Pagina:Annales monastici Vol IV.djvu/63

PEEFACE. Iv the court chronicler and the monastick annalist. The thirteenth century was certainly the time during which the monastick annalists produced their best works. Before, especiall}'- during the reign of Henry II., there was a considerable number of persons, independent of each other, who wrote history. Afterwards, individual writers are scarce, and the monastick annals almost all come to an end. It is singular how generally this is the case about the time of the death of Edward I. Such compi- lations as these volumes contain would be invaluable for the history of the fourteenth and still more for that of the fifteenth century. The few meagre entries that so many chronicles contain, written all in one hand at a date long since the regularly kept annals of the monastery have ceased, seem to show that there was no one in the monastick body to carry on what had been for so long kept with such care. Whether the troubles of the reign of Edward II. affected the inner life of the monasteries more than we have any reason to know, or whether the effect of the great plagues of the fourteenth century, which in so many ways changed the condition of the country, was also so great in the monasteries as to pre- vent their ordinary records from being kept up, we can- not say. The fact is certainly very remarkable, that there are very few monasteries which continued their annals either at all, or with anj^hing like the same spirit and diligence, after the death of Edward I. A caution is, perhaps, necessary as to accepting as generally true for the whole country the statements which are made by one of these local annalists, and which were perfectly true as far as he was concerned. The price of land, the price of corn, no doubt varied very considerably in different parts of the country, and when we recollect how isolated many parts of England were, how difficult the communication from place to place was, it is perhaps more remarkable that these chronicles agree so often, especially about such points, than that