All the historians incorporate etymology, showing how familiar place-names or words derived from history or ancient languages. Geoffrey and William of Malmesbury both give the pagan meanings behind the English days of the week, for instance.
The idiom in which all the writers worked used what we would describe as imaginative reconstructions or historical fiction. This included inventing ‘direct speeches’, spicing up accounts of battles with troop dispositions and single combats, and relaying anecdotes of a moral or simply entertaining nature. Henry of Huntington includes the story of King Canute trying to turn back the tide in his Chronicle-derived account of the Danish conquest. Geoffrey’s tale of King Bladud, who tried to fly and crashed on to the temple of Apollo in London is no more outlandish than William’s account of Eilmerus, the flying monk of Malmesbury.
It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that Arthur’s campaigns in Geoffrey are similar to those William records for Athelstan or Canute. The court of William the Conqueror is reflected in Arthur’s court at Caerleon. Geoffrey has the tale of the fatherless wonderchild, Merlin, similar to the story of St Aldhelm in William’s Gesta Pontificum. This is not to say that Geoffrey parodied the other historians – in this case he took the story from Historia Brittonum – but that all worked in the same idiom.
The similarity of their works is not surprising, as the historians often shared the same patrons. William’s Historia Novella is dedicated to Robert of Gloucester, one of the dedicatees of Geoffrey’s work. Geoffrey’s Prophecies of Merlin and Henry of Huntingdon’s work are dedicated to Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln. Once the writers found an idiom which pleased these powerful patrons, they were wise to stick with it.
Where Geoffrey worked in the same intellectual sphere as the secular histories, he gently contradicts the ecclesiastical material produced by Caradoc, William of Malmesbury and others. The pretensions of Llandaff are given short shrift. The fictitious Archbishopric of Caerleon, with primacy over all Britain, precedes St David’s with its claims over Wales. Caerleon is granted the Apostolic legation centuries before it was given to Canterbury, mentioned only as a place frequented by the wicked Vortigern. William of Malmesbury’s beloved Glastonbury is not mentioned at all.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Perspective
Geoffrey’s own perspectives are usually obvious. We mentioned his conviction that all the great characters of British history were ‘kings of Britain’, often linked dynastically. The succession of kings of Britain from Constantine to Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon, his sons, to Uther’s son Arthur, to Arthur’s cousin Constantine, then to Constantine’s nephew Aurelius need not have any source before Geoffrey.
Although Geoffrey’s geographical scope is broader than any previous Arthurian material, regional bias is clear. With a writer who identifies himself as ‘of Monmouth’, south-east Wales and adjacent Gloucestershire feature prominently. Strangely, although Geoffrey knows the Mirabilia – King Arthur discusses them with King Hoel – he makes no reference to the Arthurian wonders. Ercing is just a refuge of Vortigern. Similarly, although Geoffrey gives Caerleon as ‘City of the Legions’ he does not equate this with the similarly named battle-site in Historia Brittonum.
We cannot tell whether Geoffrey made use of Arthur because he was already famous in the region or if the connection derived from his own regional bias. There is only one pre-existing south-eastern Welsh tradition with an identifiable link – that to St Dubricius. Geoffrey makes this Welsh saint the Archbishop of Caerleon, Primate of Britain and Arthur’s right-hand cleric. It is Dubricius who crowns Arthur. The pre-Geoffrey Life of St Dubricius does not make any of these claims and knows nothing of Arthur. However, we saw how Davies was able to make a reasonable case for defining the area of Ercing, the sub-kingdom associated with Arthur, by church dedications to St Dubricius.
The magnification of Caerleon is Geoffrey’s invention, doubtless based on the Roman remains visible there, familiar to a native of Monmouth. Any ancient book which he possessed would have to be transmitted by clerics. It is inconceivable that an ecclesiastical writer from elsewhere would so aggrandise a rival see. None of the abundant twelfth-century South Welsh material supports the claims of Caerleon. For the church historians of twelfth-century Wales, Llandaff or St David’s are the key locations. Geoffrey contradicts these claims. Teilo, first Bishop of Llandaff is just a priest, and St David’s is a foundation of St Patrick.
