HISTORIES, CHRONICLES, ANNALS AND LIVES

The extraordinary fertility of historical talent and industry among the monks and canons of the twelfth century, to which we owe so much of our knowledge both of the period and of themselves, had ceased before the reign of Henry III, and we have noted elsewhere that although the day was yet to come of one of the most remarkable historians of all the monastic centuries, Matthew Paris of St Albans, yet the thirteenth century saw the dwindling and extinction, one by one, of the greater number of the monastic and other religious chronicles that had hitherto served as precious sources for history of every kind.

The extinction was never, indeed, complete before the very last years of the fifteenth century. Besides three or four great monastic houses, to be mentioned shortly, where the traditions of the past lingered on to inspire either a continuous or an interrupted succession of writers, individuals appeared here and there to revive literary forms that had disappeared outside the cloister, or to keep the record of national events. Of the latter class several, in addition to those shortly to be mentioned, deserve remembrance: Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester Abbey, compiled a history of England from earlier sources, adding numerous local and national items from his own knowledge in the later books. He died in 1366, and his work was carried on by another hand to 1395. Ralph Higden, Knighton's contemporary, a monk of Chester, compiled a valuable chronicle from early times to 1352, which was continued in turn by a monk of Malvern and one of Westminster.