SOURCE: Gerould, Gordon Hall. “King Arthur and Politics.” Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies 11, no. 1 (1927): 33-51.

[In the following essay, Gerould contrasts William's Deeds of the English Kings, Henry Huntingdon's History of the English, and Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain in an effort to understand the political significance of the appearance of the Arthurian legend in the twelfth century.]

There is nothing new in the statement that Geoffrey of Monmouth was inspired to write his great Historia Regum Britanniae by other considerations than a passion for historical truth; nor is there any doubt in the minds of scholars that it was owing to the influence of this book, direct and indirect, that the Arthurian stories leapt into general literary popularity just at this time.¹ In all the writing about these matters, however, I cannot find that anyone has ever suggested a line of inquiry that seems to me very helpful to an understanding of why and how the Arthurian romances came into being.

There has been a great deal of discussion, some of it fruitful and some of it barren, about the genetics of these works, as well as a considerable amount of sheer quarrelling about the relative contributions of Wales and Armorica to the stories upon which they were based; but there has been too little effort to study their origins in relationship to other phenomena, literary, political, and religious, of the twelfth century. Yet it should be evident to all of us that the sudden development of Arthurian romance must have come about through ideas and impulses more or less consciously operative in people of the time. Scholars have too often treated this sudden florescence of romance as if it were a true and not a metaphorical flowering: something botanical, uncontrolled by human action, which is to lose sight of the plain fact that neither spurious history nor acknowledged fiction comes into being of itself.

Of course we do know that stories about Arthur and at least some of his followers had long been told by the Celts. There is the reference in Nennius, which takes us back to the seventh century; there is the entry in the tenth-century Annales Cambriae, which mentions the battle between Arthur and Mordred; there are the monks of Laon, who found in 1113 that people in Cornwall believed Arthur to be alive, just as did the Bretons; and there is the allusion to Arthur from about the same time in the life of the Cornish Saint Carantoc.² William of Malmesbury, writing in 1125, was cognizant of these tales, but condemned them as unworthy of the real Arthur, whom “non fallaces somniarent fabulae, sed veraces praedicarent historiae.”³ According to William these were mere Britonum nugae, although he recorded in another passage⁴ the discovery of Gawain's tomb in Wales, explaining that it was the ignorance about Arthur's burial place which had given rise to the “popular songs” prophesying his return. William's account of the Saxon conquest is a sober one, depending upon Nennius and Bede. It is noteworthy that Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote his Historia Anglorum⁵ before 1133, added nothing to the account of Arthur found in Nennius, though he arranged the material otherwise than William. Gifted as he was with more imagination than critical sense, capable for instance of describing battles of the Arthurian period with invented detail, Henry nevertheless dealt with Arthur himself in a single chapter, lacking, it would appear, any impulse to enlarge upon the theme.

The ways of folk legend, if not past finding out, are undeniably dark; and we shall probably never know with any degree of certainty the extent and precise character of the naeniae to which William of Malmesbury referred. The phenomenon we are now considering is this: after Geoffrey of Monmouth published his astounding Historia, there followed, though not so immediately as we sometimes rather carelessly think, a succession of writers who made Arthur, before the twelfth century had run its course, the great king of romance which he has remained from that day to this. Geoffrey issued his history, we are fortunate in being able to say with precision, between 1136 and 1138.⁶

Several questions at once come to mind with reference to Geoffrey, only two of which concern us at present, since the very natural and important one about his sources has been admirably studied by the late Professor Fletcher and by many other scholars,⁷ while we may now hope for new light from Mr Acton Griscom. Quite as important as any other matters, however, are the questions of the extent to which Geoffrey's work differed in emphasis from previous chronicles, and of plausible reasons for his becoming the father of Arthurian romance. Was his history, in the first place, so new a departure? In the second place, what led him to give Arthur so important a place? If we could answer these questions—and I can pretend to do no more than make certain suggestions as to the second—we should come to a better understanding of the Arthurian florescence in the second half of the twelfth century.

The first question, happily, is not a difficult one. We need only compare the outline of Geoffrey's book with those of his immediate predecessors to see that even his ostensible purpose was different from theirs. William of Malmesbury called his book Deeds of the English Kings, Henry of Huntingdon entitled his a History of the English, but Geoffrey wrote a History of the Kings of Britain, which at once limited his scope in one sense and enlarged it in another.

