About the Chronicle


The Chronicle of Melrose: a brief introduction

The Chronicle of Melrose is the principal chronicle source for Scotland in the 12th and 13th centuries. It was created at Melrose Abbey, a Cistercian monastery founded by King David I in 1136 in southern Scotland. The text is entirely in Latin. The manuscript is a remarkable survival of an ‘active’ chronicle, with multiple generations of scribal additions while the manuscript was at the abbey. The digital edition highlights the Chronicle text’s piecemeal growth as a result of these layers of scribal contributions.

At some point in the late 13th or first half of the 14th century, the Chronicle was taken south to a monastery in England (there is evidence it was at the priory of Deeping St James in Lincolnshire for a period: see the lower margin of Julius B XIII, f. 2r).

In the mid-16th century, the Chronicle was acquired by the antiquarian John Leland (d. 1552). Leland likely split the manuscript into two separate units. He was also probably responsible for associating these two parts with other works, thus creating two ‘composite’ manuscripts.

Both composite manuscripts were then acquired by Sir Robert Cotton for his illustrious library (d. 1631) where they were given the shelf-marks Julius B XIII and Faustina B IX.

The two manuscripts live today in the British Library in London. Only in the early 21st century was it shown that both were part of the same original entity (see Broun, The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey, chapter 4).


As a physical object, then, the ‘Chronicle of Melrose’ is 120 folios currently divided between two separate bound volumes:

  • London, BL Cotton MS Julius B XIII, ff. 2–47
  • London, BL Cotton MS Faustina B IX, ff. 2–75


Textually, the surviving portions can be summarised as:

  • Julius B XIII, ff. 2–40: Hugh of St Victor’s Chronicle, aka De tribus maximis circumstantis gestorum, ‘On the three best memory-aids for learning history’.
  • Julius B XIII, ff. 41–47: annals for AD 1–249 (finishing mid-sentence).
  • Faustina B IX, ff. 2–75: a brief introduction quoting Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of hte English People from AD 731, followed by annals of varying length for AD 734–1270 (finishing mid-sentence), with a smattering of other annals in the 1270s and 1280s, plus some other incorporated texts such as letters, king-lists, lists of burials at the abbey, verses on Scottish kings, and a ‘little work’ on Simon de Montfort (d. 1265).


The Chronicle has possibly suffered losses of folios over the years. There are various ‘lacunae’ (absences) in the text as it stands which might suggest this:

  • At Julius B XIII, f. 47v: the annal for AD 249 finishes mid-sentence which may indicate lost text (the gathering’s final folio has been cut away at some point).
  • Annals for AD 250–730: it is not clear whether annals for AD 250–730 were ever written. One scribe working probably in the early 13th century noted the absence of these years (Scribal profile 18, Julius B XIII, f. 30v), so if they ever existed they were already lost by then.
  • At Faustina B IX, f. 75v: the annal for AD 1270 finishes mid-sentence at the end of a gathering which may indicate lost text.


As for its creators, there are many dozens of scribes evidently writing the Chronicle over a long period of time. Almost all of these are assumed to be members of the community at Melrose in the late 12th and 13th centuries, though we do not know their precise identities. This edition, building on the work of previous editors, brings to the fore the individual contributions of these many ‘scribal profiles’ (see more discussion of the scribal profiles here).


The digital edition can be thought of as:

  • Digital images of the manuscripts from the British Library, with editorial annotations of the ‘scribal profiles’.
  • A representation of some of the text in the Chronicle as a transcription and accompanying English translation. Texts have been marked-up in a common web-compatible format (TEI-XML) to allow display on screen. The selection process for editing the text is explained under Editorial principals 1: scribal profiles (for example, Hugh of St Victor’s Chronicle is summarised rather than edited).
  • The accompanying editorial guides and documentation.

 

 

Author: Jo Tucker
Last updated: 07/07/2026