The 'Flores Historiarum' (Flowers of History) - a chronicle extending from the Creation to 1235 - was composed by Roger of Wendover (d.c.1236), a monk at St.Albans Abbey. Roger's work was rewritten, embellished and extended, to 1259, by another monk of St.Albans, Matthew Paris (d.1259), to form his 'Chronica Majora' (Great Chronicle). Various writers continued this history to 1326 (although many manuscripts stop at 1306) - the work from 1265 being carried out at Westminster. It seems that a copyist's misunderstanding of this sequence of events, which appears in a manuscript produced c.1400 (Cotton Claudius E viii), led to the chronicle being attributed to a fictitious Matthew of Westminster. Matthew of Westminster's 'Flores Historiarum' was first printed by the archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, in 1567. The error of this attribution was discovered in 1826, by Sir Francis Palgrave.
Roger's original work does still exist, however, and it is the translation by J.A Giles (first published in 1849) which is used on this website. Dr. Giles opines that the section covering 447 to about 1200 is:
"... of great value, not as a work of original authority, for the writer was not contemporary with the events which happened during that interval, but because he has gathered his materials from other original sources, many of which have since perished."
