles of Crowland Abbey. Kingsford devoted three pages to discussing the possible author, to whom he attributed at least one opinion that the chronicler did not, in fact, present as his own. The second continuator did not say that the previous chronicler (the 'first' continuator) 'knew nothing of profane affairs': he was explaining ...
... his predecessor's stated reasons for leaving out some matters, 'as much from religious devotion, which customarily ignores secular affairs, as from the short time available for study'. Kingsford's superficial impression that '[the author] tells us that he completed the writing of his history in ten days, finishing it on April 30, I486' has since been corrected. Subsequent writers have also pointed out that where Kingsford said that '[the author] describes himself as one of the King's Counsellors, and a Doctor of Canon Law, who in the summer of 1471 was entrusted with a mission to Charles the Bold to negotiate an alliance', and concluded that the Continuator 'was certainly in the King's service' in 1471, the identification is Replica Cartier not in the body of the text but has been provided by a marginal annotation. Influential, however, have been Kingsford's statements that 'the [chronicler's] accounts of events at court read like the work of an eyewitness.

So also the history of what took place at London in the summer of 1483 seems to be written from personal knowledge. The Chronicle is just the kind of work which we might expect to have been written down from memory by a well-informed man of affairs'. 'When he relates that men of experience wondered how one who was so addicted to luxury and licence [as Edward IV] should have shown himself so capable in affairs, he no doubt expresses his own opinion'; 'when he states that [in May 1483] the more prudent members of the Council were opposed to the claims of the Woodvilles, there can be no doubt that he expresses a judgment which he helped to form'.