This predictable regional bias is not the only one found in Geoffrey’s work. Towards the end of the book, Cadwallo, exiled from Britain, arrives at the court of King Salomon of Brittany. Salomon launches a verbal attack on the Welsh, compared with the earlier kings of the Britons: ‘a series of weaker men succeeded them as their heirs, and these lost the island once and for all when the enemy attacked. That is why I am so distressed at the feeble behaviour of your people, for we come from the same stock and we bear the name of Britons just as the men of your kingdom do, and yet we manage to protect our fatherland, which you see around you, when it is attacked by any of our neighbours.’
Strangely, Cadwallo agrees with him: ‘When you said it was extraordinary that my people could not maintain the proud position of their ancestors once the Britons had migrated to these lands, I myself really find nothing to be surprised at. The nobler members of the whole community followed the leaders [to Brittany] and only the baser sort remained behind and took over the lands of those who had gone’ (HRB XII.6, Thorpe 1966:275). He then piles more invective on the insular Britons than his host has done.
Later, the Voice of God, confirmed by all written oracles and prophesies, informs Cadwallo’s son that his people will never more rule the island. The remaining insular Britons continue to degenerate so much that even their ancient name is lost, and they become known as the Welsh, perhaps, Geoffrey suggests, because they are so barbarous.
This Breton bias is evident throughout the history. Every major ruler, Arthur included, has military exploits on the continent, in the lands bordering Brittany. Arthur’s family is from the Breton royal house, and his victories are only accomplished with Breton military might.
There is no convincing twelfth-century reason for this. Neither Geoffrey nor his dedicatees are Bretons. The only real explanation is that he is using a Breton source. He tells us specifically that he has a book about Breton history. As Gormund, King of the Africans, devastates seventh-century England, ‘many priests fled in a great fleet to Armorican Brittany . . . I shall describe these happenings elsewhere when I come to translate their Book of the Exile’. There are clues that Geoffrey’s very ancient book in the British language is also a Breton work. When Geoffrey uses the word Britannia in his book, he either means Britain or Brittany. As there is no indication that he is writing outside England (indeed, he was witnessing charters in Oxford at the time), the only explanation for his claim that Walter the Archdeacon brought him the book ‘ex Britannia’ is that it came from Brittany. As we will discover, the only major parts of Geoffrey’s story of Arthur which cannot be extrapolated from known sources are those dealing with his exploits in France. We have thus some pointers towards Geoffrey’s unknown source.
The History of the Kings of Britain
Although Geoffrey’s work runs from the aftermath of the Trojan War to the end of the seventh century AD, half of it focuses on the hundred years c. AD 450–550. Geoffrey’s passages which begin and end the period are those from Gildas which I have chosen to define the Arthurian era. Geoffrey simply quotes Gildas describing the Roman withdrawal from Britain. He includes the appeal to Agitius with no guess at who he might be.
We are back on familiar ground at the end when we meet Gildas’s tyrants Constantine, Aurelius Conanus, Vortiporius and Malgo. The indications are that Cuneglassus was also in Geoffrey’s original version. His reign had earlier been predicted by Merlin. However, at a very early stage in the manuscript transmission, he must have been dropped accidentally as a scribe moved from one similar passage to another. Each of the reigns
begin with the same words, ‘cui sucessit’ (to whom succeeded), so such a mistake would be easy to make.
The tyrants are consecutive rulers of all Britain. Although readers can detect a light-hearted air to Geoffrey’s work, it is not justified to say that the work is a knowing parody. No contemporaries ‘got’ Geoffrey’s jokes and he never draws attention to them as would be expected from a writer of the time. We cannot say, therefore, that his consecutive reigns of reasonably good kings are a humorous distortion of Gildas’s contemporary bad ones. He may genuinely have understood Gildas as saying they were a succession of kings of the whole country. Gildas never states explicitly when or even if Britain has fragmented into small regional kingdoms. This is something we have established from external evidence. Geoffrey, on the contrary, might fully appreciate his difference from Gildas, and consider he is setting the record straight. Whatever Geoffrey’s intention, he does not know anything about these rulers other than what is contained in Gildas. He embellishes and glosses this material but does not add to it significantly.
