LA3AMON’S WELSH

Abstract

Sometime soon after 1135, the potent circumstances of Welsh revolt following the death of Henry I,1 Geoffrey of Monmouth composed his prose Historia regum Britanniae, effectively contextualizing such revolt a declaredly ancient and detailed record of British sovereignty: this begins with Brutus, great-grandson of the Trojan Aeneas, culminates with the glorious King Arthur, and ends with Cadwallader, whose evacuation of the island of Britain time of plague opened it to Saxon resettlement. Thenceforth the insular Britons - now the Welsh - are consigned to an ongoing history of insurgency destined to accomplish an overthrow of Saxon dominion the prescribed time came (postquam fatale tempus superueniret).2 The work is dedicated primarily to Robert, earl of Gloucester, Lord of Glamorgan, eldest (illegitimate) son of the late King Henry and potential defender of the rights of his half-sister, the Empress Matilda, to the crown of England against the claims of their cousin, the usurper, Stephen of Blois. For Robert of Gloucester and other rebellious Anglo-Normans - men such as Brian fitzCount, Lord of Abergavenny and Upper Gwent, and illegitimate son of the duke of Brittany, with whom Geoffrey of Monmouth, as canon of St George's Oxford castle,3 would have been intimately familiar - the Welsh are, the years after Henry's death, powerful and necessary allies, armed with the timely goal, underwritten by the long providential history Geoffrey records, of reclaiming a sovereignty unjusdy usurped. The anonymous Anglo-Norman Description of Ungland., probably composed the 1140s, evinces the political expediency of Geoffrey's British history and a contemporary Welsh investment that history, as well as the challenge that both the history and its Welsh adherents posed to an oppositional Anglo-Norman lordship:Mais nepurquant suventesfeizBen s'en vengerent les Waleis.De noz Franceis mult unt ocis,De noz chastels se sunt saisiz;Apertement le vont disant,Forment nus vont manecant,Qu'a la parfin tute l'avrunt,Par Artur la recoverunt,E cest pais tut ensementToldrunt a la romaine gent,A la terre sun nun rendrunt,Bretaine la repelerunt.[But, nevertheless, oftentimesThe Welsh avenged themselves well.Many of our French they have killed,They have taken our castles;Openly they go about saying -Fiercely they go around threatening us -That the end they will have everything;Through Arthur they will recover it,And this country likewiseThey will wrest the Roman race.They will give the land back its name:They will call it Britain again.]4The currency of Arthurian prophetic history registered the Description is expressly constitutive of Geoffrey's writing the preface of Historia regum, Book VII, the Prophetiae Merlini. Here Geoffrey claims to have been advancing his of the deeds of British kings, twin task (uterque labor) of a planned Prophetiae, when news of Merlin spread and was being pressed to publish his prophecies by all my contemporaries (de Merlino diuulgato rumore compellebant me undique contemporanei mei prophetias ipsius edere). Urged, particular, by Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, to whom an appended dedicatory epistie is addressed, Geoffrey translates the prophecies of Merlin from British into Latin (de Britannico Latinum), literally interrupting the Historia to do so: I have put my rustic pipe to my lips and, to its humble tune, have translated the tongue which is unknown to you (agrestem calamum meum labellis apposui et plebeia moduladone ignotum tibi interpretatus sum sermonem).5Geoffrey is thus exhorted to textualize Merlin's prophecies in Latinum for circulation amongst people who urgently need to know them, a situation formally signified by the disruptive insertion of the Prophetiae into the continuous narrative of his Historia regum 6 Whether or not the preface accurately represents the genesis of the Prophetiae, its presentational rhetoric reveals Geoffrey's canny engagement with, if not knowing construction of, the pertinence of his books to the political moment of baronial and Welsh insurgency which renders crucial the information they contain. …