William, a sober and sophisticated historian, and an honest one as modern research has proved,⁸ divided his history into five books. The first ran from the conquest of Britain by Julius Caesar to the reign of Egbert; the second went on from Egbert to the Norman Conquest; the third dealt with the reign of William I; the fourth had to do with English and Continental affairs during the time of William Rufus; and the fifth concerned itself with the days of Henry I. To Arthur he devoted part of one chapter in Book i, giving him as much space as the sources available warranted—and no more. Whatever fault may be found with William's judgment in dealing with this detail or that, there can be no question that he had both a sense of proportion and a sense of fact. He was, in short, a worthy example of twelfth-century scholarship, and he wrote after the best manner of his kind.

When we turn from him to Henry of Huntingdon's History of the English, we find ourselves in a different atmosphere. His first edition was divided into seven books, only two of which were concerned with the Norman Conquest and later events. He began with a description of Britain and took over from Nennius the Trojan foundation, but devoted most of the first book to the Romans. The second book described the Saxon conquest, and therefore included Arthur, but only in a single chapter—like William. His third book was an account of the conversion of the English and Scots; the fourth of English history down to the death of Egbert; and the fifth chiefly of the Danish wars. There is nothing wrong with his outline, therefore, but every evidence of carelessness in the treatment of events. Compared with William of Malmesbury, Henry was a very incompetent person, who thought to make up for general dullness by passages of flashy rhetoric and who was obviously incapable of the critical effort of his predecessor. Yet Henry, though without distinction of manner or close veracity of substance, was writing a survey of English history down to his own day and was not tempted to indulge his imagination except in details. What he might have done, had Geoffrey furnished him with the materials, his famous letter to Warinus, written in 1139, shows only too well.

Yet Geoffrey of Monmouth had an entirely different purpose, according to his own statement, and therefore a different scope. He had wondered much, he says, even before getting his “very ancient book” from Walter of Oxford, why Gildas and Bede had failed to tell of the kings who ruled Britain in the pre-Christian era, and failed also to tell of others, like Arthur, who lived in succeeding centuries. It is significant that, according to his own avowal, he had thus “wondered.” Walter's book, of course, enabled him to supply the lack; and nothing was ever more lordly than his epilogue, in which he grants to William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon their Saxon kings but enjoins silence about the kings of the Britons, since they do not possess the book that Walter brought from Wales.⁹

His theme was therefore the glory and the decadence of Roman and Celtic Britain, and with this theme the entire twelve books into which he divided his work are concerned. So fully was he informed that he does not reach the invasion by Julius Caesar until Book iv, although William of Malmesbury began with this event and Henry of Huntingdon came to it early in the first of seven books. That Geoffrey included in this section of his narrative various stories that have enriched later literature is beside the point of the present discussion. After two books devoted to the Romans, he arrives at the Pictish invasions, and so at his Arthurian material, which extends past the beginning of Book xi, while the remainder of that book and the twelfth are given up to Arthur's successors down to Ivor and Iny, who were kings of Wales only and ended the day of British supremacy.

Thus, although Arthur's actual reign occupies only slightly more than two books, more than half of the entire work is devoted to persons connected with his story. No wonder that Geoffrey remarked of Arthur in his Prophecies of Merlin, which constitute the seventh book: “et actus ejus cibus erit narrantibus.”¹⁰ As Fletcher so well said, “in his History Geoffrey did nothing less than to create the historical romance of Arthur for the mediaeval world”;¹¹ and his work as a whole is nothing less than the romance of Celtic Britain. In the matter he presented he was no rival of William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, for he pretended to be the historian not of the dominant races in the island but of the subdued and backward-driven Celts.

Why—we come now to the second and difficult question propounded above—should an aspiring scholar have thought it worth his while to gather the scattered materials he used, and stretch his imagination as he stretched it, to write a history of Celtic Britain? The suggestion proffered at the end of the twelfth century by William of Newburgh that Geoffrey and others who made up stories about Arthur did so either from an inordinate love of lying or for the sake of pleasing the Britons¹² is clearly inadequate, even though the famous story by Giraldus Cambrensis¹³ that the devils who were routed by the Gospel of John returned when Geoffrey's History was substituted, shows the same tendency of critical persons to look upon him with distrust. The explanation will not do, because no one has ever lied at such length and at such pains simply for the sake of lying, while it is unreasonable to suppose that Geoffrey had any special wish to placate the Welsh themselves. The Welsh of that day did not furnish prime ministers to England, with deaneries and bishoprics in their gift. That Geoffrey was an ardent patriot has been more than once suggested, but it does not seem probable on any score.