The sequence begins with the reign of Constantine, according to Geoffrey the son of Duke Cador of Cornwall and a cousin of Arthur. Geoffrey synchronises his reign to the deaths of Daniel, Bishop of Bangor, and St David. As they do not feature in Gildas, they must derive from a separate source. David is buried in Menevia (St David’s) on the orders of Malgo, King of the Venedotians, with no indication that this is the same man who appears a few years later as ‘Malgo King of Britain’. He is, of course, Maglocunus of de Excidio.
Unlike the previous sources we have been studying, the problem with analysing Geoffrey’s History is the huge number of copies (at least 200) which survive. The current editor, Neil Wright, is working on a detailed textual history, but until that is completed it is difficult to say which manuscripts give the best witness to Geoffrey’s intentions. Modern editors of Geoffrey’s work have used different criteria for which variant readings they prefer.
Malgo is a case in point. ‘Mabgo’, King of the Venedotians, appears in Cambridge University Library MS Ii.1.14 (1706) as edited by Griscom, the source of Thorpe’s popular translation. Griscom, however, had only the Bern Manuscript for comparison, which does not say anything about the king who ordered St David’s burial. Meanwhile, Faral’s edition of Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.2.21 (1125), combined with nine others, opts for Malgo, King of the Venedotians. Presuming this is the original reading, Geoffrey must recognise that Malgo of the Venedotians and Malgo, King of Britain, are the same person. Cadwallo gives his genealogy going back to Malgo, specifically stated to be the fourth ruler after Arthur. This is essentially the Harleian genealogy of Gwynedd, and Cadwallo’s father Cadvan(us) has been described as King of Gwynedd. This suggests that Geoffrey does associate Malgo King of Britain with North Wales. He would begin as King of North Wales in the time of Constantine, rule through the three years of Aurelius and the doubtless short reign of the, according to Gildas, aged Vortiporius, before becoming King of Britain. This neatly combines Maelgwn’s traditional location with Maglocunus’s wide power in Gildas.
The only incident of Constantine’s life which Geoffrey covers is his killing of the two royal youths in a church. According to Geoffrey, these are the sons of Arthur’s adversary, Modred, defeated in a civil war and pursued to monasteries in Winchester and London. More discreditable aspects of the story, such as Constantine’s oath not to use his wiles on the Britons, his ‘disguise’ as a holy abbot and the presence of the youths’ earthly mother, described by Gildas, are glossed over. The killings in church are, however, punished four years later by God. Constantine is buried at Stonehenge.
Constantine is succeeded by his nephew, Aurelius Conanus. I have suggested a family relationship between them, too, but in this case Geoffrey could equally well be guessing at a dynastic link. The other lion’s whelps, in Gildas the uncle of Maglocunus and his men, are transposed to Aurelius’s story. In Geoffrey’s version, Aurelius defeats his uncle, presumably Constantine’s brother, who should have ruled after him, and kills his sons. This replaces the untimely death of Aurelius’s father and brothers in Gildas. Aurelius’s involvement in civil wars is considered by Geoffrey as the one blot on the career of this ‘extraordinarily brave’ and ‘worthy’ king of the whole island of Britain. Aurelius comes to the throne a young man and dies just three years later, fulfilling Gildas’s suggestion that he will not live to see his descendants. Geoffrey’s version of his name ‘Aurelius Conanus’ is rather more likely than Gildas’s (punning?) Caninus.
Little is said about Aurelius’s successor, Vortiporius. He is a successful fighter against the Saxons, but none of the information from Gildas, not even his Demetian origin or his royal father, is given. He simply ‘governed the people frugally and peacefully’.
The detailed condemnation of Maglocunus is disregarded by Geoffrey, who paints the king in the best possible light: ‘He was the most handsome of almost all the leaders of Britain [the tallest, in Gildas], and he strove hard to do away with those who ruled the people harshly [the tyrants Gildas says he dispossessed]. He was a man brave in battle, more generous than his predecessors [even Gildas acknowledges this] and greatly renowned for his courage.’ Geoffrey interprets his epithet ‘insular dragon’ with the greatest hyperbole. Not only is he ‘ruler of the entire island [of Britain]’, he also conquers the six neighbouring islands of Ireland, Iceland, Gotland, the Orkneys, Norway and Denmark! The only bad thing Geoffrey finds to say about him is that he was ‘given to the vice of sodomy’, a probably over-literal interpretation of Gildas’s description of him behaving like ‘a man drunk on the wine of the sodomitic grape’.
