I have chosen to make Robert Mannyng's Story of Inglande (also known as the Chronicle, but henceforth Story here) the focus of my final chapter because it offers a useful counterpoint to Laʒamon's Brut. If the Brut demonstrates the innovative potential for vernacular varietas, the Story shows how moving too far from varietas's original principles can impede its historiographical utility.

Robert Mannyng was a Gilbertine canon, who lived and wrote in the early decades of the fourteenth century. Much of his biography is uncertain, but Mannyng tells us that he lived most of his life at various Gilbertine establishments in Lincolnshire, and that he wrote his Story at the request of a certain Robert of Malton. As Mannyng notes in his prologue, the Story is primarily a translation from two Anglo-Norman French verse chronicles, Wace's Roman de Brut (discussed in the previous chapter) and Peter Langtoft's Chronicle, a history of Britain from its foundation through the reign of Edward I, compiled from numerous sources (including Wace's Roman) and completed c. 1307. Mannyng is, for the most part, a faithful translator, who maintains many of the narrative emphases and stylistic flourishes of his sources. However, like all translators, Mannyng puts his own stamp on the narrative. For example, like Laʒamon, he vivifies his sources’ narratives by frequently turning indirect to direct speech. He also expands his pool of sources beyond Wace and Langtoft, relying on additional written sources, including Bede and the Anglo-Latin historians I examined in the first part of this book, as well as stories from English oral tradition, such as Havelok the Dane. Some of these references are in his predecessors, but others are his own, testifying to Mannyng's broader familiarity with the British historical record.

Still, Mannyng's Story has received less attention than the histories I examined in previous chapters. As a translation, the Story attracts relatively little notice among historians, aside from whatever general information it can provide about the early fourteenth-century English zeitgeist; meanwhile, literary scholars tend not to pay much attention to verse chronicles (unless they possess some overtly “literary” appeal, as is the case with Laʒamon’s Brut). At the same time, Mannyng's Story has also attracted modern scholars’ derision for its stunning variety of verse forms.