Invented and Manufactured History

Abstract

In 1138, at the height of the Mediaeval period and less than seventy-five years after William the Conqueror led his Norman barons into Britain, an imaginative Welshman, Geoffrey of Monmouth, completed a detailed account (in Latin, of course) entitled The History of the Kings of Britain. In it he gave the British people an apocryphal, proud, and noble Trojan ancestor, Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas. With this fine pedigree rooted in the ancient and classical civilizations, he dispelled any thoughts that the ancient British might have been rude barbarians beyond the reach of the Graeco-Roman world. He was most resourceful in applying his rich imagination to filling in the many gaps in early British history. He successfully pandered to the sensibilities of his Norman patrons. He related stirring accounts of heroic times, such as the story of King Lear, ready for Shakespeare to exploit centuries later. He created the channel through which the enduring Arthurian legend is transmitted to an appreciative audience year after year. But more than anything else, Geoffrey of Monmouth started a grand tradition of invented history. Earlier British writers had also invented parts of their historical accounts, but Geoffrey's rousing good stories immediately became popular throughout Europe and remained so well into the eighteenth century. That great tradition of invented history continues its powerful influence into the present day, as the persistent efforts of some Scottish nationalists attest. The English-speaking world is replete with attempts to use classical, biblical, folkloric, invented, and imagined sources for personal, monetary, ethnic, religious, political, and national aggrandizement through the vehicle of invented history. The documentation of sources has long been a problem for the inventors of history. For example, Geoffrey claimed that he had obtained many details from a vetustissimus liber, a very ancient book in the British (that is, Welsh) language that has never materialized. When British antiquarians in