INTRODUCTION. い THE object of the present volume is to shew more completely the precise points of difference between the Chronicles of Wendover and Paris, by furnishing the reader with the additions and various readings made by the latter historian to the work of the former, and so rendering the history more perfect, by combining the labours of both writers, so far as they are the narrators of contemporaneous events. In doing this, it was the original intention of the editor to include also a collation of the Historia Minor; but the perusal of the first few pages of that work, appended to this Introduction, will be sufficient, it is hoped, to shew that such an attempt, however desirable, was altogether impracticable. The different style of language used in relating the same events as are recorded in the Greater Chronicle, the additional matter also with which it is supplied, would have made it necessary to print volumes in order to render such a collation at all perfect. It does, indeed, seem extraordinary that such a collation should never have been made; still more so, perhaps, that the work itself never should have been printed, being, as it is, so entirely throughout the original work of Matthew Paris, and existing, as at the present day, in the original handwriting of its ingenious and learned compiler.' In former times, however, men appear to have rested equally well satisfied with the Historia Major; ' In the British Museum, MS. Reg. 14 C. VII. b |
