Anglo-Norman nobility, who were now identified with Great Britain, that they could claim a hero who was the equal, if not the superior, of Charlemagne, the great hero of their Continental kinsmen. The consequence of all this was that Geoffrey's Historia had an instantaneous and prodigious success and it stimulated immensely whatever interest there may already have been in Arthur and his companions. The first sign of Geoffrey's influence on the vernacular literature appears in the metrical chronicles. Between 1147 and 1151 Geffrei Gaimar had used Geoffrey of Monmouth in compiling a chronicle of Great Britain in French verse.44 His own statement is that he followed "the good book of Oxford which belonged to Walter the Archdeacon", but it is safe to say that this really means Geoffrey's Historia. The work was undertaken at the instance of Constance, wife of Ralph Fitz-Gilbert, an Anglo-Norman noble to whom Gaimar was chaplain. Women rarely understood Latin in the Middle Ages, and so just as vernacular versions of Biblical books were often composed for their benefit in that period, so too with the chronicles. Giraldus' Opera, VI, 57f. (1868) also, the summaries of these passages in Fletcher, op. cit., pp. 101f. and 180, respectively. Among modern scholars who have expressed a belief in the reality of Geoffrey's liber are H. L. D. Ward, "Postscript to the article upon Geoffrey in the Catalogue of Romances, Vol. I (1883)," Anglia, XXIV, 383 ff. (1901), E. Windisch, Das Keltische Brittanien bis zu Kaiser Arthur, pp. 126 ff., (1912), and A. Leitzmann, op. cit., pp. 375f. (1916). Ward conjectures that the liber consisted of an Old-Welsh MS. containing many British genealogies and several historical glosses, brought home from Brittany by Archdeacon Walter. Windisch and Leitzmann argue that Geoffrey would not have dared to pass off on Robert of Gloucester the most powerful man in the kingdom so audacious an invention. But the examples cited above show to what length mediaeval audacity might go in such matters, and, besides, Robert of Gloucester, though cognizant of the fraud, may not have taken the matter seriously, or may have even accepted the Historia gladly as a sort of national epos. As such it has been interpreted with some plausibility by Sebastian Evans in his translation of the Historia, pp. 357ff. (London, 1904). L'Estorie des Engles, edited by T. D. Hardy and C. T. Martin for the Rolls Series, 2 vols., (London, 1889), is all that survives of it. The MSS. of Gaimar's chronicle preserve only the later portion of the work, - L'Estorie des Engles, as it is called. To be sure, the so-called Munich Brut,45 which appears to be of the same date, is by some eminent scholars supposed to be a fragment of the earlier portion. Even this fragment, however, ends before it reaches the reign of Arthur. The only part of the extant portion of Gaimar's Chronicle, then, that contains any mention of Arthur is the story of Havelock which he has inserted in his poem. The Arthurian allusions here accord substantially with Geoffrey of Monmouth. Of far greater importance, however, was the paraphrase completed by Wace in 1155 the poem which is commonly called the Roman de Brut, or simply, Brut,46 although the author's own name for it was Geste des Bretons. There is no dedication of it preserved in the MSS., but the English poet, Layamon (11. 42ff.), tells us that Wace "gave it to the noble Eleanor, who was the 46 48 Edited by K. Hoffmann and K. Vollmöller, Halle, 1877. There is still another fragmentary French version of Geoffrey of Monmouth in monorhymed laisses preserved in M. S. Harley, 1605 (British Museum). Cp. Ward, Catalogue of Romances, I, 272 ff. and Otto Wendeburg, Ueber die Bearbeitung von Gottfried von Monmouths Historia Regum Britanniae in der HS. Brit. Mus. Harl. 1605. Braunschweig, 1881 (Erlanger Diss.). H. Suchier, LB, III, 107f. (1882), pronounces the dialect Picard and the date not much later than Wace. The fragments have no especial interest. The condition of this version and of the Munich Brut (both preserved in fragmentary and unique MSS.) shows, however, how easily the French original of Layamon could be lost. Edited by Le Roux de Lincy, 2 vols., Rouen, 1836-1838. F. M. Warren, MLN, XIV, 95, points out that the numbering in this edition is wrong 130 lines too high. A new edition of this work based on all the MSS. is a great desideratum. Brut is the French form of Brutus, name of the first king of Britain, according to Geoffrey. For Wacc's life, cp. especially, G. Paris, Romania, IX, 592 ff. (1880). He was born in the island of Jersey about 1100 canon of Bayeux in the latter part of his life. He is also well characterized by G. Paris in his Mélanges, I, 85f. For a full bibliography of Wace, cp. Annette B. Hopkins, The Influence of Wace on the Arthurian Romances of Crestien de Troies, University of Chicago dissertation, 1913, p. 10, note 24 a. was a high King Henry's queen that is to say, the wife of Henry II A detailed study of Wace's relation to Geoffrey 47 proves that 47 Cp. Fletcher, Arthurian Material in the Chronicles, pp. 127 ff., 48 49 For the main additions made by Wace, cp. Waldner, pp. 120 ff. 50 The term, Brut, in the sense of chronicle, was also adopted which follows the Geoffreyan tradition and makes a fabulous Brutus the founder of the kingdom did not end with him. Curiously enough, the most important representatives of this genre actually preserved are not in French, but in English; nevertheless, the English poems undoubtedly are based on (lost) French originals. The poems in question are, 1. Layamon's paraphrase of Wace, which it is common to call, after Sir Frederick Madden's example, Layamon's Brut -51 a poem which was finished not long before 1205. 