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CHAPTER ONE

Arthurian Imagination and the “Makyng” of History

I have not been able to discover anything at all on the kings who lived here before the Incarnation of Christ, or indeed about Arthur and all the other who followed on after the Incarnation. Yet the deeds of these men were such that they deserve to be praised for all time. What is more, these deeds were handed joyfully down in oral tradition, just as if they had been committed to writing, by many peoples who had only their memory to rely on.

—Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae¹

This is the Arthur about whom the trifles of the Britons rave even now, one certainly not to be dreamed of in false myths, but proclaimed in truthful histories—indeed, who for a long time held up his tottering fatherland, and kindled the broken spirits of his countrymen to war.

—William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum

KING Arthur has long been subject to controversy. Even in the twelfth century, as the quotes from William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth suggest, Arthur’s relationship to Britain’s past was a vexed one. Malmesbury, on one hand, deplores some stories about Arthur as “delirium”; Monmouth, on the other, seems troubled that such Arthurian traditions had not yet influenced the “official” histories of his time.² In response Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae offers the fullest (and most influential) account of Arthurian sovereignty of his day, rendering stories of Arthur in the prestigious, and official, language of Latin. But twelfth-century history writers (followed by more than a few of their twentieth-century readers) would vehemently condemn Geoffrey’s work as an excessively extravagant fiction.

William of Malmesbury, Gerald of Wales, and William of Newburg all judge Geoffrey’s history to be flawed, and unflatteringly contrast his work with the Venerable Bede’s sacred history. Their criticisms emphasize the falseness of Geoffrey’s popular account, characterizing the distinction between Geoffrey’s and other narratives of early Britain in the opposition of fiction to truth. Geoffrey’s “false myths” are stacked against the “truthful histories” read in William’s work and Bede’s, an opposition which recurs even today. Malmesbury’s opposition of “false myths” to “truthful histories,” moreover, raises an issue important to readers of history and literature both in Monmouth’s time and in our own. The relation of historical narrative to imaginative literature has been the subject of rich and persistent analysis for at least a quarter of a century; Arthurian scholars and devotees continue to debate Arthur’s historicity, and their discussions frequently complicate the standard opposition of fact to fable. Malmesbury’s remarks suggest, however, that there may be other issues at stake in this opposition than a simple search for the truth.

William of Malmesbury alludes to the cultural power of Arthur’s image, invoking the historic king as support for a tottering fatherland and praising Arthur’s monumental greatness, a hero who can “kindl[e] the broken spirits of his countrymen to war” (quippe qui labantem patriam diu sustinuerit, infractasque civium mentes ad bellum acuerit). Truthful histories need figures like Arthur, Malmesbury implies, sovereign icons to inspire and captivate their countrymen. Yet a captivating Arthur, Malmesbury also suggests, has a dangerous relation specifically to the “trifles” of the raving Welsh (Britonum nugae hodieque delirant).³

Emphasizing Arthur’s popular appeal, Malmesbury insists that Arthur’s popularity can sponsor his nation’s endurance. Though deeply admired, Arthur’s popularity is also suspect: Arthur apparently inspires excessive ravings among the Welsh. Malmesbury’s condescension toward the “trifles” of the Welsh, the strength of his rhetoric in casting Welsh stories as delirium, intimates disquieting elements to Arthur’s power. Arthur’s apparently dangerous inspirations, Malmesbury anxiously implies, need to be constrained by historical accounts officially sanctioned as “true.”

In this chapter I will argue that this anxiety about popular belief haunts the denigration of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s imaginative history as “false.” I will suggest, moreover, that accounts of early British history that pit the excesses of Monmouth’s extravagant fiction against other, more sober truths implicitly encode fears about the popularity and the cultural power of his text. Such charges work anxiously to disavow the somewhat disturbing fact (one hinted even by Malmesbury) that popular “ravings” can indeed change the world. Yet Malmesbury’s assertion that some popular fantasies are advantageous while others are simply false requires a very delicate negotiation of the categories of truth and fiction he deploys. If Malmesbury disavows Welsh fantasies as delirious falsehoods, he also reminds us that fantasy itself (and the widespread inspiration it provides) is useful to governments, offering the stirring of hearts that move a populace to fight a war, or support, at great personal sacrifice, a sovereign’s claim to the throne.⁴ This paradox of popular fantasy means that governments will work hard to produce and manage, as well as to constrain, the popular power of belief.

The enduring popularity of Monmouth’s captivating story indicates the power of Arthur for belief in British sovereignty. What is not often emphasized in accounts of Arthurian romance in England is the extent to which the meaning of British sovereignty in Arthur’s story (the cultural uses made of Arthur for various political projects) was contested throughout England, Wales, and Scotland from Monmouth’s time well into the late medieval period. Fantasies of Arthur and his return fueled diametrically opposed, as well as intimately related, political agendas: Edward III’s imperial pageantry, along with both Owain Glyn Dŵr’s rebellion against the English crown, and Henry Tudor’s (later Henry VII) battle for it. In the context of that history, efforts to identify some Arthurian sovereign fantasies as “untrue” despite their popularity will obscure, rather than reveal, the histories of political, social, and cultural exchange in medieval Britain. We need instead to consider what medieval “popular” and “official” accounts of Arthur might suggest about the process by which some beliefs about Britain were transformed into national fact, while others were rendered literally outlandish, increasingly unimagined and, thus, unimaginable.

Fantasy’s role in processes of cultural identification, and the historical legitimization of some, and not other, fantasies of Arthur can help us understand the importance of myth and legend to the history of British community. I begin with a brief account of the contributions medieval studies has made to our understanding of history’s relation to the fantastic. I follow medievalists who argue that psychoanalysis can help us to interpret the desires, the pleasures, and the powers embedded in historico-legendary texts. Unlike approaches to myth that oppose legend to historical realism, and unlike traditionally psychological approaches to Arthuriana that link specific stories or story cycles to transcendental processes of a universal or collective unconscious, I engage psychoanalysis with historical specificity, so as to understand the fascination and popularity of certain tales at particular historical moments. Psychoanalysis can help us see the material consequences of belief, reminding us that fantasies, even in the absence of what could be identified as historical fact, can and do affect the world.

To remark that fantasy does not require fact to have effects upon the world does not mean, of course, that fantasy is the opposite of history. I will suggest below a way to understand the relation between history and popular fantasy. Following this discussion, I turn my attention to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fantasy of a British past. In the second and third sections of this chapter I argue that Geoffrey’s deft use of ambiguity and imagination makes the outlandish traditions of a linguistic minority useful-indeed, crucial-to the rulers of Anglo-Norman England. Geoffrey’s ingenious history recasts largely ignored Welsh literary-historical traditions into the authoritative form of Latin manuscript culture; in so doing, Geoffrey renders Welsh traditions useful to those in the very centers of power. The consequences of this are multiple and long-standing. Geoffrey’s acts of translation, alongside Geoffrey’s own historical method, suggest that we might view him as an historical innovator, an intellectual who offers an important intervention into twelfth-century historiography, and crafts an influential fantasy productive for an oppositional history of British identity.

Fantasy, Fact, and Popular Pleasures

The debate between Malmesbury’s “truthful history” and Geoffrey’s “false myths” no longer dominates conversations among scholars of early Britain; yet the questions implicitly raised by Geoffrey’s text are as hotly debated today as they apparently were in the twelfth century.⁵ The categories of history and textuality have been important to medieval literary studies, a field itself long associated with an opposition between textual methodologies (New Criticism) and historicist ones (Exegetics). As a result medievalists have had much to say about these questions.

