[[Image:Peterborough.Chronicle.firstpage.jpg|thumb|right|240px|The opening page of the Laud Manuscript. The scribal hand is the copyist's work rather than either the First or Second continuation scribes.<br />
Translation of this scanned page.]]
The Peterborough Chronicle (also called the Laud manuscript and the E manuscript) is a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle originally maintained by the monks of Peterborough Abbey, now in Cambridgeshire. It contains unique information about the history of England and of the English language after the Norman Conquest; according to philologist J. A. W. Bennett, it is the only prose history in English between the Conquest and the later 14th century.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were composed and maintained between the various monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England and were an attempt to record the history of Britain throughout the years AD. Typically the chronicles began with the birth of Christ, went through Biblical and Roman history, then continued to the present. Every major religious house in England kept its own, individual chronicle, and the chronicles were not compared with each other or in any way kept uniform. For example, in the opening paragraph of this chronicle it is said that the Britons that settled in South Britain came from "Armenia". ("Armenia" is probably a mistaken transcription of Armorica, an area in Northwestern Gaul.)
The fire and the continuations
Today, the Peterborough Chronicle is recognised as one of the four distinct versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (along with the Winchester Chronicle or Parker Chronicle, the Abingdon Chronicle and the Worcester Chronicle), but it is not wholly distinct (). There was a fire at Peterborough (Friday, 4 August 1116) that destroyed the monastery's library, and so the earliest part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Peterborough is a copy of Winchester Cathedral's chronicle (). For the 11th century, the chronicle at Peterborough diverges from Parker's, and it has been speculated that a proto-"Kentish Chronicle", full of nationalistic and regionalistic interests, was used for these years; however, such a single source is speculative (). The Peterborough copyists probably used multiple sources for their missing years, but the Dissolution of the Monasteries makes it impossible to be sure. Regardless, the entries for the 12th century to 1122 are a jumble of other chronicles' accounts, sharing half-entries with one source and half with another, moving from one source to another and then back to a previous one. This shifting back and forth raises, again, the vexatious possibility of a lost chronicle as a single, common source.
It is after 1122 that the Peterborough manuscript becomes unique. Therefore, the document usually called The Peterborough Chronicle is divided into the "first continuation" and the "second continuation" from the time of the fire and the copying. The two continuations are sui generis both in terms of the information they impart, the style they employ, and their language. The first continuation covers 1122–1131. The second continuation runs from 1132 to 1154 and includes the reign of King Stephen.
The copied portion uses grammatical gender and inflections like in Old English, but there are discrepancies.), the chronicler protests at some length at the illegality and impiety of the appointment. He also mentions that the Wild Hunt was seen at the same time as the appointment, as an ill omen. When Henry was eventually removed by death, the monk again takes the position that this was divine remedy, for Henry had tried to make Peterborough part of the Cluniac Order and had attempted to have his own nephew be the next abbot, "oc Crist it ne uuolde" ("but Christ did not will it").
The first continuation shows a major change in grammatical gender and inflections from how they were used in Old English. Though there are still three genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter - several nouns seem to have been shuffled among the categories in a manner that cannot be completely explained by a move towards natural gender or the gender of French nouns, as the inflections marking gender are re-purposed for other functions.