AMONG fifteenth-century English chronicles, perhaps the most fascinatingly circumstantial are two that convincingly narrate events during the political and military struggles of King Edward IV from the point of view of eye-witnesses. The first, The Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire (in London, College of Arms, MS Vincent 435), is an account of Edward's three-week campaign in March of 1470 against local rebels, but, more interestingly, an account of his game of political chess against his cousin, the earl of Warwick, and his brother, the duke of Clarence, for whom the rebels are unwitting pawns. The second, The Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England (in London, British Library, MS Harley 543), is an account of Edward's three-month campaign from March to May the next year against those same kinsmen (and their new ally, Queen Margaret) to regain his crown after exile in Flanders.

The texts have much in common: they are apparently official, ostensibly eye-witness, blatantly Yorkist, substantially accurate and surprisingly detailed histories; they are narrowly focused on immediate events – battles, marches, the sending of messages and the gathering of intelligence – without long-term political or historical context, which the intended readers are presumed to know.

Such similarities in two texts emanating originally from the same court within little more than a year might naturally lead scholars to speculate that a single chronicler was responsible for both. This possibility is tentatively suggested by, among others, Antonia Gransden, who, in her 1982 Historical Writing in England, writes that ‘the evidence on the authorship of the two works does not preclude the possibility, which is supported by their style, that they were by the same author’.

But as a result of the detailed and persuasive investigations of Livia Visser-Fuchs, building on the earlier work of J. A. F. Thomson and Richard Firth Green, we now know enough about the textual histories of these chronicles to complicate, though perhaps not to obviate, the question.