The Peterborough Chronicle is one of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles that contains unique information about the history of England 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. When William the Conqueror took England and Anglo-Norman became the official language, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles generally ceased. The monks of Peterborough Abbey, however, continued to compile events in theirs. While the Peterborough Chronicle is not professional history, it is one of the few first-hand accounts of the period 1070 to 1154 in England written in English and from a non-courtly point of view. It is also a valuable source of information about the early Middle English language itself. The linguistic innovations recorded in its second continuation are plentiful, and at least one innovation, the feminine pronoun "she", is first recorded in the Peterborough Chronicle.
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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1675: Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of a function y = f(x) by using antiderivatives. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Leibniz)
1930: A patent was awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for their invention, the Einstein refrigerator. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator)
1965: Ian Smith, Premier of the British Crown Colony of Southern Rhodesia, issued the Unilateral Declaration of Independence. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Smith)
1975: The Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 came to a head as Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was dismissed from office by Governor-General Sir John Kerr. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_constitutional_crisis_of_1975)
1978: Maumoon Abdul Gayoom began his first term as President of the Maldives. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maumoon_Abdul_Gayoom)
_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:
"Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains that victory." -- George S. Patton (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_S._Patton)