Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth (Latin: Galfridus Monemutensis, Galfridus Arturus, Welsh: Gruffudd ap Arthur, Sieffre o Fynwy; c. 1095 – c. 1155) was a British cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British historiography and the popularity of tales of King Arthur. He is best known for his chronicle The History of the Kings of Britain (Latin: De gestis Britonum or Historia regum Britanniae),^[1] which was widely popular in its day, being translated into various other languages from its original Latin. It was credited, uncritically, well into the 16th century,^[2] but is now considered historically unreliable.

Biography

Geoffrey was born at an undetermined date, probably between about 1090 and 1100,^[3][4][5][6] in Wales or the Welsh Marches. He must have reached the age of majority by 1129, when he is recorded as witnessing a charter.

In his Historia, Geoffrey refers to himself as Galfridus Monemutensis, "Geoffrey of Monmouth", which indicates a significant connection to Monmouth, Wales, and which may refer to his birthplace.^[7] Geoffrey's works attest to some acquaintance with the place-names of the region.^[7] To contemporaries, Geoffrey was known as Galfridus Artur(us) or variants thereof.^[8][7] The "Arthur" in these versions of his name may indicate the name of his father, or a nickname based on Geoffrey's scholarly interests.^[8]

Earlier scholars assumed that Geoffrey was Welsh or at least spoke Welsh.^[8] Geoffrey's knowledge of the Welsh language appears to have been slight however,^[8] and it is now recognised that there is no real evidence that Geoffrey was of either Welsh or Cambro-Norman descent, unlike for instance, Gerald of Wales.^[7] He may have sprung from the same French-speaking elite of the Welsh border country as the writers Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, and Robert, Earl of Gloucester, to whom Geoffrey dedicated versions of his History.^[8] It has been argued, by Frank Stenton among others, that Geoffrey's parents may have been among the many Bretons who took part in William I's conquest and settled in the southeast of Wales.^[7] Monmouth had been in the hands of Breton lords since 1075^[7] or 1086^[8] and the names Galfridus and Arthur (if interpreted as a patronymic) were more common among the Bretons than the Welsh.^[7]

He may have served for a while in a Benedictine priory in Monmouth,^[9] but most of his adult life appears to have been spent outside Wales. Between 1129 and 1151 his name appears on six charters in the Oxford area, sometimes styled magister ("teacher").^[8] He was probably a secular canon of St. George's college. All the charters signed by Geoffrey are also signed by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, also a canon at that church. Another frequent co-signatory is Ralph of Monmouth, a canon of Lincoln.^[8]

On 24 February 1152,^[10] at Lambeth, Archbishop Theobald consecrated Geoffrey as Bishop of St Asaph, having ordained him a priest at Westminster 10 days before. According to Lewis Thorpe, "There is no evidence that he ever visited his see, and indeed the wars of Owain Gwynedd make this most unlikely."^[11] He appears to have died between 25 December 1154 and 24 December 1155, in 1155 according to Welsh chronicles, when his apparent successor, Richard, took office.^[8]

The History of the Kings of Britain

Geoffrey wrote several works of interest, all in Latin, the language of learning and literature in Europe during the medieval period. His major work was The History of the Kings of Britain, the work best known to modern readers. It relates the purported history of Britain, from its first settlement by Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas, to the death of Cadwallader in the 7th century, taking in Julius Caesar's invasions of Britain, two kings, Leir and Cymbeline, later immortalised by William Shakespeare, and one of the earliest developed narratives of King Arthur.

Geoffrey claims in his dedication that the book is a translation of an "ancient book in the British language that told in orderly fashion the deeds of all the kings of Britain", given to him by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Modern historians have dismissed this claim.^[12] It is, however, likely that the Archdeacon furnished Geoffrey with some materials in the Welsh language that helped inspire his work, as Geoffrey's position and acquaintance with the Archdeacon would not have afforded him the luxury of fabricating such a claim outright.^[13] Much of it is based on the Historia Britonum, a 9th-century Welsh-Latin historical compilation, Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and Gildas's 6th-century polemic De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae expanded with material from Bardic oral tradition, genealogical tracts, and embellished by Geoffrey's own imagination.^[14] In an exchange of manuscript material for their own histories, Robert of Torigny gave Henry of Huntingdon a copy of History, which both Robert and Henry used uncritically as authentic history and subsequently used in their own works,^[15] by which means some of Geoffrey's fictions became embedded in popular history.

The History of the Kings of Britain is now usually acknowledged as a literary work of national myth containing little reliable history. This has since led many modern scholars to agree with William of Newburgh, who wrote around 1190 that "it is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, or indeed about his predecessors from Vortigern onwards, was made up, partly by himself and partly by others".^[16] Other contemporaries were similarly unconvinced by Geoffrey's History. For example, Giraldus Cambrensis recounts the experience of 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 'Geoffrey Arthur' (as Geoffrey named himself) 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."^[17]

Geoffrey's major work was nevertheless widely disseminated across the whole of Medieval Western Europe: Acton Griscom listed 186 extant manuscripts in 1929, and others have been identified since.^[18] It enjoyed a significant afterlife in a variety of forms, including translations/adaptations such as the Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut of Wace, the Middle English Brut of Layamon, and several anonymous Middle Welsh versions known as Brut y Brenhinedd ("Brut of the kings").^[19] where it was generally accepted as a true account.

