The discovery and excavation in 1939 of the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, brought to light an object which was immediately recognised as a piece of early seventh-century regalia – a sceptre, or symbol of its owner’s power from the kingdom of the East Angles.1 The power is presumed to be that of a king, buried with his regalia in his ship, amidst other objects symbolic of his exalted status, and indicative of his great wealth and extended connections. The further interpretation of such a magnificently mysterious object leads in many directions and remains a matter of informed speculation. It is enough that the object itself remains symbolic of whatever it had once been known to symbolise, and thereby of all that cannot be known about the earliest stages in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom.

The vernacularity of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can seem to isolate it from contemporary European history-writing and to invite literary interpretations which emphasize its preoccupation with ‘Englishness’. This chapter focuses on form and social networks at three key points in the keeping of the Chronicle: its inception in Alfred’s cosmopolitan court, Æthelweard’s late tenth-century Latin translation for his cousin Matilda, abbess of the Ottonian nunnery of Essen, and the bringing together of the Old English Orosius and the Chronicle in the mid-eleventh century to create an ambitious universal chronicle. The Chronicle emerges as embedded within the multilingual fabric of Europe, from Ireland to the Bosporus, and alert to the linguistic politics of history-writing across the Latin West.