The annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were written and compiled by an unknown number of anonymous authors across a period extending from the late ninth century to the middle of the twelfth. As compilations, the various versions (ABCDEF) of the Chronicle tell a story across many years, but in a few places we find individual authors carefully crafting their contribution to create entries that more than simply record events of the passing years, instead developing themes and connections across a sustained trans-annual narrative. A striking example of this more crafted type of historical narrative in the Chronicle is found in the annals for the reign of King Æthelred the Unready. Æthelred succeeded his murdered brother Edward the Martyr to the throne as a teenager in 978. The internal tensions of Æthelred’s early reign would give way to a growing national crisis caused by viking incursions in the 990s, and then a full-scale invasion led by the Danish king Swein. This culminated in total English defeat in 1016, the year of Æthelred’s death, and the accession of the Dane Cnut as England’s sole ruler.
The block of annals from c. 983 to c. 1023 is substantially shared by the C, D and E versions of the Chronicle; these annals were originally crafted as a continuous narrative by a single author (who may have been reworking a lost source) probably soon after the accession of Cnut in 1016. The precise points at which these accounts join and separate are uncertain; their common material may begin as late as 991 (before which divergences in tone are noticeable), and end as early as 1017 (when differences among the annals again become apparent).
Simon Keynes has pointed out that where Alfred the Great was fortunate in having the record of his reign created by chroniclers who were ‘loyal to their king and sympathetic to his interests’, Æthelred was not so lucky. The annals of his reign, written soon after his death in 1016, show a highly personalised style with no interest in objectivity, but rather enthusiastically commenting on events. From the 990s the Æthelredian annals are characterized by new stylistic features, with a censorious tone imputing motives to historical figures whose deeds are analysed in detail. From 991 the tone of the annals is personally engaged in a way that offers readers an emotional perspective on events, though to what extent the annalist was an eyewitness of the action described is unclear. The reader is provided with contextualizing descriptions enlivening the narrative, expressed in syntax that is complex and flexible, with emotive adjectives and adverbs, and a vocabulary employing a wide register, including the colloquial and familiar beside an elevated poetic mode, often with a homiletic inflection. Rhythmical passages in Archbishop Wulfstan’s style, and quite possibly written by him, are found across these annals, often for climactic effect; rhyme and alliteration add emphasis. The annalist’s feelings about the decades-long story being told are never in doubt and expressed with rhetorical richness. Across the block of annals, the narrative includes forward glances and a sense of continuity, knitting them together as a whole.
Even in those entries for Æthelred’s reign employing the terse style of the common stock moral lessons are often on offer. The short annal in CDE986 employs the strategy of providing muted commentary on divine punishment by juxtaposing certain events, implying human cause and divine effect (C): Her se cyning fordyde þæt bisceoprice æt Hrofeceastre. Her com ærest se micla yrfcwealm on Angelcyn (‘In this year the king laid waste the diocese of Rochester. In this year the great murrain first occurred in England’). The annalist’s ‘first’ indicates retrospective writing, and with this the implicit causal association of the recurrent cattle plague (murrain) with Æthelred’s attack on Rochester. The author believes in God’s direct intervention in human affairs, implying appropriate moral lessons.
From annal 991, the commentary becomes more forthright. The chronicler does not hesitate to apportion blame for military defeats; a recurrent focus of criticism is Ealdorman Ælfric of Hampshire. In annal 992 Ælfric is blamed for the Danish fleet’s escape near London, when the ealdorman warned the enemy on the eve of battle, and himself absconded by night ‘to his own great disgrace’. Annal 1003 again describes the ealdorman’s failure of leadership, when he was to lead an army assembled in Hampshire and Wiltshire (C text):
Þa sceolde se ealdorman Ælfric lædan þa fyrde, ac he teah ða forð his ealdan wrencas sona swa hi wæron swa gehende þæt ægðer here on oþerne hawede. Þa gebræd he hine seocne 7 ongan hine brecan to spiwenne 7 cwæð þæt he gesicled wære 7 swa þæt folc becyrde þæt he lædan sceolde, swa hit gecweden ys, þonne se heretoga wacað þonne bið eall se here swiðe gehindrad.
[Then Ealdorman Ælfric was to lead the army, but he was up to his old tricks. As soon as they were so close that each army looked on the other, he pretended to be sick, and began retching to vomit, and said that he was taken ill, and thus betrayed the people whom he ought to have led, as the saying goes: when the general weakens then the whole army is greatly hindered.]
