Annales Cambriae
medieval Welsh chronicle

The Annales Cambriae (Latin for Annals of Wales) is the title given to a complex of Latin chronicles compiled or derived from diverse sources at St David's in Dyfed, Wales. The earliest is a 12th-century presumed copy of a mid-10th-century original; later editions were compiled in the 13th century. Despite the name, the Annales Cambriae record not only events in Wales, but also events in Ireland, Cornwall, England, Scotland and sometimes further afield, though the focus of the events recorded especially in the later two-thirds of the text is Wales.
Sources
The five principal versions of Annales Cambriae appear in four manuscripts:
A: London, British Library, Harley MS 3859, folios 190r–193r.
B: London (Kew), National Archives, MS. E.164/1 (K.R. Misc. Books, Series I) pp. 2–26
C: London, British Library, MS. Cotton Domitian A.i, folios 138r–155r
D: Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS. 3514, pp. 523–28, the Cronica ante aduentum Domini.
E: ibid., pp. 507–19, the Cronica de Wallia.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Annales Cambriae” as medieval Welsh chronicle. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as medieval Welsh chronicle. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q564369. VIAF identifies the subject as 176947859. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Annales Cambriae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.