In the last twenty years, medievalists have complicated our understanding of the relation between history and imagination, arguing against a strict opposition between the truth of history and the power of the fictional.⁶ Paul Strohm, for example, suggests that fictionality is “no embarrassment to history,” since “fabulists and romancers conceive episodes within imaginary structures or value systems their audiences embrace as true, and lies accepted as a basis for actions gain retrospective truthfulness through their influence on events” (3). Stressing a reciprocity between fictionalizing activities and history making, Strohm insightfully insists that “a text can be powerful without being true” (5). Strohm’s work reminds us that authors consolidate (and legitimize) the power of their texts through the truth-claims they make. Such truth-claims can obscure the political interests embedded in official versions of the past.

Despite this nuanced approach to history’s relation to fiction, however, even Strohm’s important reconceptualization of the power of romance links fictionalizing with lying. In the context of Arthurian traditions and given late-medieval disagreements over the meaning of Arthur’s sovereignty (evident in Malmesbury’s critique of the raving Britons), slippages between “fiction” and the “lie” prove especially disabling. When late medieval English sovereigns, anxious about the stability of their claims to the throne, commission fictional genealogies that trace their lineage back to King Arthur, they are, I would argue, doing something more complicated than lying. They are imagining the possibility of their future rule through a fictionalized identification (hardly itself an innocent act) with an imagined community of British kings. Likewise when fourteenth-century Welsh poets identify Owain Glyn Dwr with Arthur (and others) as the heir of a specifically Welsh rule from London, they too are doing something other than lying. They are contesting the ownership of British sovereignty through the fantasy of a salvific return of Welsh rule, although these are exactly the kind of Welsh “ravings” William of Malmesbury deplores as “false myths.”⁷ The evidence of, and the competition between, such sovereign fantasies require a further development of Strohm’s important insights. And this is especially the case since one side of this competition has, more persistently and insistently, been thought to be “raving,” luxuriating in “false myths,” and rejecting the apparently sober truths of history. We thus need a way to understand the power and the differences of official and unofficial fictions of the British Arthurian past as contestations of important material consequence.

R. James Goldstein has suggested the power of such disagreements about the past to materially affect a contested (and colonial) cultural politics. In The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland, Goldstein analyzes the distinction between romance and history in the historiography of medieval Scotland’s engagements with an English crown, reading in this intercultural encounter a moment when the categories of “history” and “fiction” were divested from one another. Goldstein gestures, albeit briefly, toward the power of psychoanalysis to help us understand the material consequences of such disagreements. In an effort to keep the material consequence of military battles in full view, Goldstein briefly identifies the category of history with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “Real.” While Goldstein does not take full advantage of the subtle account of the relation of fantasy to the material world that Lacan’s work might offer, the example he uses can prove informative for us. With reference to the Battle of Flodden Field, one of Scotland’s most famous (and failed) stands against English aggression, he writes:

The scene of transgression [read in the Battle of Flodden] takes place in the context of the real, Lacan’s problematical third term that lies beyond the dialectic of the imaginary and the symbolic: “The Real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists symbolization absolutely,” he says. By Fredric Jameson’s reckoning, “it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the Real in Lacan. It is simply History itself.” As Jameson writes elsewhere: “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” This sense of setting inexorable limits to desire is precisely what the Scottish host led by James IV was to discover at Flodden Field. (283)⁸

Goldstein identifies the Lacanian “Real” with history as the materiality of war: the fact of dead bodies on a field of battle. He moves very quickly, from Lacan’s complicated notion of the “Real” to Fredric Jameson’s description of “History” to the Scottish host at Flodden Field. His conclusion emphasizes a soldier’s death as the ultimate determination, the irrefutable limit, a tragic constraint that can never be imagined away. Goldstein thus implies that the materiality of dead bodies can grant history its claim to the Real. To be sure, as Elaine Scarry argues, the bodily pain suffered by soldiers in war offers a touchstone for reality—in Scarry’s terms the lethal physicality of war substantiates a culture’s insubstantial “truths”; those abstract “truths” (“liberty,” or “democracy,” or “freedom”) are literally made to matter, to be material, because of the soldier’s body in pain. Abstract ideas, in other words, borrow materiality from the body of a soldier willing to suffer pain for belief in those abstractions.⁹ Yet in Goldstein’s understandable emphasis on the materiality of death in war, he forgets how pain and imagination together structure our belief in history’s truth; in the process, he implies that “history” has little to do with imagination. But “history,” I would argue, is as much about the meaning given for why those soldiers died as it is about the fact of their dead bodies.

Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of culture is more complicated than either Fredric Jameson’s words or Goldstein’s use of them implies, and a more detailed understanding of it can shed light on the interweaving of materiality with imaginary structures like belief or fantasy. While the Lacanian ‘Real’ certainly pertains to limitation, it pertains as much to the interior state of the subject (and the limitations prompted by the subject’s relation to individual prehistory and to culture) as it does to traumas, like war, that intrude from without. The sentence from Lacan which Goldstein cites, moreover, (“The Real, or what is perceived as such,” my emphasis) urges upon us the complexity of the relation between the Real and articulations of it. Elsewhere Lacan describes the interweaving of his three domains, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, with the mathematical figure of “the borromeanean knot” (Feminine Sexuality, 163), a grouping of “three or more interlocked rings which fall apart when one of the links is severed” (Fuss 10). These interlocking relations cannot be separated from one another so neatly as Goldstein implies. Jameson’s Lacanian gloss is, in fact, an imprecise rendering of the Lacanian Real, a category that cannot be easily coordinated with events. While Goldstein apparently reads Lacan’s predicate (“is what resists symbolization absolutely”) to figure the materiality of physical pain (Jameson’s “what hurts”), I would read Lacan’s phrase to imply that the Real stands not absolutely outside symbolization, but outside absolute symbolization. While the Real can never be symbolized once and for all, it remains bound to the Imaginary and the Symbolic, it exists “in relation both to the imaginary and to language” (Feminine Sexuality, 171).

It thus matters a great deal what imaginary structures and what languages are understood to grant special access to the Real and to the “truth” about it. It matters a good deal which languages and narratives are thought to be materially true. So long as some imaginary structures are disavowed as simple “lies” or, in another trope familiar to readers of medieval historical debates, dismissed as excessively immodest imaginings, we are unable to see the extent to which assessments of falsity or fiction can further tendentious definitions of what can count as “real.” Those definitions, and the imaginary possibilities they declare “narcissistic,” “extravagant,” or the mad ravings of an undisciplined people, point to how official cultures use history’s special claim to the “real,” to establish what postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha calls a “regime of truth” (“Other Question,” 19).

Before developing the implications of how this might help us to read the fantasies of Arthurian history, I turn to consider briefly the ways in which charges of “false myths” converge, in medieval rhetorical theory, with charges of an excessive and immodest imagination. Malmesbury’s rhetoric which identifies ‘false myths” with Welsh delirium is a case in point, but I would also like to note that this rhetoric continues to influence some scholars analyzing medieval historiography today. For example in Chaucer and the Subject of History, Lee Patterson insightfully stresses the importance of imagination for the historical subject, yet he nonetheless implies that some imaginings are excessive and need constraint. Describing imagination—in particular Chaucer’s creative makyng—as a means to display agency in the face of historical limitation, Patterson offers fiction and creative endeavor as a response to the necessities of Chaucer’s historical moment.¹⁰ In praise of this historical vision Patterson writes, “The classical poets, and especially Virgil and Statius, were essentially historians; and they provided [Chaucer] with a historical vision that allowed him to step outside the suffocating narcissism of court makyng and to recognize the mutual interdependence of subjectivity and history” (61). Patterson helpfully suggests that imagination can constitute a crucial response to limitation. And yet, in a formulation striking in both its forcefulness and in its use of the frequently gendered and ethically charged “narcissism,” imagination, specifically non-classicist imagination, liable to dangerous excesses, requires control.¹¹ Patterson implies that Chaucer’s scholarly, classical proclivities protect him from the selfish imaginary fancies to which his aristocratic audience falls victim. One can certainly appreciate this reminder of the difficulties of life at court; and I sympathize with Patterson’s implication that poetic imagination offers a means to resist court politics. Nonetheless, charges of narcissism have long been used to castigate the desires and imaginations of the powerless.

Like Chaucer, Welsh writers of vaticinative (prophetic) poetry deployed imagination as a response to historical limitation, although the material they drew upon was not limited to the classical. Late medieval sovereigns, moreover, paid their scribes to imagine British history in ways that supported their effort to solidify their sovereignty through their identification as Arthur’s heirs. (This last example would, to be sure, offer exactly the kind of “narcissism” Patterson wishes to critique.) Rather than dismiss one or the other of these as “excessive” in their pleasures, we can learn much more about the cultural function of Arthurian romance in late medieval Britain by analyzing the contested space of the pleasures themselves. Moreover, in light of Malmesbury’s influential castigation of the immodest excesses of Welsh traditions, we would do well to remember that rhetorics of excess have served to obscure precisely these contestations over meaning and pleasure. Charges of immodesty and excess prescribe limits; and they have long been used to sanction official desires while disallowing the alternatives.¹²

While medieval rhetorical theory emphasizes modest restraint and not pleasure, the preceding discussion suggests the importance of pleasure to medieval cultural negotiations over history and truth. The links between history and pleasure—the desire prompting those Welsh “ravings” Malmesbury wishes to dismiss from history’s “truth”—return us to psychoanalysis and to Lacan’s intermingling of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. These domains converge in the invocation of a certain kind of pleasure. According to Slavoj Žižek, these three intermingle in Lacan’s notion of le sinthome (the symptom), “a fragment of the signifier permeated with … enjoyment,” “the meaningless letter which immediately procures jouis-sense, ‘enjoyment in meaning,’ ‘enjoyment’” (Looking, 129).¹³ The fascinations available through historical narration can grant this kind of enjoyment. History, to return to Goldstein’s example, satisfies insofar as it produces a fascinating (glorious, tragic, or ignominious) image of the bodies on Flodden Field. Žižek helps us see that the politics and the ideology of claims to historical truth link with the pleasures encoded in tales of the past. Thus, it matters a great deal which fantasies—and whose pleasures—are recorded in officially sanctioned “true” accounts.

Žižek’s larger work, moreover, can help us see the pertinence of these structures to questions of group identity. Elsewhere he argues that communities organize their identities not simply around “a point of symbolic identification,” but around a bond which always implies pleasure, as he puts it, “enjoyment incarnated” (51). The jouissance gathering around such identities, again with debts to Lacanian psychoanalysis, Žižek calls the “Nation-Thing,” a “non-discursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive-entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency” (“Republics of Gilead” 53). This organization of jouissance surfaces as pleasure in unpleasure, Žižek argues; this means that groups have access to pleasure through a paranoic account of its theft, a paranoid fantasy of the excessive and threatening pleasure of another group. A fantasmatic belief in the “excessive” pleasures of others thus provides a paranoiac index of how those “others” menace our nation, stealing our pleasure and threatening the possession of enjoyments distinctly claimed as “ours.”

With Žižek’s analysis in mind we are ready to return to Malmesbury’s castigation of Welsh “ravings.” Malmesbury approaches the pleasures of Arthurian narrative through his displeasure over Welsh “delirium.” This structure of “pleasure in unpleasure” registers through Malmesbury’s anxious rhetoric of Welsh “ravings,” wherein he argues that the Welsh need the constraint of simple “truth.” Such paranoic fantasies, of course, embed material conflicts with material consequence. Malmesbury’s insistence on Arthurian “truth” mounts an effort to forbid the Welsh from stealing, through their “trifles” about Arthur, the powers and fascinations of Arthurian history. The pleasure available in stories of Arthurian rule apparently “belong” to “truthful histories” and to official historians—that is, to non-Welsh culture. At stake here is the desire to forbid the pleasures of Welsh creative makyng; at stake too may be the fear that enjoyment of Arthur might “kindle the broken spirits” of the Welsh “to war.”

Where Žižek’s work helps us see how pleasure inhabits the fantasmatic desires implicit in Malmesbury’s words, Fredric Jameson’s Marxist historiography suggests that one group’s pleasures frequently require another group’s pain. Jameson’s work also reminds us that texts are material in form as much as in content. And when he writes, “history is what hurts; it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis,” that statement applies as well to definitions of what counts as “real” (and the concomitant elimination of possible alternatives) which also “refuse desire and set inexorable limits.” Like cautionary tales and words in legal statutes, historical narratives can be employed to give pain; they can punish, prohibit, and constrain desire; they can circumscribe our vision of what might be possible. The generic classification of “history” naturalizes, as it does in Malmesbury’s repudiation of Welsh “trifles,” what can count as real. History can grant to the Real the air—inexorable, determined—of sober tragedy; it can render loss an act of “nature,” “fate,” or even the wages of “narcissism,” rather than a production of collective cultural desire.¹⁴ Once granted a privileged access to “what actually happened,” the genre of history can be used to discount, and to make us forget, alternative stories of the past. And it can lend events (like plague, war, or famine) the aura of unavoidable disaster, obscuring the extent to which such events were themselves culturally produced and, thus, could have been avoided.¹⁵

Divesting the pleasures of “fiction” from those of “history” has profound implications for an analysis of the contestations over Arthurian “truth” in medieval Britain. The opposition of “realism” to “fiction” can preclude us from seeing fiction making as an activity in which sovereign powers, committed as they are to the “realism” of statecraft, engage. The distinction between “fantasy” and the “real” implies, as it did in Plato’s account, that when governments do participate in fiction-making (efforts usually understood to constitute propaganda) such activity is an aberration, or a mark of “bad” government, rather than a fundamental aim of the powerful. When imagined as activities committed to “truth” and “reality”—in a famous phrase “the art of the possible”—politics and statecraft, perhaps even history, are seen to have only accidental relation to the production of fictions. This presupposition obscures how the powerful use fantasy for their ends whether in the medieval period or our own.¹⁶

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae—poised over the breach we have been examining—can elucidate the pleasures and dangers of popular belief for a national fantasy. Beginning with critical assessments of Geoffrey’s work, I argue below that his Arthurian account displays a “British” identity fantastically dependent upon Welsh pleasures, popular figures, and poetic forms. It is to Geoffrey’s fantasy that we turn.

