Chapter 11 Colonial Preoccupations in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum

Michael Faletra

Nearly three quarters of the way through the sweep of legendary history that constitutes Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum, the narrative grinds almost to a halt. Whereas parts of the history had glossed over dozens of kings and hundreds of years, sometimes in a page or two, the pace of events lead- ing up to the reign of King Arthur had steadily slowed, only to arrive at a near standstill in Geoffrey’s description of Arthur’s Plenary Court. It is a moment of great political importance, the celebration of the king’s victory both over the Saxons who had plagued the realm for a generation and over much of what is now France: like several of his more successful predecessors on the British throne, Arthur returns to Britain a conqueror. The Plenary Court held to stage Arthur’s coronation and to celebrate his glorious new order takes place on Pentecost in the Welsh city of Caerleon: “Located in Glamorgan on the River Usk at a lovely site not far from where the Severn empties into the sea, it had an abundance of riches greater than that of any other city and was thus an excellent place to hold a high feast.”1 No expense is spared, Geoffrey reminds his Anglo-Norman readers, and he treats them to lavish descriptions of the coronation processions, the splendid regalia, the celebratory games, and the feasting for many hundreds of guests – all of which seem calculated to drive home the fact that ancient Britain had attained a cultural pinnacle: “Britain had at that point acquired such a state of dignity that it surpassed all other kingdoms in its courtliness, in the extravagance of its fineries, and in the pol- ished manners of its citizens.”2 In their enjoyment of the trappings of a cultural modernity characterized by courtly behavior and fine clothing (and later by Europe’s first literary description of a tournament), the ancient Britons under King Arthur revel in a Caerleon that stands as the metropole of expansive

1 DGB, ix.156.312–14: “In Glamorgantia etenim super Oscam fluuium non longe a Sabrino mari amoeno situ locata, prae ceteris ciuitatibus diuitiarum copiis abundans tantae sollempnitati apta erat.” All translations are my own. 2 DGB, ix.157.385–87: “Ad tantum etenim statum dignitatis Britannia tunc reducta erat quod copia diuitiarum, luxu ornamentorum, facetia incolarum cetera regna excellebat.”

© The Author, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004410398_013 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. 318 Faletra empire. The Arthurian moment is an imperial moment, and it reveals Geoffrey of Monmouth’s preoccupation throughout his writings with the dynamics of colonization and conquest. Among the many guests at this coronation are the subject-kings of Arthur’s newly-won and far-flung empire: the kings of Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Gotland, and the Orkneys all pay their obeisance. But the most prominent under-kings are the ones who lead Arthur’s coronation procession, namely the kings of Scotland, Moray, Cornwall, North Wales, and South Wales. The presence of these kings passes without comment, and Geoffrey tellingly never mentions Arthur as having subdued any of these areas. This silence, however, paradoxi- cally reveals one of the most important of the ideological underpinnings of the DGB, a phenomenon that Simon Meecham-Jones calls the “discourse of Britishness”, or what we might more broadly call the “myth” of Insular British unity, an idea that had assumed textual form as early as Gildas’s 6th-century The Ruin of Britain.3 As Meecham-Jones sees it, “the discourse of Britishness proclaimed the ‘natural’ unity of the island(s) of Britain, inferring from physi- cal continuity an inevitable political unity.”4 The ready submission of the kings of Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall to King Arthur ratifies Meecham-Jones’s in- sight, and it allows us to see more clearly that the concept of “Britain” itself is for Geoffrey hardly an apolitical one, suggesting that the island’s various ethnic or political entities are rightly or naturally subordinated to a greater whole. The very concept of Britain being named after its single founder – the Trojan exile Brutus – reinforces the concept of a primal British unity, a unity standing in contrast to the more piecemeal ethnic, linguistic, and political subdivisions of the island in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s own day. Geoffrey’s account of the initial division of the island into subsidiary realms brings to the fore some of the colonialist and imperialist impulses motivating his work. The second book of the DGB opens with what almost amounts to a second origin myth, the partition of the island after the death of its first king, Brutus, among his three sons Locrinus, Albanactus, and Kamber:

Locrinus, the eldest, possessed that part of the island that was later called Loegria after him. Kamber received the area that lies beyond the River Severn and which is now called Wales, but which was called for a long time Kambria after him, which is why the people of that land who speak

3 See Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (Arthurian Period Sources, 7), Chichester, 1978. 4 S. Meecham-Jones, “Introduction”, in R. Kennedy and S. Meecham-Jones (eds.), Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, New York, 2008, pp. 1–11, at p. 2.