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The English Reception of Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Chronicle J ulian Harrison ccording to conventional wisdom, Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Chronicle enjoyed limited success in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe.1 Also entitled De tribus maximis Acircumstantiis gestorum (‘On the Three Chief Conditions of History’), the work in question was designed ostensibly as an introductory handbook for the use of historians, though its prologue (teaching an important mnemonic technique) seems to have gained wider currency, and was sometimes circulated independently of the whole.2 Approximately forty mediaeval copies of Hugh’s compilation are recorded as extant, a substantial proportion of which had belonged to religious communities in France, together with a handful of examples from both Germany and Italy.3 There are indications, nonetheless, that the Chronicle did not rank among his most popular compositions: as Mary J. Carruthers has remarked, ‘the evidence suggests that this particular treatise was not regarded as major or original enough to deserve wide dissemination, despite its author’s eminence; that it was never known much beyond the precincts of St. Victor [in Paris]; and that it sank into oblivion by the early fourteenth century, because it had been superseded by or incorporated into other pedagogical tools.’4 The extent to which Hugh’s Chronicle was known directly in the British Isles has hitherto remained subject to speculation.5 Among mediaeval scholars, solely Ralph de Diceto, 1 R.W. Southern,‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 2. Hugh of StVictor and the Idea of Historical Development’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, xxi (1971), pp. 159-79 (pp. 172-4); Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: