Ranulph Higden (d. 1364), a Benedictine monk and chronicler, wrote in the first half of the fourteenth century Polychronicon, a book on world history from the beginning to his own time under the reign of Edward III. John Trevisa (c. 1342-c. 1402) translated Higden's Latin original into Middle English by 1387, occasionally adding notes in his own words. Trevisa's translation is recorded in fourteen manuscripts (one of which, i.e. the F-manuscript, is owned by the Senshu University Library in Tokyo), while a version of it was printed and published by William Caxton in 1482. Caxton's text is considered to have derived from that recorded in the H-manuscript (London, British Library, Harley 1900), which in turn derived from the version in the M-manuscript (Manchester, Chetham's Library 11379)(see Waldron, pp. xxiii-xliii).
Main body of the text on the leaf is printed in black, while orange capitals, paragraph marks, and inscriptions on the margin are added by a contemporary hand (the name of King Edward the Martyr in orange occurs once each on the margin of each page and that of King Æthelred the Unready once on the margin of the verso page). Another, seemingly later, hand adds some inscriptions in black on the margin too.
The text on this leaf covers from the latter half of Chapter 12 of Book 6 to the beginning of Chapter 13, where some episodes from late-tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England are recounted. The first part deals with the assassination of King Edward the Martyr (c. 962-978), his humble burial in Wareham, many miracles taking place at the burial site, and the later translation of his body to a better place in Shaftesbury. Then a story on a miracle occurred to Fulbert, a bishop of Chartres, follows, which concludes Chapter 12. Chapter 13 begins with an account of the accession of King Æthelred the Unready (c. 966-1016) after the assassination of his elder half-brother Edward (based on William of Malmesbury's De gestis regum Anglorum). Here Æthelred's life is said to have been 'cruel / and vngracious in the begynnyng / wretched in the myddel / and foule in the ende'. Dunstan, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, is also said to have had a very negative opinion about his succession, because it was a result of the murder of his half-brother, which Dunstan ascribes to Æthelred's mother, Ælfthryth, who wanted her own son to reign.
For more information about John Trevisa's Middle English translation, see R. Waldron, John Trevisa's Translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, Book VI: An Edition Based on British Library MS Cotton Tiberius D. VII (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004), which includes an edited text of Book 6. The original Latin text and Trevisa's Middle English version, as well as another anonymous Middle English translation, are all edited in C. Babington and J. R. Lumby, Polychronicon Ranulph Higden monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, 9 vols. (London: Longman & Co., 1865-86), in which the text on this leaf is printed in vol. 7, pp. 35-43. See also R. A. Seeger, 'The English Polychronicon: A Text of John Trevisa's Translation of Higden's Polychronicon, Based on Huntington MS. 28561', diss. University of Washington, 1975.