2. The alliterative Morte Arthure52 of the fourteenth century, which has often been ascribed 53 wrongly, no doubt to the Scotch poet, Huchown of the Awle Ryale. In both of these poems the principal interest is pseudo-historical, Indeed, the narrative of the second is almost wholly taken up with the continental wars of Arthur and his final conflict with Mordred that is selected episodes of some lost Brut. The spirit is, therefore, considerably nearer that of the chansons de geste or poems of the Charlemagne cycle than is the case with the Arthurian romances proper. Indeed, the encounter of Gawain and the Saracen prince, Priamus, together with the latter's conversion to Christianity in the Morte Arthure, is actually drawn from Fierabras, one of the most famous of the chansons de geste. More 54 51 The only edition is Madden's, in 3 vols. (London, 1847), for the Society of Antiquaries of London. A complete bibliography of Layamon down to 1906 was published by B. S. Monroe, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, VII, no. 1, pp. 139 ff. (1908). For the critical literature since then, cp. J. E. Wells, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400 (Yale University Press, 1916), and the supplements thereto. Layamon's terminus a quo is 1189, since he refers I, 3, to Henry II as dead; his terminus ad quem is 1205, date of the crisis over the collection of Peter's pence, which, contrary to Madden, seems in the allusion to this tax, III, 286, unknown to him. 52 53 The latest and best edition is Erik Björkman's (Heidelberg and New York, 1915), in Morsbach and Holthausen's Alt- und mittelenglische Texte, no. 9. The Introduction contains a full bibliography. Cp., for example, G. Neilson, Huchown of the Awle Ryale, (Glasgow, 1902). 53 54 Cp. R. H. Griffith, "Malory, Morte Arthure, and Fierabras", Anglia, XXXII, 389 ff. (1909). over, the parts played in the story by Lancelot, Gawain, and others show plainly the influence of the fully developed Arthurian romances; and there is nothing surprising in this, seeing that the alliterative poem belongs to the fourteenth century. But in its essentials the Morte Arthure is based on a lost Brut.55 Of far greater importance, however, in this connection is Layamon's Brut, which is a specimen of a metrical chronicle preserved in its entirety. At the beginning of his poem Layamon gives as his sources "the English book that Saint Bede made, another, in Latin, that Saint Albin made and the fair Austin who brought baptism in hither" (i. e. St. Augustine, the missionary), and, lastly, Wace. It is of little importance that he has cited here other books besides Wace. His poem does not show any use of such books and there can be little doubt that he took over mechanically from his French original this citation of authorities.56 With regard to the question of his relations to Wace, Layamon's poem is about double the length of Wace's: the one contains something upwards of 15000 lines, the other something upwards of 32000.57 Until quite recently it has been the common assump 55 On its sources see P. Branscheid, "Ueber die Quellen des stabreimenden Morte Arthure", Anglia, Anzeiger, VIII, 179ff. (1885) and, especially, R. Imelmann's treatise, named in the next note. Branscheid's idea that Layamon is a source of the poem is certainly wrong. 86 In his treatise, Layamon, Versuch über seine Quellen (Berlin, 1906), p. 17, R. Imelmann has pointed out that this coupling of Wace and Bede as authorities is found in other chronicles which relate the history of Great Britain under Anglo-Saxon as well as Celtic rule. The addition of Albin the abbot, who died at Canterbury in 732, and St. Augustine to the list of authorities was also, no doubt, already in Layamon's original. And this addition is not hard to explain - for Bede incorporates in his work the long interrogatories which St. Augustine addressed to Pope Gregory asking for instructions as to how he should proceed in his mission of converting the Anglo-Saxons, and he still further speaks of Abbot Albin in his Preface as auctor ante omnes atque adjutor opusculi hujus. So Albin and Augustine were to a certain degree part-authors of his Ecclesiastical History. It was an easy blunder, of which the Middle Ages furnishes many examples, to make them now the authors of a separate work, although Augustine died, of course, before Albin was born. 57 Wace's poem is written in octosyllabic couplets which became |