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Six Old English Chronicles

J. A. Giles

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John Allen Giles (1808 - 1884) was a more colourful character than could be expected of a classicist, Doctor of Civil Law and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was born on 26th October 1808 at his grandparent’s home in Mark, Somerset to Sophia and William Giles. Allen was his mother’s maiden name. The young Giles gave every appearance of becoming a brilliant scholar. After attending Charterhouse School as a Somerset Scholar, on 26th November 1824, one month after his sixteenth birthday, he was elected to a Bath and Wells Scholarship at Corpus Christi. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1828 with a double first, and completed his Master of Arts in 1831. The same year he published his first two books: Scriptores Graeci Minores, an anthology of Greek fragments, and A Grammar of the Latin Language, for the use of Schools, which reached its revised third and final edition two years later. In 1832 he was elected as a fellow of Corpus Christi, but resigned a year later, when he married Anna Sarah Dickinson on 17th December. He was ordained as deacon in 1832 and as priest in 1835, and in 1838 obtained his degree of Doctor of Civil Laws.

From 1833 he held the curacy of Cossington in Somerset, jointly with the headship of Bridgewater School. From Bridgewater, he moved to Camberwell Collegiate College in 1834, and in 1836 was elected Headmaster of the City of London School, the first in its new premises on Milk Street on the site of Honey Lane Market. However, he found it necessary to resign in 1840, over disputes regarding his leadership and, possibly, financing of the new premises. Between 1840 and 1846, he worked primarily as an author and editor, but also took private pupils at his home. In 1844 his creditors, including his publishers, filed a bankruptcy claim against him, and succeeded in attaching his manuscripts of the Venerable Bede. He returned to church duties in 1846 as the Curate of Bampton, Oxfordshire, where he continued writing, editing, and independently publishing. His output was prolific, but often hastily written and assembled to meet deadlines. He often reused older material and works, usually credited, of other translators and authors. At his criminal trial in 1855, he claimed under oath to have published [not written] 120 volumes.

Giles was tried at the Oxford Assizes in 1855 for falsifying the marriage records and certificate of one of his maids, Jane Green, to Richard Pratt, an apprentice cobbler. Both were allegedly under age, denied by Giles, and Jane had found herself in an embarrassing condition for the time. Despite a well publicised disagreement the previous year, concerning the publication of Christian Records, which questioned the age of the New Testament books, his bishop spoke on his behalf. Nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, but released by Royal Warrant after three months.

Six Old English Chronicles is an anthology, edited by J. A. Giles, of four previously published translations and two new translations (Ethelwerd’s Chronicle and Asser’s Life of Alfred) by Giles himself. The majority of The Works of Gildas was translated by Thomas Babington between 1586 and 1592. Nennius’s History of the Britons is “substantially” the 1819 translation by William Gunn. Geoffrey’s British History is the 1718 translation by Aaron Thompson, revised and republished by Giles in 1842. The Description of Britain is a verbatim copy of the anonymous translation written by Henry Hatcher in 1809.

For the modern reader, Six Old English Chronicles may be seen as an incorrect title. All the texts were originally written in Latin, four of them by British (Welsh) authors. Only two of the original texts are chronicles of the Anglo-Saxon period, one of them being a Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle by Aethelweard, a distant cousin of Alfred the Great. The other is Asser’s Life of Alfred, covering the period of unification of the Angle and Saxon kingdoms to form England. Gildas’ sermon is essentially a biting polemic against the British political and Church leadership in the face of the sixth century pagan Anglo-Saxon incursions. Nennius, writing later, early in the ninth century, presents a pseudo-historical chronicle of the rise and fall of the British kingdom, which in turn formed the basis of Geoffrey’s ostensible Latin translation of lost Welsh and Breton texts. The final chronicle in Giles’ anthology is a fictitious description of Roman Britain, written in the eighteenth century by Charles Julius Bertram who fraudulently attributed it to Richard of Cirencester, a fourteenth century monk.

Folklore and Heritage Edition

This edition of Six Old English Chronicles is adapted from the 1843 first edition edited by J.A. Giles, which is in the public domain. It is not intended as, and should not be treated as, an academic text. There are no footnotes or references, except some of those provided by the original editors and authors. Where appropriate the spelling and pronunciation has been modernised (British English), including the generally accepted names of historical figures. For ease of reading, minor changes (which do not affect the flow of the text) have been made to update the grammar.

Author Illustation: The Reverend John Allen Giles, Headmaster of the City of London School (1836–1840), Charles J. Grant, ca. 1839 (detail)

Cover Illustation: Stonehenge, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, ca. 1825 - 1828 (detail)