The palaeography of the Parker manuscript of the<i>Chronicle</i>, laws and Sedulius, and historiography at Winchester in the late ninth and tenth centuries

Abstract

The Parker manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 173, is generally recognized to be the earliest surviving copy of the compilation known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . It cannot be the original since it contains various scribal errors including dislocation in the chronology, yet its physical characteristics reflect all the major divisions in the text recognized by modern scholars: it seems to reflect the nature and sometimes even the format of the various exemplars from which it was copied. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to these and other palaeographical features and to survey some of the questions arising from them.