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Pleasures of History

The Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1135–38) narrates the story of early Britain from its founding by the Trojan Brutus, through Roman and Saxon rule, with special focus on King Arthur’s birth, rule, and death. The account offers fabulous tales of giants and monsters, dragons, sovereigns, and soothsayers. Despite the denigration of the imaginative excesses of these stories by historians like Malmesbury, Geoffrey’s history would be wildly popular, enormously increasing the renown and influence of King Arthur. Julia Crick counts over 200 extant manuscript redactions of Geoffrey’s text, whether complete or partial, in a variety of languages stretching over a significant period¹⁷; Geoffrey’s narrative would inspire chronicle accounts in Latin, English, French, and Welsh, as well as a genre of romances of the “Matter of Britain”; Geoffrey’s Merlin prophecies would fuel the dynastic prophecies and genealogies of fifteenth-century political propaganda. According to Crick’s now standard account of the dissemination and reception of Geoffrey’s text, its popularity continued, perhaps even increasing in England, into the later medieval centuries.¹⁸

For years the debate over the problems of Geoffrey’s historicist project focused attention on his claim to be translating an ancient British (Welsh) book, a claim that was, scholars believed, dubious. Geoffrey’s history was compromised by doubts about the existence and authority of this elusive vetustissimus liber (old book), and the value of the Historia as a historical text was delimited by a longstanding scholarly consensus concerning Geoffrey’s fraudulent “British” source. Even this consensus conveyed a cultural bias. Acton Griscom, the editor of what was for many years the standard vulgate text of the Historia, implied nearly seventy years ago that the preeminence of Latinists within the medieval scholarly community produced at least a premature rejection of the possibility of Geoffrey’s Welsh source.¹⁹ Geoffrey’s claims to the contrary were interpreted, moreover, in the most ungenerous terms, with scholars suggesting that his Welsh source was duplicitously invented “to cover the romantic creations of [his] own imaginative genius” (Griscom 102).

Admittedly Geoffrey may have had no written source. But his assertion of the vetustissimus liber amounts to his use of a standard rhetorical figure, the “old book” topos. Monmouth’s deployment of the “old book” topos locates him firmly within the established tradition of medieval historiography; it does not imply that he perpetrated “one of the best hoaxes of the Middle Ages” (Crick 226). As Julia Crick points out, Geoffrey’s use of the imagination in recounting his history is not at all unusual; like his competitors, Geoffrey amplified and elaborated a story within an already existing narrative tradition. Ruth Morse argues that invention and rhetorical embellishment were especial features of medieval and classical histories written about a very distant past. If an account could be demonstrated as authorized, as Morse puts it, “‘Truth’ might be secondary.… [The] inescapable but highly exploited interpretative circularity depends upon the variety of authority which authorities had” (102). Given these facts, what is striking about the Historia, is neither Geoffrey’s fondness for invention nor his use of the “old book” topos, but the fact that, despite a tradition of historical invention endorsed by medieval rhetorical theory, his is the only account of early Britain dismissed for its apparently extravagant inventions.²⁰ When Bede peppers his famous ecclesiastical history with descriptions of miracle cures and visions of heaven and hell, his excursions into the fantastic fail to compromise his appeal for “scholars [who] respect his historical thoroughness and competence” (Gransden 17). Christian tradition and historiography remain legitimate and authoritative sources for fantasy and magic; other fantasy traditions do not. Thus Antonia Gransden declares Bede’s “grasp of historical method … unique in the middle ages,” displaying as evidence of this methodological competence the fact that “he was the first historian to date consistently by the era of the Incarnation—the system of dating AD. and BC. in use today” (25). Here Bede’s commitment to marking time in Christian terms testifies to his historical expertise. Monmouth’s narrative seems, on the other hand, the only early history held accountable to objectivist standards; his history is, in fact, the very place where the definition of “history” gets made.²¹

Scholarly concern with Geoffrey’s extravagant fictions may, in fact, displace anxieties about his extravagant popularity. Scholars have consistently, if implicitly, linked the problem of Geoffrey’s authority to his text’s popularity. Gransden’s (once very influential) account of medieval historiography critiques the apparent problem of Geoffrey’s popularity in terms that denigrate the pleasures of his text. Describing Geoffrey as “a romance writer masquerading as a historian” (I, 202), Gransden classifies the Historia as romance because it was so delightfully amusing and so remarkably popular (Gransden I, 207; II, 459).²² More recently Julia Crick has revised this opinion, reminding modern readers of the importance of pleasure and delight for historians writing during the Middle Ages, a time when “history was not a free-standing discipline, but an auxiliary one” (225). Crick continues, “Lacking a niche in the academic world, historians … had to catch their audiences in a way that writers of technical literature generally did not…. In such a market content, style, and general appeal to the reader were essential to success” (225–26). By such standards, as Crick concludes, Geoffrey of Monmouth “was an exceptional artist fully governing and not governed by his material. His choice of subject was a brilliant success” (226). Crick reminds us that Geoffrey was not writing from a position of textual authority and disciplinary influence. Her remarks imply that critical condescension toward Geoffrey’s artistry and brilliance remains linked to his success. Indeed, the Historia was far more influential than the authorized “technical literature” of the time.

For his part, Geoffrey of Monmouth evinces his own anxiety about the pleasures of his text. He endeavors to ensure that those pleasures not be identified with himself as a writer. Geoffrey’s prefatory remarks (cited as epigraph to this chapter), explicitly link Arthurian pleasures with Welsh culture. The “old British book” drawn from Welsh oral tradition was, Geoffrey insists, invested with enjoyment: stories of Arthur were handed down joyfully (“a multis populis quasi inscripta iocunde & memoriter predicarentur,” emphasis mine), his source “book” of British traditions was an aesthetic delight (“ex ordine perpulcris orationibus pro-ponebat” [Griscom 219, emphasis mine]). In contrast to the joys of the Welsh tradition, Monmouth insists upon his own modest and unpretentious style. The following quotation (from Lewis Thorpe’s translation) addresses those issues:

I have taken the trouble at [Archdeacon Walter’s] request to translate that [old British] book into Latin, although I have been content with my own expression and my own homely [rustic] style and I have gathered no gaudy flowers of speech in other’s gardens. If I had adorned my page with high flown language I should have bored my readers, for they would have been forced to spend more time discovering the meaning of my words than following the story.²³

Perhaps such a statement amounts to the standard trope of authorial humility; perhaps, too, it offers rhetorical concessions to competing traditions of historiography (like that of the Venerable Bede or William of Malmesbury) narrating the history of the English people or of their church.²⁴ Monmouth’s investment in rhetorical modesty, here again, situates him firmly within the status quo. But what would Monmouth gain by identifying the aesthetic pleasure of his text with the Welsh stories he chose to “translate,” rather than with his own imagination? Might his humility signal something more than another standard topos?

To answer these questions we turn to a central section of Geoffrey’s text that will serve as an important source for late-medieval political propaganda. In the center of the Historia—wedged in between two episodes in the history of Constantine—Geoffrey “translates” “The Prophecies of Merlin.” Up to this point, the account of British history has moved forward in chronological progression: beginning with the story of Brutus, continuing through the time before and during Roman colonization of Britain. Geoffrey next tells the story of the dynasty of Constantine, interrupting that narrative immediately after the famous episode of Vortigern’s tower, a monumental edifice crumbling (so Merlin advises) because of two dragons, one red and one white, locked in battle beneath it. At this point, in most redactions, Geoffrey’s authorial voice intrudes in dedication.²⁵ In most (but not all) manuscripts his patron is now identified as Alexander Bishop of Lincoln, “a man of the greatest religion and wisdom … waited on by so many noblemen” (170).²⁶ At this point Geoffrey recapitulates his humility, linking himself and Bishop Alexander with Merlin, the prophet:

