Page:The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon.djvu/24

 a version of his poems suited to the taste of modem times.

The chronology of the History is very defective. During the Saxon period, it is based on the reigns of the kings of Wessex, with reference to which the series of events in the other kingdoms of the Heptarchy is calculated, and the whole is adapted rather unsatisfactorily to the reckoning of the Saxon Chronicle. This cumbrous system occasions great confusion. His subsequent chronological references are scanty and erroneous. Some of the errors are pointed out in the notes, and the dates have been generally rectified from the Saxon Chronicle, and, when that fails, from later authorities. The subject is fully discussed in the Preface to the "Monumenta Historica Britannica," and the introductory remarks on the chronology of the medieval historians prefixed to that work.

"The Acts of King Stephen," now first translated into English, forms an appropriate sequel to Henry of Huntingdon's History. Nothing is known of the anonymous author of this valuable fragment; for such it is, time and neglect having so injured the only MS. copy extant, that several portions of the narrative are obliterated, and the concluding pages entirely lost. The work, however, bears internal evidence of having been written by an author contemporaneous with the events related, an eye-witness of many of them, and not only present at the councils where affairs of state were debated, but privy to the king's most secret designs and springs of action. As he also appears to have been an ecclesiastic, it has been conjectured that he was the king's confessor. The ancient MS. referred to, preserved in the library of the duke-bishop of Laon, was brought to the notice of Duchesne, who printed it in his collection of the Norman Historians, published at Paris in the year 1619: it has been lately republished by the Historical Society of London, under the careful editorship of Dr. Sewell, from whose improved text the present translation has been made.

Singularly enough, "The Acts of Stephen" do not contain a single date, but, as far as can be ascertained (a variety of events being related which have found no place in any