The Official Fictional History of Britain
900 years of historical fibs and fakery
Illumination of a 15th-century manuscript of Historia Regum Britanniae showing king of the Britons Vortigern and Ambros watching the fight between two dragons.
Making stuff up and pretending it’s true is a timeless pursuit. Politicians and despots have done it forever, and in this era of Trump, Putin, and misinformation, politically motivated fiction is a leading genre once again.
Modern political liars act out of greed, narcissism, and malice. If you’re feeling generous, you might be more sympathetic to professional liars from pre-modern times, especially historians, who lacked the documentary evidence to verify their assertions. There was often more misapprehension than malice behind their fibs.
For instance, imagine you’re Galfridus Arturus, more commonly known as Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first post-1066 writer to pen a book about the history of Britain, recording everything that ever occurred in the portion of the island conquered by the Normans. Your reference materials are scarce, to put it mildly, but your public is no less eager to hear what you have to say. So, where do you start?
Okay, before imagining that, a brief biog is in order.
Galfridus Arturus was born in Monmouth around AD 1095, became Bishop of St Asaph in 1152 (a mere ten days after being ordained a priest), worked as a secular canon – a kind of scholar-come-admin assistant – in the pre-University of Oxford, and died in 1155. He is thought to have been of Anglo-Norman or Breton rather than British/Welsh stock, possibly from one of the many Breton families that had supported William the Conqueror and settled in south Wales after 1066. Galfridus’ magnum opus, Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) was dedicated to two influential Norman Lords of the day – think of them as oligarchs or Elon Musks – Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and Waleran, Count of Meulan. These men were political rivals, so they are unlikely to have jointly commissioned the book. Geoffrey seems to have penned it first and then made his pitch for patronage.
It's probable that the surname “Arturus” was coined after publication, as Galfridus’ name suddenly became synonymous with the exploits of King Arthur.
You say Britain, I say New Troy
The volume Geoffrey of Monmouth produced, Historia Regum Britanniae, was a huge hit and remained so for the next 500 years. In brief, it invoked dubious and non-existent sources to relate how the British royal line originated with Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas of Troy.
The Trojans had been growing increasingly weary of their exile in Greece, and when the goddess Diana told Brutus of a land far to the west and ripe for conquest, he set sail. With a band of Trojan mercenaries, he raided his way through southern Europe, following the coast north until the island of Albion appeared through the fog.
Docking at Totnes in the late 11th-century BC, Brutus and his crew subdued the locals – a race of giants – and his chief henchman Corineus killed their leader, Geomagog, in a wrestling match. The island’s name was changed from Albion to Britain, after Brutus (albeit a garbled dedication). The Trojans founded Trinovantum, or New Troy – London – soon after. The linguistic ruse here was that the name of a Roman-era British tribe, the Trinovantes, appeared, to the imaginative mind, to mean “Troy novantes” or New Trojans.
Suitably unlikely hat for a bloke who never existed - Brutus, from "Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum" 1553, by Guillaume Rouille (1518?-1589).
After Brutus’ death, the island was divided between his three sons. Locrinus took the southern bit, Albanactus the north, and Camber the west (i.e., modern England, Scotland, and Wales). The wrestling champion Corineus claimed Cornwall (hence its name).
There were ups and downs in the centuries that followed. King Locrinus was defeated in civil war by Corineus and his daughter Gwendolin (the Queen, usurped in Locrinus’ affections by a German princess). The king, his lover and their child were executed. Later royal siblings routinely killed each other; King Mempricius was eaten by wolves; King Bladud died in a flying accident; and King Morvidus was eaten by a sea serpent.
On the upside, Bladud instigated a culture of academia, founding Oxford University and, as the reference above hints, inventing a flying machine. King Brennius conquered Rome, and King Arthur very nearly repeated his triumph but had to turn back after hearing the news that his nephew Mordred had usurped him. Britain weathered the Roman conquest without entirely relinquishing its throne or kings, and the whole brave enterprise was knocked on the head by the Saxon King Athelstan, turning up in the plot three centuries early to succeed the last king of Britain, Cadwallader, in the mid-seventh century.
Geoffrey’s dilemma – which side are you on?
Geoffrey fell in love with the mythology and fibs he was passing off as history, claiming he had based his book on extant historical texts, including "a very ancient book in the British tongue" that Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, had passed his way. No one other than the most wilfully blinkered antiquarian believes such a book existed. My suspicion is that Geoffrey wanted to believe his own fabrications but knew he needed a bit of evidence to score the winning hit. Making up that evidence didn’t impact the veracity of his tale – it was either bollocks or it wasn’t, regardless of the pseudo-facts he stacked up to justify it.
Historia Regum Britanniae is a political fantasy. Its author knew well that no one would be able to authoritatively question his thesis, and he also knew that confirmation bias rules the waves. People would read his exploits of heroes and legendary figures and be happy with the idea that this was a record of their illustrious ancestors. In my very unacademic flights of fancy, I imagine Geoffrey having a eureka! moment. Britain wasn’t a weak island tossing and turning on the whim of a succession of conquerors – Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman – but a nation of perpetual winners with a triumphant and unbroken line of descent from Troy to today’s Welsh Britons and Bretons. Britain’s inhabitants were kinsmen and allies of the Norman aristocracy.
Prior to the mid-twentieth century, history writing was a perilous business, as it required sufficient spin to please the ruling elite of the day – or, more to the point, to prevent the ruling elite from imprisoning or executing you (as in many authoritarian regimes today). Shakespeare, for example, had to present Richard III as a pantomime baddie to make the Tudor conquest look, if not entirely legit, then at least welcome.
