Gower's last long piece of writing, the Cronica Tripertita of early 1400, is written in the most verbally ornate style the poet used: 1062 lines of Leonine hexameters (though with a single pentameter line in fine), the rhymes consistently disyllabic, with also some couplet formations; not having quite the complexity of the work of some near-contemporary Anglo-Latin poets, perhaps; yet Gower sustained what was for others fundamentally a lyric style over the course of a lengthy historical ennarration. Though unparalleled, even original in style, the poem is also altogether derivative in its substance and shape: the Cronica makes verse of ‘Les record et proces del renunciacion du roy Richard le second apres le conquest, et de lacceptacion de mesme la renunciacion, ensemblement oue la deposicion de mesme le roy Richard’ – hereafter ‘Record’ – insinuated into the public records of parliament late in 1399 and put about otherwise, in various forms, by those then essaying to master England. The verse-form Gower used for the Cronica is highly mannered, by comparison with his earlier Latin poems; the Latin prose source on which he based his work is also in a highly mannered style, though differently mannered: grotesquely verbose, largely by consequence of constant synonym-mongering and clausal repetition, yielding periods so distraught that even the persons responsible for them lost grammatical way sometimes, having also an idiosyncratic word-set taken over from Law French, with admixture of unliterary but precise Anglicisms.

The incommensurability of the stylistic extremes of the two pieces of writing made Gower's undertaking the more difficult, and his difficulties would have been compounded by another peculiarity of the source, in turn the product of its peculiar limitations, which were institutionally determined. Strictly, the Record recounts a single day's events, and only such business as was transacted in parliament (or the parliament-like assembly), at Westminster, 30 September 1399. Because, strictly, it records only the particular parliamentary process, the Record cannot itself give a temporally ordered recounting of the sequence of events culminating in Richard II's deposition that might stand on its own as narrative or provide a basis for narrative directly.