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Traces and Myth, Whose History Began Entering Into the Consciousness of Normans Only in the Twelfh Century

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Traces and Myth, Whose History Began Entering Into the Consciousness of Normans Only in the Twelfh Century Kelsey Blake Te Britons and the Welsh in Twelfh-Century Vernacular Literature Te twelfh century saw a great wave of intellectual and historical writing in Europe as part of what is known today as the Twelfh Century Renaissance. Norman armies under the leadership of William the Conqueror had defeated the English in 1066, had claimed their land, and were establishing increasing control over the island. Many of the writings that emerged in this period concerned the history of the conquered English, the time of the Anglo-Saxons. Very few early histories mentioned the people who had inhabited the island before the Saxons, however. Tese people were the Britons, a group relegated to folkloretraces and myth, whose history began entering into the consciousness of Normans only in the twelfh century. Before the twelfh century the Britons had been overlooked by most historians, as the people and their accomplishments were considered unworthy of note. Te few historians who mentioned the Britons’ loss to the Normans attributed it to a faw inherent in the British people that caused their cowardice and instability. However, King Henry II’s reign brought forth a wave of literary works in England and France, many of which were inspired or infuenced by Geofrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a work from 178 Kelsey Blake Miniature of the battle between King Arthur and Mordred’s armies on Salisbury Plain. (Photo by Xxxx Xxxx.)1 the frst half of the twelfh century that introduced a new interpretation of the original inhabitants of Britain and the events that led to their decline. An analysis of these works provides a window into the minds of the authors and the patrons who requested and approved of these writings. Several authors translated Geofrey’s History from its original Latin into the French vernacular, while others borrowed his historical fgures and themes to create stories of their own. Geofrey’s reinterpretation clearly infuenced many of these portrayals of the Britons, who were described as a noble people whose kingdom and autonomy came to an end long ago, but whose essence survived in the Welsh. Tis notion shaped the image of the Welsh in these later twelfh-century works. While authors saw the Welsh as a barbaric and uncivilized race, this was due not to their innate wickedness so much as their distinct culture. Tis article will explore the popularity of Geofrey’s chronicle among members of the twelfh-century Norman court and the works in the French vernacular that took the History of the Kings of Britain as their inspiration. Tese authors drew upon the tales and fgures in Geofrey of Monmouth’s chronicle, which shaped their creation of a literary world that refected the courtliness expected in their own time and infuenced their depictions of the Welsh people. 179 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History Geofrey of Monmouth’s Alternative History of Britain Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss describes a type of story, the “Genesis of Disorder,” that is told in many diferent societies. “Te entire story aims at explaining why afer their frst beginning, a given clan or lineage or group of lineages have overcome a great many ordeals, known periods of success and periods of failures, and have been progressively led towards a disastrous ending,” Levi-Strauss explains.1 In the History of the Kings of Britain, Geofrey of Monmouth provides such a story, detailing the origin, rise, and eventual fall of the Britons. Monmouth’s account is flled with noble kings and tales of heroic deeds, countering previously held notions of the “worthless” Britons.2 His work also advances the legend that, afer their conquest by the Anglo-Saxons, the Britons had fed to the hills of Cambria, known in the twelfh century as Wales. Te legends claimed that the Britons still lived there and that their descendants had come to be called by a diferent name: the Welsh.3 Much of Geofrey’s text is believed to be invented.4 He claims to have learned of previously unreported events and unheard of kings through a mysterious book in the British tongue given to him by the Archdeacon of Oxford, but many scholars doubt that the book ever existed.5 Geofrey mentions in his introduction that stories of British kings were “proclaimed by many people as if they had been entertainingly and memorably written down.”6 Te source Geofrey draws upon for his most famous stories 1 Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2001), 32-33. 2 J.S.P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950); Siân Echard, “Geoffrey of Monmouth,” in The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Siân Echard (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 43-59. 3 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007). 4 There is much debate over the ancestry of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Some scholars believe he was of Welsh or Breton lineage, and invented the History out of a desire to present a more positive portrait of his ancestors. Others argue that his time spent living on the Welsh Marches, the border between Wales and England, gave him access to a unique variety of sources and tales. Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25; John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), 24-25; Tatlock, 440-443, 430. 5 Tatlock, 422-5; Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, 4. 6 Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, 4. 180 Kelsey Blake therefore was not a written and preserved text, but a body of oral tradition.7 Drawing upon sources diferent from those used by many other historians, Geofrey invented details as he saw ft, relating these stories in a way that allowed for a new interpretation.8 Geofrey infuenced later works in the twelfh century because his History, fantastical though some events in it may be, refuted a work that had previously been hailed as the undeniable truth of ancient British history, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Written in AD 731, Bede’s was one of the earliest historical works to detail the history of the island of Britain and its transition to the hands of the Anglo-Saxons.9 His depiction of the land’s former inhabitants, the Britons, would prove infuential, and thus any study of this subject must start with Bede. Bede portrays the Britons as a passive people, without control over their own fate, ultimately doomed to failure by their inherent faws.10 Bede wrote in a time when great transitions of power were attributed to the will of God.11 Unsurprisingly, then, he argues that the Britons failed because they fell out of favor with God. As he states in his address to king Ceolwulf, “If history records good things of good men, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good; or if it records evil of wicked men, the devout, religious listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and perverse and to follow what he knows to be good and pleasing to God.”12 According to Bede, God had placed the Anglo- Saxons in power over the Britons, who were found unworthy of their own leadership and even their own lands. Since the Britons were ultimately 7 Echard suggests that Geoffrey’s British book is “a place-holder for his access to oral traditions richer in his own time than their scattered survival today suggests.”: Echard, 45-7.For more, see Tatlock, 178, 206; Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 124. 8 Echard argues that “Medieval historians did not share our understanding of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’: as a branch of rhetoric, history was properly embellished in ways we might regard as essentially literary.”: Echard, 46. 9 Michelle P. Brown, “Bede’s Life in Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3-5. 10 J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Clare Stancliffe, “British and Irish Contexts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 69-78. 11 Stancliffe, 19; Alan Thacker states that Bede viewed historical writing as “the unfolding of God’s purposes for mankind as the world moved towards final judgment and the end of time.” Alan Thacker, “Bede and History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 170-176. 12 Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, t rans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R.E. Latham (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 41. 181 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History defeated, it stood to reason that they must have displeased God in some way, and deserved their fate.13 Scholars of this time judged Bede to be a trusted historian. William of Newburgh considered Bede the highest historical authority, one “whose wisdom and integrity it is sacrilegious to doubt.”14 Furthermore, he only trusted the British historian Gildas’s On the Ruin of Britain to the extent that the work agreed with the Ecclesiastical History.15 William of Malmesbury wrote of Bede, “I wonder which to praise the more, the great number of his writings or the modesty of his style.”16 William considered his work a continuation of the Ecclesiastical History, and himself Bede’s successor. Henry of Huntington used 132 out of 140 of Bede’s chapters in writing his Historia Anglorum, and he indicated that his patron wanted him to use Bede’s history as a reference for his own.17 Of 160 surviving manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History, 30 percent were copied in the twelfh century.18 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was not simply a historical work that happened to survive into the twelfh century: in the eyes of twelfh century historians Bede was “the standard against which all other historians must be measured.”19 Antonia Gransden argues that the Norman Conquest played a role in his popularity.
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