In the first place, there is no evidence, despite the Britonum nugae mentioned by William of Malmesbury, that a coherent legendary sequence about Arthur existed until Geoffrey created it. Indeed, the way he played upon passages from Nennius and Bede, using them as so many spring-boards for his airy flights, indicates pretty clearly his lack of any source that he could follow straight on. Moreover, there can scarcely have been a ‘Celtic movement’ to inspire him. In the second place, he was connected throughout his career with the Normans and English, and certainly wrote for them. Be it noted that he dedicated his Prophecies of Merlin to the great Alexander of Lincoln and his History—exclusively in its final form—to the still greater Robert, Earl of Gloucester, although he did not achieve a bishopric (or take full orders as a priest) until 1152. In addressing these men, he was unquestionably putting himself under the patronage of the two persons in high place most likely to appreciate literary efforts and to reward them.

Robert of Gloucester, as the one surviving son of Henry I, was a power in England not only before his father's death but still more during the reign of Stephen, when he became the chief stay of his half-sister, the Empress Matilda, and of her son, Henry of Anjou. Between 1136 and 1138, however, the date of Geoffrey's History, he was at peace with Stephen, having sworn a conditional oath of fealty in the former year, which he renounced in the latter.¹⁴ Although illegitimate, he had received great honors and wealth from Henry I, and gained much through his marriage. Indeed, he was like a vassal king in the western counties and the Welsh marches, and he was withal accounted a man of learning—Beauclerc like his father. To him William of Malmesbury addressed his Gesta Regum in 1125 and later his Historia Novella. If he could never quite hope to be king, he was certainly a good person to have for friend. It is perhaps not without significance that Geoffrey in his dedication referred to him as if another Henry.

Alexander of Blois, too, who became Bishop of Lincoln in 1123, was a great personage in his day. William of Malmesbury says in downright fashion: There were then two most powerful bishops in England, Roger of Salisbury and his brother's son, Alexander of Lincoln.¹⁵ Roger was justiciar of England and in Stephen's reign papal legate, but he was scarcely more magnificent than his nephew, a worldly Norman prelate more concerned with politics than with the practice of religion perhaps, but a patron of letters withal. Henry of Huntingdon, who—about 1133—dedicated to him his History, says that he wrote the work at the bishop's command, which may very well be true. Alexander was considered a learned man, even though it was probably flattery on Geoffrey's part to say that he would have sung “prae ceteris audaci lyra”¹⁶ if he had not been called to higher things.

My point in citing these magnates of state and church is not merely to show that Geoffrey of Monmouth was ambitious, which is sufficiently evident from what we know of his career as a whole,¹⁷ nor that he was aware of the chief fountain-heads of honor in his time. The point is rather, it seems to me, that he should have hoped to interest the prince of the royal house and the great prelate in the romance of British history, and that, judged by the later fame of the book, he should have been so successful in doing this. It might be argued, to be sure, that Earl Robert, as lord of the West, would have liked to know the past of his Welsh neighbors; but it could hardly have been expected that he would welcome a glorification of their kings. It could not have been expected, that is, unless there were reasons other than propinquity to account for it.

To understand the situation as I see it, one must view both sides of the Channel at once and notice certain parallels in the history of the Capetian and Norman dynasties, which can scarcely be fortuitous and which throw a very interesting light on literary as well as political events of the twelfth century.

Hugh Capet dispossessed the last of the feeble Carlovingians in 987, and in that same year had his son Robert II (the Pious) crowned and anointed, the double rite having been instituted in 816 for Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne. As Professor Marc Bloch has shown in his wholly admirable work, Les rois thaumaturges,¹⁸ it was quite possibly Robert II, who reigned from 996 until 1031, who first “touched” for scrofula. Certainly his grandson Philip I (1060-1108) exercised this regal and dynastic gift, and by the time of Louis VI (1108-1137) the custom was firmly established in tradition. M. Bloch pertinently remarks¹⁹ that one has difficulty in believing that this crystallization of thaumaturgic power took place with no thought of its political bearing on a dynasty still far from sure of its position. It must be remembered, furthermore, that the French kings considered themselves successors of Clovis, in connection with whose baptism, according to a legend first recorded by Hincmar of Rheims in the ninth century, the Sainte Ampoule was divinely provided. This phial containing celestial balm was preserved in the Abbey of Saint-Rémi, and was produced at the consecration of all kings of France, who thus had a sanction to which English kings could not aspire until a far later date.²⁰

By the end of the eleventh century, the house of Capet was thus buttressed by a set of beliefs and practices that were of inestimable advantage to monarchs surrounded by hostile rivals and ambitious vassals. The Capetians might lack the energy and sagacity of the house of Anjou, for example, but they were more highly favored of Heaven than any other sovereigns in Europe; and in the long run they gained solid power from such imponderables as miraculous unction and the gift of healing. Robert II, Henry I, and Philip I were not great kings, as the world counts success, but they managed to attain, or their counsellors attained for them, a unique position. It may be surmised that the final emergence of France, as France, from the welter of struggling dukedoms was due, in a far higher degree than historians have been accustomed to tell us, to the factors here mentioned. Feeling is, after all, one of the great realities of politics in any age.

