and Bede and Nennius—sometimes quoting their statements, more generally amplifying them almost beyond recognition.

Was Geoffrey merely an inventor? Sometimes—undoubtedly. The long strings of names of purely fictitious princes whom the Roman Consul summoned to fight against King Arthur, at a time when in sober history Justinian was Roman Emperor, are invented by Geoffrey. And consider too his parodies of the practice of historians of referring to contemporary events: an instance of the genuine article is given in Gerald’s Itinerary. “In 1188, Urban III. being pope, Frederick, Emperor of the Romans, Isaac, Emperor of Constantinople, Philip, King of France,” &c., &c. Now take Geoffrey’s parodies: “At this time, Samuel the prophet governed in Judæa, Æneas was living, and Homer was esteemed a famous orator and poet.” Or again: “At the building of Shaftesbury an eagle spoke while the wall of the town was being built: and indeed I should have transmitted the speech to posterity, had I thought it true, like the rest of the history. At this time Haggai, Amos, Joel, and Azariah were prophets of Israel.” One may be quite sure that passages like these are not derived from the writings of the ancients, or from oral traditions. One can in some cases trace back his statements and see how much he added to his predecessors. A good instance is his account of the conversion of the Britons under King Lucius, in Bk. IV., cap. 19 and 20, and V., cap. 1 (A.D. 161). Geoffrey’s account is circumstantial: King Lucius sent to the Pope asking for instruction in the Christian religion. The Pope sent two teachers (whose names are given), who almost extinguished paganism over the whole island, dedicated the heathen temples to the true God, and substituted three archbishops for the three heathen archflamens at London, York, and Caerleon-on-Usk, and twenty-eight bishops for the twenty-eight heathen flamens. Now all this is based on a short passage in Bede: “Lucius King of the Britains sent to the Pope asking that he might be made a Christian; he soon obtained his desire, and the Britons kept the faith pure till the Diocletian persecution,” which itself is amplified from an entry in the Liber Pontificalis: “Lucius King of the Britains sent to the Pope asking that he might be made a Christian.” This last does not occur in the early version of the Liber Pontificalis, and is irreconcilable with the history and position of the papacy in the second century; but is a forgery, inserted at the end of the seventh century by the Romanising party in the Welsh Church—the party desiring to bring the Welsh Church into communion with the Roman, and so interested in proving that British Christianity came direct from the Pope; and all the talk about the archflamens and archbishops, &c., is pure invention. Notice too what an important part the places with which Geoffrey is specially connected play in his history: Caerleon is the seat of an archbishopric and favourite residence of Arthur; Oxford is frequently mentioned though it did not exist until the end of the ninth century; the Consul of Gloucester (predecessor of Geoffrey’s patron, Robert, Consul of Gloucester) makes the decisive move in Arthur’s battle with the Romans.

A parallel case is Geoffrey’s account of Brutus and the descent of the Britons from the Trojans. The tradition is found in Nennius, and perhaps dates from the classical revival at the court of Charlemagne. It is clearly not a popular tradition, but an artificial tradition of the learned; but whilst Geoffrey did not invent the legend, he invented all the details—letters and speeches, and hairbreadth escapes and tales of love and war.

Probably his detailed accounts of King Arthur’s European conquests—extending over nearly all Western Europe, from Iceland and Norway to Gaul and Italy—are still more the work of Geoffrey’s inventive genius, though it is possible they may rest on early Celtic myths about the voyage of Arthur to Hades, as Professor Rhys suggests, or on late Breton traditions which mixed up Arthur with Charles the Great.

Now let us consider Geoffrey as a gatherer and transmitter of the genuine oral traditions of the Welsh and Breton people. Genuine traditions are true history in the sense that they preserve manners and customs and modes of thought prevalent at the time when they became current. Thus they are on quite a different level from Geoffrey’s inventions, though they cannot be taken as containing the history of any of the individuals to whom they profess to relate. He tells us in his preface that the actions of Arthur and many others, though not mentioned by historians, “were celebrated by many people in a pleasant manner and by heart,” were sung by poets and handed down from generation to generation, like the poetical traditions of every people in primitive times. There can be no doubt that Geoffrey collected a number of these old stories and wove them into his narrative. Thus, the story of King Lear and his daughters has the ring of a genuine popular tradition about it, though the dates and pseudo-historical setting were probably supplied by Geoffrey. Again, there were certainly prophecies attributed to Merlin current in Geoffrey’s time. But one may suspect Geoffrey of doing a good deal more than translate the prophecies of Merlin; he adapted them; one may even suspect him of parodying them. “After him shall succeed the boar of Totness, and oppress the people with grievous tyranny. Gloucester shall send forth a lion and shall disturb him in his cruelty in several battles. The lion shall trample him under his feet ... and at last get upon the backs of the nobility. A bull shall come into the quarrel and strike the lion ... but shall break his horns against the walls of Oxford.” “Then shall two successively sway the sceptre, whom a horned dragon shall serve. One shall come in armour and ride upon a flying serpent. He shall sit upon its back with his naked body, and cast his right hand upon its tail.... The second shall ally with the lion; but a quarrel happening they shall encounter one another ... but the courage of the beast shall prevail. Then shall one come with a drum, and appease the rage of the lion. Therefore shall the people of the kingdom be at peace, and provoke the lion to a dose of physic!”

Then as to Arthur. In Geoffrey’s history he appears mainly as a great continental conqueror—a kind of Welsh Charlemagne. “Many of the most picturesque and significant features of the full-grown legend (as Professor Lewis Jones points out)[1] are not even faintly suggested by Geoffrey. The Round Table, Lancelot, the Grail were unknown to him, and were grafted on the legend from other sources.” But he made the Arthurian legends fashionable; he opened for all Europe the hitherto unknown and inexhaustible well of Celtic romance; and it may be said without exaggeration that “no mediæval work has left behind it so prolific a literary offspring as the History of the Kings of Britain.”

The value of Geoffrey is not in his fictions about past history, but in his influence on the literature and ideas of the future. He stands at the beginning of a new age: he is the first spokesman of the Age of the new Chivalry. Read his glowing account of Arthur’s court, where “the knights were famous for feats of chivalry, and the women esteemed none worthy of their love but such as had