I [Geoffrey] … pressed my rustic reed-pipe to my lips and, modulating on it in all humility, I translated into Latin this work written in a language which is unknown to you. All the same, I am greatly surprised that you should have deigned to commit the task to so poor a pen as mine, when your all-powerful wand could command the service of so many men more learned and more splendid than I … Leaving on one side all the wise men of this entire island of Britain, I feel no shame at all in maintaining that it is you and you alone who should … declaim it with bold accompaniment, if only the highest honour had not called you away to other preoccupations…. [S]ince it has pleased you that Geoffrey of Monmouth should sound his own pipe in this piece of soothsaying, do not hesitate to show favour to his music-makings. If he produces any sound which is wrong or unpleasant, force him back into correct harmony with your own Muses’ baton. (Thorpe 170–71; VII, 1)

Alexander’s power becomes a magician’s wand; Geoffrey maintains proudly that Alexander “alone should declaim [the prophecies] with bold accomplishment,” despite the fact that their original language is “unknown” to him. In place of Alexander’s “all powerful wand,” Geoffrey offers his own more modest “rustic reed pipe,” a figuration which marks authorial power with tropes of male virility while simultaneously placing Alexander as an imaginary intermediary between Geoffrey and Merlin. This description compliments Alexander’s majesty while distancing Geoffrey’s own artistry from Merlin’s prophetic authorship. Geoffrey is merely the humble medium; he mediates the creations of a fictional magician and the desires of a powerful bishop. Through this dedication Geoffrey displays the usefulness of imaginative ventures like prophetic soothsaying to those in power. Powerful bishops like Alexander, Geoffrey reminds us, have access to their own muses; it is their aesthetic pleasures—their designations of “correct harmony” and “favorable music-makings”—that determine which sounds will gain a fair hearing and which will fall on deaf ears.

Geoffrey’s text displays a crucial fact of patronage.²⁷ Sovereigns and bishops need aesthetic creation (and linguistic techniques) to display their power. In fact, the story of Merlin that Monmouth tells will link linguistic technologies (the powers of storytelling, translation, and prophecy) to a powerful set of material activities. Merlin’s skill in the power of the story, his ability to “foretell the future,” is linked with his knowledge of “mechanical contrivances” (195). Skilled in tales and technologies, Merlin’s prophecies restore stability to Vortigern’s military fortifications: he solves the problem of the crumbling tower by revealing the fighting dragons underneath it. He is able, in explicit contrast to the brute strength of Vortigern’s warriors, to dismantle the Giant’s Ring in Ireland, reerecting it as Stonehenge. Indeed, Merlin’s usefulness to his sovereign is matchless. More important than any army, “his artistry is worth more than any brute strength” (ingenium que uirtuti preualere) (198). And Merlin manages explicitly innovative technologies of sovereign succession, providing the magical means whereby Uther Pendragon and Ygraine beget Arthur. As a prophet and magician, Merlin builds monuments and produces monumental kings.

As Martin Shichtman and Laurie Finke have noted, Merlin’s awesome abilities mark him as more than the average court poet. Shichtman and Finke call him “the possessor of intellectual property a monopoly so absolute and valuable that it almost equalizes the relationship between client and patron” (35).²⁸ And this, as Shichtman and Finke also point out, is one way to read Geoffrey the historian. Geoffrey, like Merlin, mediates influential pleasures to amazing cultural and political effect. In Merlin Geoffrey may well craft a veiled representation of the power of his own ingenium, the word Monmouth used repeatedly to describe Merlin’s craft, a term which in the Middle Ages could mean both “artistry and genius” and “deviousness, artifice and fraud” (Shichtman and Finke 34). Despite their attention to the ambiguities of ingenium, Shichtman and Finke characterize Geoffrey’s use of the word as unequivocally enthusiastic: “Geoffrey glosses over the limitations of Merlin’s ingenium,” they argue, “just as he glosses over the limitations of his own” (34). But Geoffrey’s efforts to distance himself from the pleasures of the text he “translates,” the dedications that identify Merlin’s skills with Bishop Alexander’s power rather than with Geoffrey’s own, all hint at anxieties about his own ingenium. When he positions himself as the medium and not the source of the pleasures of his own text, Geoffrey’s dedications—read as “fulsome” and “sycophantic in the extreme” by some²⁹—suggest an artistic and historiographic agency constrained by pleasures other than his own. He is, in the textual variants that include these dedications, overcome by the wishes of his patrons; their dictates and their pleasures may likewise overwhelm his text.

Such a reading suggests Geoffrey’s political canniness; it suggests as well that Geoffrey may have been trying to point out that histories were always written for politicians with political axes to grind. In light of this we can now consider the ambiguities of the Merlin Prophecies, a central, and perhaps the most imaginatively excessive, section of the Historia. Geoffrey’s representation of Merlin’s power for Vortigern may indicate sobering testimony to what massive things sovereigns can do with soothsayers like Merlin at their service. Yet Geoffrey also places in Merlin’s mouth radically prophetic words powerful enough to jolt an imperial king like Vortigern out of his sovereign complacency. Merlin’s prophecies warn of a horrific British future:

For Britain’s mountains and valleys shall be leveled, and the streams in its valleys shall run with blood.…

The race that is oppressed shall prevail in the end, for it will resist the savagery of the invaders.…

The island shall be called by the name of Brutus and the title given to it by foreigners shall be done away with….

Three generations will witness all that I have mentioned, and then the kings buried in the town of London will be disinterred….

London shall mourn the death of twenty thousand and the Thames will be turned into blood.

The Daneian Forest shall be wakened from its sleep and, bursting into human speech, it shall shout: “Kambria, come here! Bring Cornwall at your side! Say to Winchester: ‘The earth will swallow you up. Move the see of your shepherd to where the ships come in to harbour. Then make sure that the limbs which remain follow the head! The day approaches when your citizens will perish for their crimes of perjury…. Woe to the perjured people, for their famous city shall come toppling down because of them.’” (Thorpe 171, 175, 176, 178; VII, 3, 4)

The prophecies warn of injury, death, devastation, and a vengeful repayment for “the savagery of invaders.” As Rupert Taylor points out, Merlin’s prophecies resonate with Biblical indictments from apocalyptic literature of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Revelation (27). Those prophetic books, identified by Biblical scholars as “crisis literature,” narrate the captivity of a conquered, yet holy, people, and of their messianic hopes for deliverance. Embedded, in the vulgate version, within Monmouth’s larger text, Merlin’s prophecies launch a sharp critique of conquest, prophesying death to London, a scene of such geological tumult that Wales (“Kambria”) and Cornwall shout curses upon Westminster. London shall mourn; the Thames will be turned to blood; the Kings of London will be disinterred after three generations. Statements like these allude to promises of divine wrath meted out upon oppressors.