In 2017 the initial results of the Lost Voices of Celtic Britain Project established at Bournemouth University were published by the lead author Miles Russell.^[20] The main conclusion of the study was that the Historia Regum Britanniae, despite being compiled many centuries after the period it describes, appears to contain significant demonstrable archaeological fact. Although Geoffrey was clearly writing for a wider political purpose, he seems to have brought together a disparate mass of source material, including folklore, chronicles, king-lists, dynastic tables, oral tales and bardic praise poems, some of which was irrevocably garbled or corrupted. In doing so, Geoffrey exercised considerable editorial control, massaging the information and smoothing out apparent inconsistencies in order to create a single grand narrative. Much of the information he used can be shown to have derived from two discrete sources: the first being the orally-transmitted, heroic tales of the Catuvellauni and Trinovantes, two essentially pro-Roman tribes inhabiting central south-eastern Britain at the very end of the Iron Age; the second being the king-lists of important post-Roman dynasties ruling territories in western Britain. Stretching this source material out, chopping, changing and re-editing it in the process, Geoffrey added additional information culled from later Roman histories and also those of ‘Dark Age’ and early Medieval writers such as Gildas and Bede.^[21]

Other writings

The earliest of Geoffrey's writings to appear was probably the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin), which he wrote at some point before 1135, and which appears both independently and incorporated into The History of the Kings of Britain. It consists of a series of obscure prophetic utterances attributed to Merlin, which Geoffrey claimed to have translated from an unspecified language.

Geoffrey's structuring and reshaping of the Merlin and Arthur myths engendered the vast popularity of Merlin and Arthur myths in later literature, a popularity that lasts to this day; he is generally viewed by scholars as the major establisher of the Arthurian canon.^[22] The History's effect on the legend of King Arthur was so vast that Arthurian works have been categorised as "pre-" or "post-Galfridian" depending on whether or not they were influenced by him.

The third work attributed to Geoffrey is another hexameter poem Vita Merlini ("Life of Merlin"). The Vita is based much more closely on traditional material about Merlin than are the other works; here he is known as Merlin of the Woods (Merlinus Sylvestris) or Scottish Merlin (Merlinus Caledonius), and is portrayed as an old man living as a crazed and grief-stricken outcast in the forest. The story is set long after the timeframe of the History's Merlin, but the author tries to synchronise the works with references to the mad prophet's previous dealings with Vortigern and Arthur. The Vita did not circulate widely, and the attribution to Geoffrey appears in only one late 13th-century manuscript, but it contains recognisably Galfridian elements in its construction and content, and most critics are content to recognise it as his.^[8]

See also

• Adam of Usk
• Ranulf Higdon
• William of Malmesbury

Notes

References and further reading

• Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Edited and translated by Michael Faletra. Broadview Books: Peterborough, Ontario, 2008. ISBN 1-55111-639-1
• Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated, with introduction and index, by Lewis Thorpe. Penguin Books: London, 1966. ISBN 0-14-044170-0
• Crick, J. C. (2004). "Monmouth, Geoffrey of [Galfridus Arturus] (d. 1154/5)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10530. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Curley, Michael (1994). Geoffrey of Monmouth. New York: Twayne Publishers.
• Echard, Siân (1998). Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521021524.
• Echard, Siân, ed. (2011). The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature: The Development and Dissemination of the Arthurian Legend in Medieval Latin. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0708322017.
• Foster, Idris Llewelyn (1959). "Geoffrey of Monmouth (1090?–1155), or Galfridus (Gaufridus) Artur, or Galfridus (Gaufridus) Monemutensis, bishop of S. Asaph and chronicler". The Dictionary of Welsh Biography down to 1940. London: The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. pp. 274–5.
• Higham, N. J. (2002). King Arthur: Myth-making and History. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-21305-3.
• Morris, John (1996) [1973]. The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 1-84212-477-3.
• Parry, John Jay; Caldwell, Robert (1959). "Geoffrey of Monmouth". In Loomis, Roger S. Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages. Oxford University: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-811588-1.
• Roberts, Brynley F. (1991). "Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd". The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ISBN 0-7083-1307-8.
• Russell, Miles (2017). Arthur and the Kings of Britain: the Historical Truth Behind the Myths. Stroud: Amberley. ISBN 978-1445662749.
• Tatlock, J. S. P. (1950). The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and its early vernacular versions. Berkeley: University of California Press.

External links

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• Latin Chroniclers from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries: Geoffrey of Monmouth from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume I, 1907–21.
• Works by Geoffrey of Monmouth at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)