Since the Capetian dynasty regarded itself, and was regarded, as carrying on the succession of Merovingian and Carlovingian rulers, it benefited also, without much doubt, from the extraordinary and complicated growth of the chansons de geste in the second half of the eleventh century. Whatever may be thought of Professor Bédier's conclusions as to the making of the French Epics,²¹ it is scarcely disputable that he has shown them to be a product—and what we may justly term a literary product—of the eleventh century, and of no earlier date. Their development thus synchronized with the accession of sanctity attained by the Capets. It would be absurd to argue, of course, that the royal line of France fostered the growth of the Charlemagne legend in order to strengthen its own position; for that would attribute to those monarchs a machiavellian shrewdness certainly not theirs, and it would have been impossible geographically besides. It is almost certain, however, that they profited from the popular fame into which the great emperor emerged. How could have it been otherwise, since they traced their sacred descent far back of his time to Clovis himself? Feeble though they were, the divine sanction was there, and it must have come to the minds of men as they listened to the tales of the heroes who surrounded Charlemagne. Bédier's suggestion²² that the very insignificance of such kings as Robert II, Henry I, and Philip I recalled the glories of Charlemagne by contrast, and was partly responsible for the development of the chansons de geste, may possibly be right; but it seems to me more probable, in view of Capetian success during the same period in asserting a distinctive claim to sovereignty, that the romantic tales merely strengthened—even if fortuitously—a growing sentiment of nationality, which looked to the kings of France for titular leadership.

Across the Channel, a Duke of Normandy seized the English throne in 1066, when Philip of France was still at the beginning of his long reign. Duke William won and held his kingdom by right of conquest; but he took pains, as everyone knows, to make it appear that he and not Harold was the legitimate ruler of the land and the proper heir of Edward the Confessor. He was wise enough to see that only by a process of adaptation and amalgamation could his successors and the Norman nobles keep what they had won. The results of his policy are descernible even in the reign of his not very wise or successful eldest son, when in the wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows itself in the altered use of names; the appellations ‘Norman’ and ‘French’ are reserved exclusively for the duke and his allies, and the supporters of the king of England are all counted together indiscriminately as English.²³ Henry I, who was an astute if not a brilliant monarch, married a granddaughter of Edward the Confessor, thus linking his house more firmly with the old line of Saxon kings. Their son William, born in 1103, seemed destined to settle for all time any question of Norman rights to the throne of England. But William perished when the White Ship went down in 1120, and by his death made perhaps inevitable the struggle between Stephen of Blois and the Empress Matilda that followed 1135.

Henry Beauclerc, as M. Bloch has shown,²⁴ probably touched for the evil, although the evidence for it is an indirect reference by William of Malmesbury,²⁵ who was concerned at the moment with Edward the Confessor rather than his own king. M. Bloch's inference that Henry I began the practice in England is strengthened, however, by the quite unequivocal testimony of Peter of Blois²⁶ as to its customary and conventionalized use by Henry II. It would be extremely interesting to know, although we are unlikely ever to discover, whether Henry Beauclerc assumed the power in the lifetime of Prince William, or only when his hope of leaving his crown to a son who united the English and Norman dynasties was so violently shattered. In any case, it would have been very natural for Henry to take up the practice, very easy for him to believe in the thaumaturgic efficacy of his touch, for he must have regarded himself as quite as good a king as his feudal lord and rival, Louis VI of France.

We know—again through the researches of M. Bloch—that Henry Beauclerc was not averse from taking advantage of his connection with the English house.²⁷ Instead of acknowledging his imitation of the Capetians in the matter of healing, he—or the monks of Westminster for him—developed a suitable legend with regard to Edward the Confessor, according to which the Saxon king “touched” successfully by virtue of his royalty. William of Malmesbury's otherwise somewhat equivocal reference makes it abundantly clear that in 1124 the belief was current—a falsity, William thought—that Edward's healing power came non ex sanctitate, sed ex regalis prosapiae hereditate. Henry undoubtedly profited by this belief, as he did by the rise of the cult of St Edward which accompanied it.

The story of this development, indeed, is an interesting one, and pertinent to our inquiry. Edward, who died at the opening of the year 1066, had acquired no reputation for sanctity during his lifetime, nor do references that immediately followed his death indicate that he was regarded as a person of distinguished holiness. The tendency to elevate him to sainthood must have begun ere long, however, since two writs from the time of Abbot Gilbert Crispin, who ruled Westminster between 1085 (or thereabouts) and 1117, state that refugees sought sanctuary at “the altar of St Peter and the body of King Edward.”²⁸ The movement, quite possibly begun by popular veneration, was equally useful to the abbey and to the Norman kings, who from the first had virtually adopted Edward as their own and in the person of Henry I had allied themselves with his blood. How cleverly the monks fostered the cult is shown by a prophecy attributed to the Confessor, which is found in an anonymous Vita²⁹ written between 1093 and 1120 and referred to by William of Malmesbury towards 1125.³⁰ This prophecy clearly indicated young William, the son of Henry, as destined to heal the land of its ills, he being a bough reunited to the ancestral stock.

Although the busy propagandist who invented the prophecy was doomed to disappointment in the early death of the prince, he and his fellow-workers succeeded in attaching to the Norman house the legend of a saint in the making. Osbert of Clare, in 1138, could write a life of Edward that showed him ready for canonization, and doubtless could write it in all sincerity, although it was not till 1161, when a more politic king than Stephen was on the throne, that the Saxon monarch was finally made a saint. For Ailred of Rievaulx, who in 1160 wrote the official Vita, St Edward's prophetic vision was adequately fulfilled in the fusion of races that had taken place.

The Norman dynasty had thus acquired before the end of Henry Beauclerc's reign not only power, but most of the trappings of power so valuable by way of inspiring respect. It had not, to be sure, the royal balm descended from Clovis, which gave the French kings a special sanction; but it had coronations and anointings, and it had established relations with a member of a former dynasty whose repute for sanctity was growing and was certain to lead to canonization in due time. Perhaps, after all, it was quite as satisfactory to lean for support on the divine favor accorded to the grandfather of a living queen as on someone so remote as Clovis. Furthermore, the Norman line gave proof of its legitimacy by its thaumaturgic gift: Henry by a touch of his hand could heal the evil as well as Louis, and must therefore be an equally sacred king.

In one essential respect only was the English dynasty less well provided than the French with the pomp and circumstance of royalty. There was not in the background any figure of heroic size such as Charlemagne had come to be in the imagination of the eleventh century. The Capetians could not lay claim to descent from the mighty emperor, but the legitimacy of their succession from him was attested by the sacred gifts they possessed. England had no such world-conqueror to boast; and a dynasty become English in sentiment, if not in manners and speech, could not well encourage its supporters to chant a Song of Roland as a Norman duke could afford to do in 1066. There were plenty of Anglo-Saxon royal saints, to be sure, who were not neglected in the new era,³¹ but nowhere in English history was there a universal glory like Charlemagne.

It is Geoffrey of Monmouth's one clear title to genius, I believe, that he saw the situation as it was: that only from British history could the want be supplied. He well deserved all the fame he won in his own day, and all the fame that has been his ever since—in spite of detractors—if only for the moment of inspiration when he conceived the notion of his “librum vetustissimum, qui a Bruto primo rege Britonum usque ad Cadwaladrum filium Cadwalonis, actus omnium continue et ex ordine perpulcris orationibus proponebat.”³² Indeed, he deserved a much greater reward than was his in his own lifetime, since what he accomplished by his pen was something of inestimable advantage to his country—something worth infinitely more than the inconspicuous bishopric of St Asaph's.

Some strokes of political genius, however, and most literary inspirations can scarcely be paid for in worldly honors, the more so that frequently their importance is not understood at the time. Of necessity, it seems to me, Geoffrey had to veil himself behind his “very old book” and Walter of Oxford, who was erudite “in exoticis historiis.” There is no sense in regarding Geoffrey as a vulgar forger or a humorist. He could not well pose as the discoverer of hidden things; he must appear merely as the disseminator of information that ought to be common knowledge. Yet it is more than possible that he won less personal reputation by his book because he wrote himself down simply as translator and compiler.

It has never been suggested, I believe, but it is a point to consider in connection with Geoffrey's intentions that his seventh book, the Prophecies of Merlin, so curiously rivals and outdoes the single prophecy attributed to Edward the Confessor, discussed above. This seventh book, perhaps in a longer form, appears to have been issued as a separate work before the publication of the History.³³ It was dedicated, as we have seen, to Alexander of Lincoln. Now, Professor Rupert Taylor in his very useful monograph, The Political Prophecy in England,³⁴ has shown it to be a peculiarity of Geoffrey that he used animals and trees as prophetic symbols, which connects his work with later Welsh poems in which the same device is found. We have noted that the Edwardian prophecy employs a tree with its branches to hide its meaning; noted, too, that by 1120 the prophecy was famous.³⁵ Geoffrey could perfectly well have received the inspiration for his libellus from this source, carrying out the idea with the thoroughness so characteristic of him. In saying this, I do not imply, however, that he may not have obtained material for some of his prophecies from Welsh or Breton sources, but merely the probability that he was stimulated by the success of the earlier vision.³⁶

In many ways, though the idea and its execution were so admirably adapted for success, the date of publication of Geoffrey's Historia was a bad one. As I have already said, we know that the book must have been given to the world between 1136 and 1138. Stephen of Blois had made his coup d'état after Henry's death at the end of 1135, and in the following spring Robert of Gloucester had given his conditional oath of fealty; but no thoughtful person could have failed to have misgivings about the new reign. Hope there must have been, nevertheless, that Stephen—impulsive and likable—would keep his oath to follow out the policies of his late uncle. Actuated by some such hope, no doubt, Geoffrey, who had just dedicated his book to the Earls of Gloucester and Mellent, changed the dedication to exclude the latter, putting the new king in first place. One extant manuscript³⁷ thus links Stephen and Robert. It is not inconceivable that the ambitious author may have believed the time propitious to launch a history designed at once to put such fellows as William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon in their place,³⁸ to flatter the followers of Earl Robert who had Celtic blood, and to show to all the world that young King Stephen had predecessors as glorious as any of whom King Louis could boast. There was Arthur, his whole life now made clear to anyone who could read Latin—Arthur, before whom the kings of the Continent bowed down either in fealty or fear—Arthur, who worsted even the Emperor of Rome. Charlemagne was no greater, and he was much less ancient.

Unfortunately Stephen did not keep the peace with Gloucester, but in the summer of 1138 seized his castles and plunged the country into a devastating civil war. It must have seemed to everyone then that Geoffrey had hit upon a very inauspicious time to celebrate the splendors of the past, unless indeed as consolation for the sorry present.

Some immediate success the Historia must have had, or so we are led to believe by the twin double dedications. We know from the case of Osbert of Clare, who presented his Vita of Edward the Confessor to the new papal legate in 1138, and took it to Rome, together with other documents, presumably in the following year,³⁹ that what we nowadays call propaganda did not cease when Stephen quarrelled with Robert of Gloucester. It is perhaps significant, however, that except for Gaimar no writer in the vernacular literature shows the influence of Geoffrey until the end of Stephen's reign. The flowering of romance, as I have already hinted, did not come at once. It was delayed for some two decades, and began almost immediately after Henry II came to the throne.⁴⁰ One is led to believe that the advent of Henry Plantagenet, with a court acknowledged to be one of the most brilliant in Europe, brought Geoffrey's work into prominence and gave rise to the romances that drew upon it for material.

What can be said safely is this: the coincidence in the cultivation of various means calculated to increase the prestige of the Norman dynasty, so curiously paralleling similar movements in France, shows that Geoffrey's History was even more important than it has hitherto been considered. The researches of many scholars have demonstrated that stories about Arthur were circulating both in Wales and in Brittany when Geoffrey wrote.⁴¹ They have not shown, however, that the “popular songs” mentioned by William of Malmesbury were coherent, well-organized tales. Since investigation has proved that Geoffrey, while using Nennius and Bede extensively, while adapting themes from the Old Testament and certainly picking up much from current tradition, invented and embroidered with the utmost freedom, we are forced to the conclusion that without him there might never have been any Arthurian romances at all.

Geoffrey formed Arthur in the image of Charlemagne—for very good and sufficient reasons, as I have tried to show. Whether or not he was wholly conscious of these reasons matters little, though I cannot help believing that he was. His was the notion of Arthur, I need scarcely say, that persisted in all the romances except a few late ones of English derivation. If Arthur became the centre for the exploits of the knights of the Round Table, but himself took small part in them, it was because his position had been fixed by Geoffrey as a world-conqueror: he was too lofty a person to be involved in adventures by the way. M. Bédier has pointed out that Charlemagne, in the same fashion, was almost never given the centre of the stage in the chansons de geste. It is not without significance that Geoffrey listed the Twelve Peers of France among Arthur's lords.⁴²

If the views I have been presenting have validity, it follows that the question as to the Welsh versus Armorican derivation of the material used by Geoffrey, and by the romancers after him, has less importance than has been assumed. If, that is to say, the genre of Arthurian romance be conceived not as a self-directed and spontaneous growth, but as a kind of fiction cultivated by story-tellers perfectly conscious of what they were doing, there is no reason why the story-tellers should not have derived suggestions from the folklore of both Brittany and Wales, at the same time adapting and inventing without scruple. The sanctity of popular tradition is a fetish of modern scholarship: it was no affair of mediaeval writers.

