The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: How Alfred Invented English History

Before Alfred the Great, England had no national history — just scattered monastic annals. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the creation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a revolutionary project that wove together oral tradition, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, and contemporary eyewitness accounts to produce the first continuous narrative of English history. They examine how Alfred's scribes compiled the Chronicle from multiple sources, why it was written in Old English instead of Latin, and how later scribes kept it going for centuries — right up to the Norman Conquest and beyond. The conversation touches on the Parker Chronicle (still in Cambridge's Corpus Christi College), the haunting entry for 793 that describes the first Viking raid, and the Chronicle's role in forging an English identity. What did the scribes leave out? How reliable are the annals for the early centuries? And why did this one manuscript tradition survive when so many others perished? This is the story of how England wrote its own story. #AngloSaxonChronicle #AlfredTheGreat #OldEnglish #Bede #ParkerChronicle #VikingRaids #Lindisfarne #Wessex #MonasticScribes #MedievalHistory #EnglishIdentity #ManuscriptStudies #CorpusChristiCollege #Cambridge #OralTradition #Historiography #History #FexingoHistory Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo