Ayala
Contemporaneous with Froissart was Ayala, who is first of the Spanish chroniclers to be entirely safe as an historical source. Ayala wrote calm, business-like prose, and was bent upon recording facts whether glorious or inglorious. In contrast with Froissart's simple-hearted enthusiasm Ayala's attitude is one of cool sagacity and experience. He looks quite through the deeds of men. He as dispassionately records the crimes of the lords of the earth as he does their pretentions to greatness. He lived in "four wild reigns"—those of Peter the Cruel, Henry the Second, John the First, and Henry the Third—and, as a minister of state in each, had every opportunity to become disillusioned, about chivalry. An event that both Ayala and Froissart record is the murder of Blanche of Bourbon by her husband the king, Don Pedro the Cruel.
The circumstantial minuteness of an account by a chronicler, who was an eight-years' eye-witness of the king's inhumanity to his young and beautiful queen, and who recorded step by step the series of murders by which the king came up to the final crime, seems more moving to a modern reader than would seem the wildest and most impassioned ballad on the subject. Indeed, Ayala's account has settled the character of Don Pedro forever, despite the occasional attempts by some personally interested countryman to defend him, and despite the sentimental-tragedy of the theater, and such metrical outbursts as that of Chaucer's in the "Monk's Tale." But Chaucer, as Ayala himself would have told us, was an "interested party," since he was attached to the Duke of Lancaster who was attached to Don Pedro.
General chronicle of Spain
Seventy-five or eighty years before Ayala, Alfonso the Wise had begun the general chronicle of Spain by collecting old ballads and redoing them into prose, and by adding thereto the history of his own day. Sixty years after him, Alfonso the Eleventh appointed a court chronicler; and so the habit in Spain of recording the chief events of the kingdom was kept up from 1320 with more or less regularity down to the establishment of the Academy of History in the eighteenth century. It is interesting to note that this chronicle, that first preserved the popular metrical tales by putting them into prose, in turn gave rise to popular metrical tales that have kept the traditions—such as those of the Cid and Bernardo del Carpio.
Saxo Grammaticus
Like this earlier part of the Spanish Chronicle, the still older legendary chronicles of the North promoted literature. That of the Britons by Geoffrey of Monmouth and that of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus have served, perhaps, a better purpose than true accounts; for they have quickened the imagination of subsequent times and given us themes for many ballads and for some of the marvelous productions of Shakespeare.
Holinshed
Because of the industry of Shakespeare's commentators in assigning so much of the great dramatist's subject-matter to Holinshed, the Tudor chronicler will always live. Regardless of whatever he may be worth personally, the whole world owes him a debt for doing the hack work and thus leaving a great genius free to construct.
A chronicle is not hard to write. The only requirements are that you shall select a definite period of time, and, proceeding in order, draw in it simple and graphic pictures of the life lived and the deeds wrought. You might put together the events of your own neighborhood for the last three years.