The prophetic traditions that fueled Merlin’s apocalyptic tone, moreover, were borrowed from Welsh vaticinative tradition. The Merlin Prophecies and the story of the Red and White Dragons battling beneath Vortigern’s tower were, according to A. O. H. Jarman, “lifted bodily … from the ninth-century collection of early British and Welsh saga material and semi-historical traditions known as the Historia Brittonum” (131). These prophetic and symbolic Welsh traditions date from “memories of the struggle of the Britons and the English for supremacy in the fifth and sixth centuries,” when the figure of the Red Dragon represented the Welsh who “will arise, and valiantly throw the English people across the sea,” while the White Dragon represented “the people who have seized many peoples and countries in Britain” (Historia Brittonum, as cited by Jarman, 136). The Welsh poem Armes Prydein Vawr, dated c. 930, prophesies Welsh efforts to vanquish foreign invaders; it mentions Vortigern and Merlin as well. Jarman argues through linguistic and textual evidence that Geoffrey was“clearly aware” of Welsh vaticinatory tradition, and used “the [general] nature and purpose of vaticination”—that is, a critique of conquest and invasion—borrowed from Welsh tradition to craft Merlin’s prophecies.³⁰

Developed from this Welsh tradition, the Merlin Prophecies encode an early version of what postcolonial scholars term “oppositional discourse.” Postcolonial cultural studies, a field marked by a commitment to the agency of conquered peoples, has reminded scholars in all disciplines of the importance of acknowledging the historical agency of such groups. In the words of critic Benita Parry, oppositional works attest “to the counter-hegemonic strategies” of a people under siege as they struggle to resist or to accommodate the vicissitudes of their experience. As I noted in the introduction to this study, oppositional discourse has come to define “postcolonial” itself. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, editors of The Postcolonial Studies Reader, define “postcolonial” as “the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being” (117).³¹ Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin among others imply that the “post” prefix in “postcolonial” signifies “against,” rather than “after,” colonialism. In this view, the “post” of “postcolonial” becomes, as K. Anthony Appiah puts it, “the post of the space-clearing gesture” (348). Such insights remain specifically resonant for scholars working in early periods. We can, I would argue, deploy “postcolonial” to signal a concern with agency and oppositional texts, even as we appreciate the historical specificity (the similarities and differences) of twentieth-century or medieval scenes of conquest.

The oppositional discourses of Welsh vaticinative poetry could, in this way, be viewed as a “postcolonial” collection. Yet the complicated textual status and linguistic nature of these traditions might also offer a crucial qualification to standard definitions of “opposition.” On the one hand, early vaticination, as E. M. Griffiths established, characteristically links the restoration of insular rule to the Britons through figures like Arthur. Yet the texts that survive (as the Historia Brittonum to which Jarman refers) are themselves notoriously complicated, combining elements of Latin clerical and Welsh “native” cultures.³² This difficult situation means that these “oppositional” texts are not romantically “pure.” Such complications have sometimes produced scholarly diffidence on questions of Welsh oppositional agency, particularly with regard to Arthur. Yet evidence of oppositional traditions in texts “contaminated” by substantial interlinguistic, cultural, and historical complexity registers, I would argue, not the absolute absence of resistance so much as the absence of resistance as a “pure” process or event. These texts testify to the complexity of “native” culture and resistance in Wales, a locale that combines conquest and difference with a long history of intimate exchange. Viewed as complicated, mixed sets of texts, these “oppositional discourses” themselves emerge as an extraordinary kind of creative agency, to recall Patterson’s formulation, an imaginative makyng in the face of constraint. Furthermore, I would argue that so long as we understand the “post” of “postcolonial” to refer solely to the time after the withdrawal of colonial rule, we will likely miss that such poignant complications suggest not a complicity with conquest that must be deplored, but the difficulty of oppositional strategies. And this, again I would argue, is exactly the case with the scholarly reception of Geoffrey’s Historia.

The importance and power—the historical agency—of the oppositional traditions Geoffrey deploys have been traditionally under appreciated in favor of an overemphasis upon the genealogical interests of Geoffrey’s Anglo-Norman patrons and audience. As a result many readers have emphasized what they see as Monmouth’s collusion with Anglo-Norman colonial desires for things Welsh, arguing that Geoffrey appropriates, even “colonizes,” Welsh material for his own uses.³³ Yet arguments that emphasize Anglo-Norman patronage and rule tend to render insignificant, and often ignore altogether, the agency of other audiences and other uses of Geoffrey’s text. In these accounts, the Historia remains almost exclusively an instrument of hegemonic power, a text that sponsors only the desires of parvenu Anglo-Norman conquerors, despite the fact that the Historia’s popularity, as the diversity of extant manuscripts suggests, obtained far beyond their concerns.³⁴ In contrast to this approach, I will argue shortly for a reading of the subtle relation between Monmouth’s Anglo-Norman patrons and Welsh resisters of Anglo-Norman rule. For if Monmouth’s text aided the Norman conquerors, it also gained important benefits for a linguistic minority and contributed to the further development of Welsh discourses of resistance. Those gains occurred in part because of the evocative (and puzzling) ambiguity of the texts themselves, and of Monmouth’s clever use of them. The ambiguity of the Prophecies, and Geoffrey’s own political acuity, meant that those resisting the designs of the Anglo-Normans had access to authoritative and popular texts that enabled resistance. The Merlin Prophecies, articulated in the Historia Brittonum as texts of Welsh resistance to Saxon conquest, could resonate as well with the later scene of Anglo-Norman Conquest. I argue below, moreover, that these important ambiguities make Geoffrey’s text crucial for competing accounts of Britain’s future, and that this explains in part the long-lived popularity of Geoffrey’s text.

Scholars have already noted that the flexible ambiguity of Geoffrey’s Historia proved useful in the context of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman aristocratic enmity. Shichtman and Finke remind us of the awkwardness of Geoffrey’s multiple dedicatees, a group of enemies, key figures from both sides of the bitter dynastic struggles following Henry I’s death.³⁵ As a result, they describe Geoffrey’s Historia, following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, as symbolic capital, “the creation of a past which could ease the [genealogical] anxieties of a powerful ruling class concerned with discovering family origin” (35). Geoffrey’s work was so popular because of its ability to accommodate such a diverse and fractured audience. I am suggesting that there is an even broader and more diverse audience to which we must attend. For Geoffrey’s popularity ventured far beyond a court circle interested in the particularities of dynastic politics. And it pertained as well to a set of contestations between the Welsh and Anglo-Normans rooted in divergent interpretations of the Merlin Prophecies.

We thus still need to address the crucial question of these traditions, asking why the history Geoffrey chose to tell was, unlike Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum or Bede’s Historiam ecclesiasticam gentis Anglorum, not the story of an English past, but of a British one.³⁶ How did this story of British kings help create an insular future, and what might this mean for our understanding of the category of “Britain?” The legacy of Geoffrey’s matter of Britain in the later Middle Ages—its appearance in texts of futuristic prophesy and political propaganda, its uses as genealogical data for aristocratic pedigree, its elaboration in regionalist romances of Arthur, or in the plans of English (or Scottish) sovereigns who name their first-born sons after the mythical king—means that Monmouth’s fantasy offered an enduring imaginary ground for creating (and contesting) the identity of an historic British community. I turn now to examine how and why Geoffrey’s “Britons,” and the ambiguity of Merlin’s futuristic prophecies of their return, prompt these uses. The Britain Geoffrey describes evokes a doubled history: one specifically linked to a remnant Welsh population, and another linked to an insular return, and to a British totam insulam.

Doubled Time and Spaces: The Riches of British History

Francis Ingledew has shown that the genealogical impulse in the Historia links with territorial claims to land, arguing that as Geoffrey’s text eased Anglo-Norman genealogical disputes, it also came to sponsor territorial claims for an entire class of aristocrats. This is because, Ingledew argues, Geoffrey advanced the very definition of what constitutes a “national” history, where “the possession of territory and power came to correlate distinctively with ownership of time; time came to constitute space—family and national land—as home, an inalienable and permanent, private and public territory” (669).³⁷ Ingledew offers a view of time that is useful for imagining, and then claiming, the unified space of a realm. Geoffrey’s Historia imagines a genealogical union (across time) that can prefigure the imagination of territorial unity, in the united (broadly familial) ownership of a realm. Yet, like so many other insightful analyses of the Historia, Ingledew’s work does not consider the significance of Geoffrey’s relation to Welsh traditions, wherein we might find a different account of the broad family descended from Brutus. Instead Ingledew emphasizes Geoffrey’s book as an exclusively Trojan history. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s genealogy of the Britons, while a Trojan story, also depends upon a view of British territory borrowed from very old popular Welsh traditions.³⁸ Indeed Monmouth’s genealogical narrative will help sponsor Welsh claims to London’s crown.