Ealdorman Ælfric becomes more than a scapegoat for English failure and is transformed into an exemplum demonstrating the truth of folk wisdom epitomised in the otherwise unknown alliterating proverb. The chronicler at times abandons annalistic detail in favour of a general, mostly bleak, assessment of the course of events, as in annal 998 (C):
7 man oft fyrde ongean hi gaderede, ac sona swa hi togædere gan sceoldan þonne wearð þær æfre ðuruh sum þing fleam astiht, 7 æfre hi æt ende sige ahton
[and the English army was often assembled against them, but as soon as they were to have joined battle, a flight was always instigated by some means, and always the enemy had the victory in the end.]
The chronicler’s energetic and emotive style is fully on display in annal 999, which narrates a pattern of English military collapse when faced by Danish pressure. The Danish fleet advances up the Thames and the Medway to Rochester (C):
7 com þa seo centisce fyrd þar ongean, 7 hi ða þær fæste togædere fengon, ac wala þæt hi to raðe bugon 7 flugon, 7 þa Deniscan ahton wælstowe geweald 7 namon þa hors 7 ridan swa hwider swa hi sylf woldon 7 forneah ealle West Kentingas fordydon 7 forheregodon.
[and the Kentish levy came against them there, and they then joined battle stoutly; but alas! they too soon turned and fled, and the Danes had control of the battlefield. And they then seized horses and rode wherever they pleased, and destroyed and ravaged almost all West Kent.]
The annalistic style gives way to the homiletic, lamenting English failures. In the telling, all initiative and movement belong to the Danes, developing a sense of inevitable decline on the English side from weakness into paralysis. The familiar Chronicle style of coordination (and … and … and) is used with heightened effect to convey the inexorability of the Danish advance. The relentless syntax aligns style with meaning—the Danes advance, and the English retreat.
After commenting on the disastrous English defeat at the Battle of Ashingdon in annal 1016, where Ealdorman Eadric ‘betrayed his royal lord and all the English people’ by fleeing the battle with the Magesæte (the men of Herefordshire and south Shropshire), this authorial voice largely falls away, though this does not necessarily imply the same author penned no further annals. Up to 1023 the C, D and E versions provide a largely shared factual account of the early years of Cnut’s reign, though these diverge increasingly in content. The shared material of the three versions ends after 1023, the year of the death of Archbishop Wulfstan of York. Their resumed sharing in annals from the later 1030s onwards reflects different sources and the work of new authors.
Select Bibliography
Editions and Translations
Cubbin, G. P., ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, 6, MS D (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996).
Irvine, Susan, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, 7, MS E (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004).
O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, 5, MS C (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001).
Swanton, Michael, trans., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (Orion, 2000).
Whitelock, Dorothy, Susie I. Tucker and David C. Douglas. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A revised translation (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961).
Whitelock, Dorothy. English Historical Documents, Volume 1, c. 500–1042, 2nd ed. (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979).
Critical Reading
Anlezark, Daniel. Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 2025).
——. ‘Wulfstan and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ (forthcoming).
Clark, Cecily. ‘The Narrative Mode of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle before the Conquest’, in England before the Conquest: Studies Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 215–35.
Jorgensen, Alice. ‘Rewriting the Æthelredian Chronicle: Narrative Style and Identity in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS F’, in Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Language, Literature, History, ed. Alice Jorgensen, Studies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 113–38.
Keynes, Simon. ‘The Declining Reputation of King Æthelred the Unready’, Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1978), pp. 227–53.
——. ‘A Tale of Two Kings: Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 36, 5th series (1986), 195–217.
Konshuh, Courtnay. ‘Anræd in their Unræd: The Æthelredian Annals (983-1016) and their Presentation of King and Advisors’, English Studies 97 (2016), 140–62.
McIntosh, Angus. ‘Wulfstan’s Prose’, in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E. G. Stanley (Oxford, 1990), pp. 111–44.
Stafford, Pauline. ‘The Reign of Æthelred II, a Study in the Limitations on Royal Policy and Action’, in Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, ed. David Hill, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 59 (Oxford: B.A.R., 1978), pp. 15–46.
——. After Alfred: Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and Chroniclers, 900–1150 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Wilcox, Jonathan. ‘Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos as Political Performance: 16 February 1014 and Beyond’, in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, ed. Matthew Townend (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 375–96.
About the author
Daniel Anlezark is the McCaughey Professor of Early English Literature and Language at the University of Sydney. He has published widely on Old English literature with particular interests in biblical poetry and Alfredian prose. He is the author of Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 2025).