ABSTRACT
Little is known about the career of Ranulf Higden, the author of the Polychronicon. He became a monk of the Benedictine abbey of St Werburgh’s, Chester, in 1299, and remained there until his death sometime in the 1360s. Higden was the product of a monastic education and a monastic background. The Polychronicon is a universal history from the Creation until Higden’s own day, in seven books. Higden’s originality as an author lay in his literary talent. He collected together a vast quantity of often disparate information and formed it into a comprehensible whole on which he impressed the seal of Christianity. Thus Higden’s concept of a universal history had two elements: it included both geographical and anthropological information and the like, and a sequence of world events from the Creation until his own time.
