An Early Vernacular Annal on the First Crusade from Christ Church, Canterbury

Kane explains that in the decades following the Norman Conquest of England, scribes working in the scriptorium at Christ Church, Canterbury England entered a series of annals in the right-hand margin of an Easter table preserved in London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. xv. Originally filled with computistical data for the years 988-1193 (fols 132v-138r), the table was later extended to accommodate the period from 1194 to 1268 (fols 138v-139r). Thirty-seven Old English annals provide a sporadic chronological record extending from 988 to 1109, together with what David Dumville describes as 'two important outliers' for the years 925 and 1130. For the scribes of Christ Church, as presumably for so many others throughout western Europe at the time, the crusade possessed clear historiographical potential, but it had not yet earned the place that it would soon come to occupy within the long arc of sacred history.