At the time Geoffrey wrote, “Briton” was an equivocal category, referring both to the Welsh and to their linguistic kin in Brittany. While there is the sense that, for modern scholars, the early medieval term is liable to slippage between these two referents, scholars rarely consider what that slippage might have meant for Monmouth, or how its doubleness might have been useful to him. Instead scholars imagine Geoffrey’s identity in singular terms—he was, they assert, a Breton. Yet questions of flexibility and of cultural doubleness remain important to Monmouth who represents it as an important strategy for dealing with complicated cultural relations.³⁹ Ambivalence and doubleness emerge in Geoffrey’s representation of the Welsh, a group he describes as both vulnerable and noble. Geoffrey’s Welsh do appear poor and vulnerable (vi, 2), yet it is their “nobility in bearing” (vi, 4) that gains for them a hearing with Aldroenus’ King of Brittany, implying that their fortunes are tarnished but not bankrupt. An army of the most illustrious Britons conquer Amorica for Maximianus and Coranus Meriadorus, settling there and leaving their lower-born kinspeople in Britain. Yet it is through the politicking of what Brynley Roberts calls the “listless, low-born, and timid remnant” (x) left behind that the dynasty destined to produce Arthur—the glorious king and narrative center of Geoffrey’s work—returns to the island. Geoffrey’s representation of the conquest of Brittany implies a ruthlessness (rather than a forthright glory) of the invading Maximianus.⁴⁰ Those left behind by Maximianus, moreover, testify to the losses this conquest wrought for his own kin, counting themselves “poverty-stricken” since “Maximianus despoiled [the] island of its soldiers.” And when Aldroenus, King of Brittany, refuses to accept the crown of Britain—an episode frequently cited as prime evidence of Geoffrey’s Breton, rather than Welsh, loyalties—he nonetheless keeps the crown in the family, offering his brother Constantine in his place, describing an island in “peace and tranquillity” as the most “fertile country in existence” (vi, 5). Finally Arthur, the central figure in Geoffrey’s monument to British kings, is descended from both insular and continental ancestors.

According to Monmouth’s story the Britons are a doubled people, occupying two places at once: they remain in the western reaches of the island, but have also migrated to the continent. The cultural migrations of the Britons offer a long history of continental and insular interaction. Geoffrey’s tale of the conquest of Amorica is, moreover, a direct inversion of Norman Conquest of the island of Britain; Norman migration from continent to island mirrors a previous, and British, migration from island to continent. In light of Geoffrey’s story of British conquest throughout all of Gaul, Norman invasion of the island of Britain amounts not to a new conquest so much as a recurrence: Britons left the island, conquering the continent; the Normans leave the continent, conquering the island. This conjunction of interactions implies geographic settlement is fluid; cultural exchange between continent and island has a long, and specifically British, history.

From an Anglo-Norman point of view, this double geography of Britain (as a number of scholars have suggested) marks Briton and Norman as distinct yet related cultures. Insular Britons, by virtue of their affiliation with this continental kin, deserve respect. Yet, as readers repeatedly point out, the Welsh Britons have none of the glory of the Normans, appearing debased and lost by the end of Geoffrey’s story. Their history is strikingly glorious, but their present is weak and unsteady. Despite such weakness, it is the Britons in Wales who offer hope for a future recovery: “Living precariously in Wales, in the remote recesses of the wood” Welsh Britons look for “the appointed moment” when “the British people would occupy the island again” (282–83; xxi, 17, 18). In the context of the geographic doubleness of British rule, Geoffrey’s text thus ends with the implication—the textual status of which will be clearer in a moment—that the promised British recovery might be displaced through Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman politics of Geoffrey’s history lies with the very important implication that the Normans can rightly inherit from the imperial Britons, a race on a par with the Romans who, “were able to conquer the island” (272; xii, 5). By implication—but only by implication—Norman presence on the island represents a British future, while the (Welsh) Britons figure its past. The Normans can, by learning and respecting the history of the isle of Britain, begin to weave their glory with the glory of the land they rule and with the British king Arthur. This history provides a way for a Norman aristocratic audience to capture the richness of a mythic Welsh past while still remaining the conquerors of those whose glorious history they wish to imagine as their own.

If historians since Geoffrey have been as happy to see his implication as the Normans themselves must have been, they have not considered the import of its status as an insinuation rather than a forthright claim. Elsewhere Monmouth emphasizes ambiguity as an important factor both for his own writing and for Merlin’s activity: in his self-conscious distancing from his text’s pleasures; in the ambiguity of the Merlin Prophecies; in the diversity of his dedications. In fact Geoffrey himself repeatedly notes that the ambiguity of Merlin’s prophecies were the source of Merlin’s popularity. All were “filled with amazement by the equivocal [ambiguitate] meaning of [Merlin’s] words” (Thorpe 170). “Ambiguitate” glossed as “inclined to both sides; hybrid” and “wavering, hesitating, uncertain, doubtful, obscure.” The OED notes the early English meanings taken from Medieval Latin pertain to the second of these connotations, “a wavering of opinion, hesitation, doubt, uncertainty as to one’s course.” The diversity of manuscript redactions points further to “a wavering of opinion” in the contradictory interests of Geoffrey’s multiple and diverse dedicatees. But it also points far beyond Anglo-Norman partisan concerns. The politics of “ambiguitate” explain the Historia’s diverse and complicated reception. Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s text will be important to Welsh nationalist politics at various times throughout the Middle Ages. In that context it is unsurprising that some redactions of Geoffrey’s text identify (in prophecies known as the “Breton Hope”) British recovery of the totius insulae with Welsh claims to the island kingdom while others call such interpretations explicitly into question. The Bern and Harlech manuscripts of the Historia, for example, end with a disclaimer that denies any hope for a future Welsh rule: “The Welsh, once they had degenerated from the noble state enjoyed by the Britons, never afterwards recovered the overlordship of the island” (Thorpe 284).

This disclaimer explicitly contests Welsh “oppositional texts” and precludes Welsh hopes that they are the Britons who will return to rule the land. Disclaimers like this one, combined with Geoffrey’s equivocation, helped consolidate the power of Geoffrey’s patrons. Yet Geoffrey’s “ambiguitate” also means that his text will prove useful to Welsh resisters of Anglo-Norman conquest. J. S. P. Tatlock notes the early popularity of the Historia in Wales, a fact corroborated by Brynley Roberts’s important account of the significance of the Brut ϒ Brenhinedd (the earliest Middle Welsh translation of Geoffrey’s text) for Welsh intellectuals in the twelfth century and beyond when it became “a potent element in Welsh national consciousness until the end of the eighteenth century” (“Historia and Brut ϒ Brenhinedd,” 113).⁴¹ The ambiguity of Geoffrey’s Historia—read especially in the final ambiguous implication of British return—meant that subversive “oppositional” Welsh material could gain influence even at court.