The question was, could Geoffrey tread the fine political line without being strung up and gutted? He seems to have believed so. Confident that his book would be a comforting dynastic foundation for Norman nobility on both sides of the fence, he pitched it to them all.
At the time of Historia Regum Britanniae’s publication, the top of the feudal tree was newly occupied by Etienne de Blois, aka King Stephen, who had succeeded his uncle, Henry I. Stephen’s reign was about to fester in an appalling civil war later dubbed The Anarchy, when the throne was contested with the same visceral, tribal blood lust as the later Wars of the Roses or the Tory party post-Brexit.
The Historia’s first dedicatee was Robert of Gloucester, Henry I’s illegitimate son, who supported Stephen’s rival to the English throne, Empress Matilda (a title she inherited after marrying the Holy Roman Emperor). Matilda was Henry I’s daughter and nominated heir, the mother of future King Henry II.
The book was also dedicated to Waleran, Count of Meulan, who was a loyal supporter of King Stephen and, consequently, Robert of Gloucester’s arch rival.
Geoffrey knew he was doffing his cap to enemy factions. He was offering something greater than provincial politics – a story that united everyone as heirs of the Trojans, legitimate rivals in greatness to the Holy Roman Empire. He wanted his toast to land butter-side-up, whoever came out on top. Robert was a conduit to Empress Matilda, and Waleran was a leeway to King Stephen.
Stephen and Matilda slugged it out from 1139 to 1154, when the severely compromised king named his rival’s son Henry as his heir and then did the decent thing and died. Geoffrey of Monmouth passed away in the following year, and his actions, status and thoughts during the Anarchy are, sadly, unknown.
Portrait of Empress Matilda, from "History of England" by St. Albans monks (15th century); Cotton Nero D. VII, f.7, British Library.
A piece of England that’s forever Trojan
What Geoffrey had produced was an origins tale for Norman England’s Breton and Welsh nobility and, by extension, for all the Anglo-Normans and non-English British. It told the world that Britain had a heritage to rival that other nest of Trojan diaspora, Rome. This put the English throne above all others, in terms of pedigree – certainly higher than that Johnny-come-lately rival, the French throne. It also returned the partly-conquered Britons – the modern Welsh – to the centre of the story. William the Conqueror’s 1066 army had included many Breton men, and Brittany was, like Wales, a refuge of those heroic Britons of old.
Framing the story as a dynastic saga of “New Trojan” Britons undermined the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon lineages. Yes, okay, Saxon King Athelstan had defeated the Britons – but only briefly. The Norman invasion, with its Breton backbone, had returned uber-nobility to an island built on the stuff. This way, everyone with a stake in the Norman ascendency was part of the action-packed, Arthurian-drenched backstory. Everyone apart from the Anglo-Saxons, that is. The court spoke Norman-French, the Welsh and Bretons spoke the ancient British tongue, Geoffrey wrote in Latin, and the Saxons could take a running jump off the White Cliffs of Dover.
Equally importantly, written at a time of political upheaval, Historia Regum Britanniae told readers that the Golden Age (King Arthur) was there for the taking as long as the wreckers (Mordred) were not allowed to win. But in dedicating his book to Robert of Gloucester and Waleran of Meulan simultaneously, Geoffrey was being coy about the identities of Arthur and Mordred in the contemporary dynastic struggle.
The original fake news
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s claim that his Historia Regum Britanniae was a translation of an ancient Welsh book detailing the deeds of the British kings is as trustworthy as an orange American’s claim to make things great again. The narrative incorporates known sources such as the Historia Britonum (a ninth-century pseudo-history that gave Geoffrey the bare bones of his tales of Trojan conquest and King Arthur), the works of Bede and Gildas, and written bardic traditions and genealogies. However, this material probably informs less than 10% of Geoffrey’s history of the New Trojan dynasties.
You better believe it - The Battle Between King Arthur and Sir Mordred, 19th century, by William Hatherell.
Although the Historia Regum Britanniae was accepted as a valid source text for historians at least as late as Holinshed – Shakespeare’s primary source of British history – as early as 1190, William of Newburgh declared Geoffrey's accounts of Arthur and his successors as fabrications. Giraldus Cambrensis (1146–1223) made a subtle judgement of the book with a darkly humorous anecdote about a man possessed by demons:
If the evil spirits oppressed him too much, the Gospel of St John was placed on his bosom, when, like birds, they immediately vanished; but when the book was removed, and the History of the Britons by Galfridus Arturus was substituted in its place, they instantly reappeared in greater numbers, and remained a longer time than usual on his body and on the book.
But this is missing the point. If people want to believe they are a.) legitimate and b.) great, a book that confirms these things will be swallowed whole, all biases confirmed and all rational thinking switched off. In this respect – and as a crazy romp through centuries of events that never happened – Geoffrey’s work is on nodding terms with genius.
It’s also a book that has haunted me for thirty-plus years. I first read it during the research for my first book, Maypoles, Martyrs and Mayhem. I followed my nose to its later reiteration Brut by the early Middle English writer Layamon (itself a translation of the Norman writer Wace’s Roman de Brut). I decided there was material here for a fantastic novel, and plunged in.
This time last week, I finished a chapter of the novel’s third incarnation, taking the plot just beyond the death of Brutus’ son King Locrinus – i.e. 60 years into a 1,100-year sequence of events. I have no hope of completing it. My current aim is to finish with the flying king Bladud, but even that’s pushing it. I’d like to say “watch this space”, but I suspect death might be intervening long before the aforementioned king climbs into his winged chariot and crashes into the Temple of Apollo.
