Reviews

THERE’S VERY LITTLE ARTHUR BUT A LOT OF DETAILED HISTORY IN THIS RE-EXAMINATION OF GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH’S HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF BRITAIN

A round-up of the latest military titles

Author: Miles Russell Publisher: Amberley Publishing Price: £9.99

In this fascinating book, Dr Miles Russell attempts to yoke together the archaeological and historical accounts of Britain from pre-history, through its four centuries’ emergence into written history, and its return to legend in the three centuries following the end of Roman rule. To do this, Russell returns to a text that has in recent years been ignored by serious scholars, being seen as a farrago of invention and fantasy: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the

Kings of Britain).

The problem for historians is that, for the two centuries following the end of Roman rule in Britain around 410 CE, there are precisely three contemporary documents: Patrick’s Confessio and Epistola ad Coroticum (probably dating to the second half of the 5th century) and De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), written in the first half of sixth century by a particularly dolorous monk called Gildas. In the following centuries, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Anglo-saxon Chronicle take up some of the slack, but from this it’s clear why the Dark Ages were so-called: there is virtually no record of some of the most important centuries in British history.

So it’s no surprise that when, in the 11th century, new Norman rulers found themselves in charge, they asked of their subjects how things had come to be like this. The most complete answer was given, around 1136, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose book goes through the kings of Britain from its first king, no less a man than Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas, Trojan prince and progenitor of Romulus and Remus, through kings including Lear (of Shakespearean tragedy fame) and Lud (the founder of London), and concluding with Arthur.

The Historia was taken seriously for centuries, until further scholarship showed that it bore almost no relation to what actually happened during the period it purported to cover.

But given the paucity of sources, Russell argues that it is worth making another, forensic examination of the text to see if it does carry any historical information. He argues that it does, preserving oral tradition from tribal groupings in southern England and king lists from western Britain. By comparing Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account with that of the 9th-century Historia Brittonum ascribed to Nennius, Russell argues that it is possible to tease out, through the different approaches of each author, something of the original sources. So Nennius is happy to give different accounts of the same reign, sometimes contradictory, but Geoffrey, committed to a linear account of the kings of Britain, either conflates different accounts or moves them to another period entirely in an effort to fill gaps. It’s a fascinating and scholarly examination of the evidence, adding in whatever can be gleaned from archaeology and other historical records. Given the sometimes tenuous links in the chain of argument – the text is full of ‘could be’ and ‘it is just possible’ – it’s unlikely to win too many scholars to the immediate acceptance of Geoffrey as a historical source, but if it serves to make the Historia a subject of serious historical study again, it will have served its purpose.

Oh, and while ‘Arthur’ appears in the title, he takes up less than 40 pages of the book; Russell concludes that he was a result of Geoffrey and Nennius conflating oral traditions of a war leader called Ambrosius Aurelianus, the only man Gildas has a good word for in his book, with later folktales that had changed the name to Arthur, and then writing Aurelius out of the story.

“IT’S CLEAR WHY THE DARK AGES WERE SO-CALLED: THERE IS VIRTUALLY NO RECORD OF SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CENTURIES IN BRITISH HISTORY”