That material was readily accessible from Cornwall, as well as Wales and Brittany, scarcely needed demonstration, though it has been sufficiently proved many times over. Under the conditions that existed, there was no strict line of separation between Celtic and non-Celtic populations. Did not the monks of Laon visit Cornwall as well as Devon in 1113? Did not Henry I plant a colony of Flemish folk in the heart of Wales?⁴³ Was not Brittany allied now with Anjou and now with Normandy; and did not Breton troops serve under William the Conqueror? It is not unlikely that Geoffrey of Monmouth himself had Breton blood, though born in Wales.⁴⁴ Such waifs and strays of tradition as would serve the turn of romancers were to be had from every side; and it is quite apparent that writers were not too particular about the genuinely Celtic provenience of everything that went into a Breton lay or an Arthurian romance.

Should anyone inquire how it happened that a set of stories developed in England to enhance the glory of English kings and minister to the pride of nobles who had learned to call themselves English, to serve withal as a balance against the tales of Charlemagne, came to be woven into romances chiefly at the rival court of France, my answer is ready. Such was not the case. We know all too little about the Arthurian romancers of the twelfth century, but we can say with considerable assurance that it was neither Louis nor Philip Augustus who fostered their undertakings.

Gaimar wrote for the benefit of an Anglo-Norman lady, and Wace, according to Layamon, presented his Brut to Queen Eleanor of Poitou. The enigmatic Marie de France, whoever she may have been, was somehow connected, everyone now agrees, with the court of Henry II.⁴⁵ The equally unknown authors of the two early poems on Tristan, Thomas and Béroul, were respectively Anglo-Norman and Norman. Chrétien de Troyes had as patrons Marie de Champagne, the daughter of Eleanor of Poitou, and Philip, Count of Flanders. Robert de Boron's dialect has been much in dispute, but has been thought to have Anglo-Norman characteristics, though prevailingly that of Picardy. Attempts have been made to identify him with two knights holding land in England; and he himself refers to Gautier de Mont-Belial as his lord, Mont-Belial being interpreted as Montbéliard in Burgundy. Wauchier de Denain, finally, appears to have written his continuation of Chrétien's Perceval while under the protection of Philippe, Marquis de Namur.

What can be ascertained from dialect and dedications indicates, accordingly, that the Arthurian material was used in the first place by writers who either had English or Norman connections, or at least were not nearly concerned with the prestige of the French kings as set over against the English. Once popularized, of course, the stories belonged to all the world, and were obviously used and embroidered by Continental writers without thought of any dynastic or national considerations. Chrétien de Troyes, who cannot have been a nationalist of any stripe any more than his royal patroness (or her mother, for that matter) may well have been the chief instrument by which the matter of Britain passed into the realm of pure fancy. But Geoffrey of Monmouth, meanwhile, had accomplished his purpose: he had romanticized England's past, and done it so effectually that we are under the spell of Celtic tradition even to this day.

Notes

1. J. D. Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance (1923), I, 20.

2. For a convenient summary of these references, see Bruce, op. cit., I, 6, 12.

3. De Gestis Regum, i, 8, ed. Stubbs, 1887, Rolls Ser. XC, 1, 11-12.

4. iii, 287, Stubbs, II, 342.

5. Ed. T. Arnold, 1879 (Rolls Ser. LXXIV).

6. See Sir F. Madden, The Archaeological Journal, XV (1858), 299-312; A. Leitzmann, Arch. f.d. Stud. d. neueren Sprachen, CXXXIV (1916), 373-75, and Bruce, op. cit., I, 18, note. Of even greater importance is Acton Griscom, “The Date of Composition of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia,” Speculum, I (1926), 129-156, which embodies the results of the first systematic examination of MSS ever made. It is regrettable that one cannot accept as anything better than an interesting possibility Mr Griscom's suggestion that the Historia was completed by the spring of 1136.

7. R. H. Fletcher, Arthurian Materials in the Chronicles, [Harv.] Studies and Notes in Philol. and Lit., Vol. X (1906), remains the most important landmark. See Bruce, op. cit., I, 20-23, for a review of investigations in this field.

8. The crucial test is his little work On the Antiquity of Glastonbury, which W. W. Newell stripped of its later accretions (Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn., XVIII, 1903, 459-511) as did Dean J. Armitage Robinson even more clearly (Somerset Historical Essays, London: H. Milford, 1921, pp. 1-25). It is unfortunate that Dean Robinson failed to read the earlier monograph and give due credit to it.

9. If ex Britannia can bear this meaning, as I believe. It seems to me that chapters 17 and 18 of Geoffrey's Book xii, coming as they do just before the passage cited, make his usage plain.

10. Ed. San Marte, p. 93.

11. Op. cit., p. 56.

12. Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Proemium, ed. Howlett, Chronicles of Stephen (Rolls Ser. LXXXII, 1, 14). I quote the translation by Fletcher, op. cit., p. 102.

13. Itin. Cambriae, i, 5, ed. J. F. Dimock (Rolls Ser. XXI, p. 58).

14. William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, i, ed. Stubbs, II, 541 and 545.

15. Hist. Novella, ii, ed. Stubbs, II, 547.

16. vii, 2, ed. San Marte, p. 92.

17. It is certainly significant that he never visited his remote bishopric of St Asaph's, though appointed to it two years before his death.

18. Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Strasbourg, Fasc. 19, 1924, pp. 29-41.

19. Idem, p. 81.

20. See Bloch, pp. 224-229, for the French legend, and pp. 238-242, for the English imitation. Henry IV, be it noted, was the first king to use the sacred oil in England: Henry IV, whose rights were far from clear.

21. J. Bédier, Les légendes épiques, 4 vols., 2d ed., 1914-21.

22. Op. cit., IV, 454.

23. K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings (London and New York, 1887), I, 24.

24. Op. cit., pp. 41-49.

25. De Gestis Regum, ed. Stubbs, I, 273.

26. Migne, Patr. Lat., CCVII, col. 440.

27. Bloch, op. cit., pp. 47-49, 82-84; and, more particularly, “La vie de S. Édouard le Confesseur par Osbert de Clare,” Analecta Bollandiana, XLI (1923), 17-44.

28. J. Armitage Robinson, Gilbert Crispin (Cambridge: University Press, 1911), p. 37.

29. Ed. Luard, Lives of Edward the Confessor, 1858, pp. 430-31 (Rolls Ser. III). For the date, see Bloch's masterly discussion, op. cit., pp. 17-44.

30. De Gestis Regum, v., ed. Stubbs, II, 495.

31. See Gerould, Saints' Legends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916), pp. 132-136, 140-142.

32. Historia Regum, i, 1, ed. San Marte, p. 3.

33. The evidence rests on Geoffrey's own statement and on the quotations made by Ordericus Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, xii, 47, ed. LePrévost, IV, 486-492.

34. New York: Columbia University Press, 1911, pp. 45-47.

35. Professor Taylor's slighting reference to the Vision of Edward, p. 8, is not strange, since its importance had not been demonstrated at the time he wrote.

36. In view of Geoffrey's reference to his shepherd's pipe (fistula), his rustic pipe (agrestis calamus), as well as to his folk melody (plebeio modulamine), in the epistle which he sent, according to his own statement, with the Prophecies of Merlin to Bishop Alexander, it seems evident that he could not have had in mind simply the prose prophesies as they are found in Book vii of the Historia. He says of Alexander, furthermore: qui prae ceteris audaci lyra caneres. What does all this mean? It has never been explained.

37. Codex 568, Staatsbibliothek, Bern. The description by Acton Griscom, op. cit., supersedes all previous accounts. Mr Griscom's argument that Geoffrey's double dedication to Robert of Gloucester and Waleran, Earl of Mellent, preceded that to Stephen and Robert seems to me as sound as it is brilliant. I take the more pleasure in saying this, since I cannot accept as proved his attempt to give a precise date for the double dedications. Similarly, Mr Griscom's “The Book of Basingwerk and MS. Cotton Cleopatra B. V,” Y Cymmrodor XXXV (1925), 49-116, XXXVI (1926), 1-33, has the great value of showing quite conclusively the need for proper texts and textual studies of the Welsh chronicles posterior to Geoffrey, even though the arguments for the existence of Walter's book seem to me negligible.

38. It is interesting that this gibe is not found in one Cambridge MS., as Mr Griscom shows, Speculum, I (1926), 137, but it does not affect my argument.

39. See Bloch, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

40. Wace's Brut, 1155, and Thomas's Tristan, 1155-70, are, by common agreement, among the earliest.

41. About the evidence from the reliefs in Lombardy, there is still the gravest doubt.

42. ix, 12, ed. San Marte, pp. 132-3.

43. William of Malmesbury, De Gestis Regum, v, ed. Stubbs, II, 477.

44. See Bruce, op. cit., I, 19.

45. See, Die Lais de Marie de France, ed. K. Warnke (Bibliotheca Normannica, Vol. III, 3d ed., 1925), pp. iii-ix.