John Hardyng

The English chronicler John Hardyng (b. 1378–d. c. 1465) had a colorful career before settling down to write his two versions of British history in the 1450s and 1460s. Born in Northumberland, he served in the household of Sir Henry Percy (b. 1364–d. 1403) from the age of twelve, where he learnt the art of warfare and fought in numerous battles, including the Battle of Shrewsbury (1403). Later, he served Sir Robert Umfraville, fighting alongside him in Scotland and in the first years of Henry V’s French campaign (1415–1416). In 1418 Henry V sent Hardyng to Scotland to survey the topography of the realm and seek out evidence of English overlordship. Promised a substantial gift for his espionage, Hardyng returned after three and a half years, but Henry V’s untimely death deprived him of his prize. He remained unrewarded until the 1440s, when Henry VI honored the late king’s promise and granted Hardyng an annuity. By this time Hardyng’s patron, Sir Robert, was dead and Hardyng had taken up residence in the Augustinian Priory at Kyme, Lincolnshire. It was here that he began writing his first account of British history in Middle English verse. Surviving in a single manuscript, which was presented to Henry VI and his family in 1457 along with a map of Scotland and several of the Scottish documents recovered for Henry V, Hardyng’s Chronicle draws primarily on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle, and a Latin Prose Brut to give an account of British and English affairs from the mythical founding of Britain by Brutus to 1437. Using the historical issue of English hegemony over Scotland as an ideological touchstone to unite divided Englishmen, the Chronicle sought to promote unity amidst the social, economic, and political instability that precipitated the Wars of the Roses. Within a few years of presenting the work and receiving another reward for his service, Hardyng began revising the text for Henry VI’s political rival, Richard, duke of York. The second Chronicle rewrote history to explain York’s superior claim to the throne, but it retained Hardyng’s call for unity among Englishmen and continued to use the issue of Scottish independence as a means of rallying his peers against a common foreign enemy. When the duke of York died in December 1460, Hardyng continued revising his text for York’s son, Edward IV, who took the throne from Henry VI in March 1461. Though Hardyng died before completing his revised narrative, numerous copies of the near-complete chronicle circulated in and around London in the 1460s and 1470s, helping to explain the Yorkist pedigree. It was the second version of the Chronicle that influenced Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur and which was later taken up by the Tudor printer Richard Grafton, who issued two prints in 1543 because of its relevance to the Anglo-Scottish wars in his own time. Grafton’s prints ensured the popularity of the Chronicle among Tudor historiographers and its influence on later writers, such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton.