Abstract
Medieval Welshmen had a very clear perception of their history. Their understanding of it stemmed from one seminal work, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, completed about 1136, which forms the basis of the Matter of Britain, one of the three great collections of stories of heroes from medieval Europe. Geoffrey set out to write the history of the Britons from the arrival of Brutus, a refugee from the fall of Troy who gave his name to Britain, to the death of the Welsh king Cadwaladr in 688; he claimed that his History was a Latin translation of a ‘very old book in the British tongue’.1 In it is recounted the legendary history of Britain and its kings, above all of Arthur, and also of the magician and prophet Merlin; indeed, Geoffrey was the conduit through which the whole Arthurian corpus found its way to Europe to become a part of the western cultural tradition. But for the Welsh Geoffrey provided an explanation of who they were and whence they had come. The story of their Trojan descent gave them a link with the world of classical antiquity, especially Rome, since Brutus was said to have been a descendant of Aeneas.
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Notes and References
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. and trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 51.
Ibid., pp. 282–3.
Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Historical writing’ in A. O. H. Jarman and G. R. Hughes (eds), A Guide to Welsh Literature (Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1976), p. 245.
The three versions of Brut y Tywysogyon have been edited and translated by Thomas Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1952, 1955, 1971); J. Beverley Smith, The Sense of History in Medieval Wales (University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, Inaugural Lecture, 1989), pp. 7–10.
Kathleen Hughes, The Welsh Latin Chronicles, Annales Cambriae and related texts (London: British Academy, 1974), pp. 11–28;
Thomas Jones, ‘Cronica de Wallia and other documents from Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3514’, BBCS, 12 (1946), pp. 27–44;
J. Williams ab Ithel (ed.), Annales Cambriae (London: Rolls Series, 1860).
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D. Simon Evans (ed.), Historia Gruffud vab Kenan (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1971).
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R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford 14: Life and Letters of Edward Lhwyd (Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 371.
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J. E. Messham, ‘The county of Flint and the rebellion of Owen Glyndwr in the records of the earldom of Chester’, Journal of the Flintshire Historical Society, 23 (1967–8), pp. 1–34;
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See, for example, J. Beverley Smith, ‘Llywelyn ap Gruffydd and the march of Wales’, Brycheiniog 20 (1982–3), pp. 9–22.
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© 1995 A. D. Carr
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Carr, A.D. (1995). Of History and Historians. In: Medieval Wales. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23973-3_2
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