"... let us take the commencement of this work from his history; beginning from his last sentence, and so recording the years of our Lord, and carefully arranging the periods of the kings ..."
J. Stevenson, in the preface of his translation (first published 1858), says:
"It is not probable that both these chronicles, which constitute the History of the Kings, are the work of Simeon of Durham; or, indeed, that they are to be ascribed to one and the same author. They contain statements which are contradictory the one to the other, and they vary in their chronology. It might be doubted, were we disposed to be sceptical, how far either of them is the production of the author whose name the whole now bears."
The first chronicle ends with the annal for 957. The second begins in 848 and finishes with 1129. Recent scholarship has suggested that the first chronicle's initial compilation was by Byrhtferth, a monk and teacher at Ramsey Abbey (north of Huntingdon), at the turn of the tenth century. The second chronicle is based on the 'Chronicon ex Chronicis' of Florence of Worcester. The 'Historia Regum', however, preserves material from no longer extant Northumbrian sources, and the period 1119-1129 is original narrative.The single surviving, twelfth century, manuscript has an introduction which presents something of a mathematical conundrum:
"Here begins the history of Simeon, of holy and pleasant memory, Monk and Precentor of the Church of St.Cuthbert, of Durham, concerning the Kings of the Angles and Danes, and their numerous wars, pillages and burnings; from after the death of the Venerable Bede [735], priest, to within a little of the death of King Henry the First [the chronicle ends in 1129, Henry died in 1135], son of William the Bastard, who conquered England; that is, during a period of four hundred and twenty-nine years and four months."
Translation by J. Stevenson