These passages are no more than Geoffrey’s variations on Gildas’s themes. Apart from the synchronism with Constantine, Mabgo and the saints, there is no indication of any outside source. Geoffrey clearly knows no more than we do about Gildas’s tyrants. The other characters, like Maglocunus’s wives, Vortiporius’s father, the royal youths’ mother, are not even hinted at. Malgo and Agitius are no more than characters from Gildas, framing the story of the Saxon revolt and British recovery.
The House of Constantine
The story starts with the reign of Constantine ‘King of Britain’. This is the usurper Constantine III, discovered in Orosius’s history and played out to Geoffrey’s various distortions. Gildas had assigned the end of Roman rule in Britain to Maximus, and described the era which followed as being given over to kings of Britain, deposed by yet more cruel successors. It was reasonable for Geoffrey to conclude that Constantine III, who ruled later than Maximus, was one of those kings. Geoffrey shares Gildas’s view that Romans are a continental people, distinct from the inhabitants of Britain, so if Constantine is a Roman, he must come from overseas. In keeping with the detected bias, he is a Breton, brother of King Aldroenus of Brittany.
Geoffrey has little use for Constantine who briefly fights ‘the enemy’ before being murdered by a Pict. Vortigern, duke of the Gewissei, seizes power in the name of Constantine’s monk son, Constans, whom subsequently he has murdered. In this, Vortigern plays the role of Constantine III’s treacherous British lieutenant, Gerontius. Vortimer is briefly ‘King of Britain’ in keeping with Geoffrey’s view that all the major characters hold this rank.
Ambrosius is the son of King Constantine and his British bride, ‘born of a noble family’. This explains Bede’s description of them as ‘of royal rank and title’. On his father’s death (before the Saxon revolt rather than, as Gildas tells us, during it), Ambrosius and his brother are whisked off to Brittany while still infants. Vortigern is preoccupied about their possible return, explaining how in Historia Brittonum he can fear Ambrosius, even though he is still a child.
Geoffrey does not have an explicit chronological framework at this point. Without any idea of the identity of Agitius, he has nothing compelling him to place these events in the second half of the fifth century. If he has a plan, it is that the arrival of the Saxons corresponds with the early date (4
20s) in the Historia, synchronised to the early visit of St Germanus. This scheme, Constantine before 410, Vortigern and the Saxons 420, first generation of the Saxon wars under Ambrosius and his brother (450–60?) and final victory by Arthur (460–70?) is maintained with an insistence that Leo (470s) is the eastern Roman emperor at the time of Arthur’s post-Badon career. Gildas would, on this assumption, be writing c. 510 and Badon could equally well be forty-four years after a Saxon arrival as Bede has it, albeit one in the 420s.
Ashe argues that these are the ‘real’ dates, somehow preserved by such synchronisms as the reign of Emperor Leo (Ashe 1982). This is to read the information the wrong way round. Geoffrey had all the sources available to construct this chronology for himself, based only on the knowledge that Constantine III reigned before 410. It comes completely apart at the other end, when Arthur fights his last battle in 542. Geoffrey gives some exact lengths for parts of Arthur’s reign. Arthur is at least forty when he dies, after a reign of not much more than twenty-four years. Geoffrey must therefore imagine his reign starting c. 517, with Uther starting his reign c. 500.
Gildas cannot be writing until after the insular conquests of Malgo. Geoffrey tells us Constantine of Cornwall reigned for four years after killing the royal youths and that Aurelius ruled for three years in total. Vortiporius seems to have ruled for a reasonable amount of time. Gildas therefore can hardly have been born at the time of the battle of Mount Badon, as Geoffrey knows he must be, if this battle is in the 460s. It is this discrepancy which surely compels Geoffrey to gloss over the details of the earlier chronology, when no AD dates are given although he could easily have added them to his narrative.
The proof that the early dating is not ‘right’ is the appeal to Agitius. Geoffrey has no idea when or to whom this was sent. Yet this appeal was made in the second quarter of the fifth century, at the earliest. It cannot possibly pre-date the reign of Constantine III and Constans.
The Reign of Arthur Page 25