Such is a powerful (and effective) display of creative makyng in the face of constraint. By some accounts Geoffrey’s history gained political prestige for the Welsh Britons into the next generation of Anglo-Norman affairs, a time when the direct conquest of Wales seemed a likely corollary of a Norman colonizing program. According to Welsh historian R. R. Davies, Wales was initially “peripheral” to Norman conquerors concerned with the security of their position in England and Normandy. Yet during the late eleventh and into the twelfth century (and in partial response to Welsh aid to Saxon dissidents) the conquerors turned their attentions westward. A struggle for supremacy over Wales ensued with the map of Norman control of Welsh regions constantly changing. During the period of Geoffrey’s initial popularity, Norman control of the area had weakened enough that, according to Welsh chroniclers of the 1160s, “all the Welsh united to throw off the rule of the French” conquerors who desired “to carry into bondage and to destroy all the Britons” (Brut y Tywysogyon, 1165, 1167, as cited by Davies, Conquest 52–53). Henry II’s 1165 campaign to crush Welsh resistance proved a failure; that fact apparently inspired a change in Henry’s policy. By 1171, again according to Davies, Henry’s policies “toward native Welsh princes … had changed radically” and “no English king would again invade Wales for almost forty years” (53–54). If Henry II’s failed military campaign inspired in him a desire to change his policy toward Wales, such a desire could find an ideological justification in Geoffrey’s book. Furthermore, there is evidence that Henry was well acquainted with Geoffrey’s text: interested in literature and history himself, Henry II had been educated at the Bristol residence of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chief patron.⁴² LaƷamon’s Middle English Brut, a verse rendering of Wace’s French verse rendering of Geoffrey’s Historia, links this insular chronicle tradition with Henry II, mentioning a dedication to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s queen.⁴³ The links between Henry II’s policies and his role as patron of legendary histories has been noted by Patterson, who remarks that “much of the court literature of the period shows patterns of interest that are consistent with Henry’s political needs” (“Historiography,” 3).⁴⁴

Geoffrey’s Historia, and later versions of its story, could encourage Henry II to appreciate the value of the Welsh as peers and allies rather than as conquered subjects. Representing the once glorious Welsh now debased by their own weaknesses and disgraced by aggressive Saxon conquerors implicitly identify the Saxons as the real Norman enemy. Joined by common enmity toward the Saxons, Norman and Briton become allies rather than rivals. Tatlock retorts that “those who profited most from Geoffrey’s work were the Britons; one of [Geoffrey’s] motives may well have been to heighten respect for them among his Norman superiors” (428). Modern histories of medieval Wales emphasize the Welsh, in contrast to the Saxons, as successful resisters of Norman invasion. In those accounts, Welsh resistance in the Anglo-Norman period produced Welsh independence from the English until Edwardian days.⁴⁵ This image of a Welsh remnant resistant to conquest, maintaining an intact community amid loss, resonates with the image of the Britons from the end of the Historia, poised on the western edge of the island. The fantasy of a native British survival in Wales, as I will argue in Chapter 2, grants fifteenth-century sovereigns access to insular native roots resistant to continental aggressions, a resistance through which, by the second half of the fifteenth century, Edward IV will claim himself heir to a continuous native line of kings.

In the decades following Norman Conquest the meaning of such an image remains paradoxically ambiguous.⁴⁶ Its popularity with the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and with Welsh resisters alike suggests both contestations over the identity of Brutus’s heirs, and the text’s ambivalent political uses in that debate. This ambivalence, moreover, links intercultural insular unity to what I am calling a national fantasy. Homi Bhabha’s account of “nation and narration” emphasizes both the fantasmatic nature of national narratives and the ways in which such texts always gesture, despite themselves, to the contestations and disunities they earnestly seek to avoid. Bhabha describes “the Janus-faced discourse of the nation,” one liable to “subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding” (Nation 3–4). Bhabha’s formulation seems uncannily pertinent to the twelfth century scene we have been examining—despite the fact that Bhabha, like many, identifies national narratives as modern inventions. Thus I turn finally to consider how we might understand this medieval oppositional history as, nonetheless, the history of a national fantasy.

Bhabha describes national narrations as ambivalent texts situated in crisis. This is because the definition of a national “people” evokes both a past (putatively shared) history and a present field of differences. The national “people” signify a crisis of representation and a contestation of meaning. Positioned amid this crisis, the “people” are both “pedagogical historical objects” learning who “they” are and “performative subjects” effecting the identity that “they” are thought to inhabit. In their pedagogical function, the people learn from the past; in their performative function, the people display an identity in the present. And the performative field may disrupt the apparent national “truths” registered in the pedagogical. Contemporary activities of the people may, in other words, trouble the stability of an identity that we have been taught to embrace as “ours.”

But Bhabha links the “margins of the nation” with “modernity,” and he is interested in explaining how modern national discourses disavow conflicts by positioning such problems as temporally past, surmounted in a “modern” present. Through such temporal limits, according to Bhabha, modern narrations of the nation both deny and imply the antagonistic variety of people claimed by national rule. In this way national narratives mark the limits of community through rhetorical tropes of time and space. They encode what Edward Said has called the “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” of an intercultural past, but as the liminal spaces bounding the nation’s (present) identity.

In the twelfth century, before the consolidation of any singular nationalist British pedagogy, Geoffrey’s Historia performs a narrativization with pedagogical and performative pretensions. Yet it also differs in significant ways from the national narration that Bhabha describes. On one hand, the Historia crafts a British “people” as its object, and its diverse reception for various political uses contests the identity of which British subjects rightfully follow as Brutus’s heirs. The scholarly reception of Monmouth’s text seems, moreover, to make something like Bhabha’s point. In that tradition, Monmouth’s use of Welsh vaticination is read merely as a “colonization” of the Welsh, and Geoffrey’s text can thus be said to bound Britain’s identity by placing the oppositions of vaticination in the past. If this is the case, then the kinds of disavowals that Bhabha links with modernity emerge even in a premodern account of the past.

Yet Monmouth’s Historia does not, I would argue, offer any such easy chronology. His interest in the difficult, provocative futurism of the Merlin Prophecies, to my eyes, disrupts a progressivist confidence that the past is forever (or ever) surmounted. Monmouth’s ambiguous moments of futurism mean that his readers cannot move back to genealogy or chronology in any triumphant or untroubled way. Furthermore, Monmouth’s combination of prophecy with genealogy suggests that future imaginings (and not just disavowals in the present) drive fantasies of community, even as the restoration of insular unity or wholeness remains a sovereign dream. Monmouth’s history repetitiously invokes the past and future fiction of an entire kingdom ruled by a sovereign family; in this, as Tatlock and Ingledew both remind us, Geoffrey’s history enables annexation. But his history also, and at the same time, contests monolithic rule by disrupting chronological history. His inclusion of the Merlin Prophecies means that the category of ‘Britain’ gestures to (at least) two futures for the crown. Monmouth thus formally encodes differential futures for Britain while displaying not the march of time but repetition and loss as Britain’s fundamental story.

The oppositional “crisis literature” of an insular minority offers a trace history of the material power of those hopes for a different future. Geoffrey’s use of Welsh traditions in a history written in Latin seeks to imagine a future for Welsh as well as Norman by narrating a past repetitively fraught with conflict and filled with loss. This history ultimately encodes the losses wrought by conquest and migration and, in the complex rhetorical figure of “the Britons,” tentatively promises a future of wholeness and recovery. The popularity of Geoffrey’s Historia demonstrates the substantial pleasure of such fragile hopes. Geoffrey’s fragile “Britons” provide (to recall Žižek’s formulation from earlier in this chapter) a captivating “kernel of enjoyment” haunted by devastating losses.

Such a project may also, before certain of audiences, enable the disavowal of twelfth-century Welsh differences from the Anglo-Normans. Desire for a British totam insulam will of course be used to impel as well as to justify England’s efforts to annex Scotland and Wales. But it will also repeatedly be used in opposition to English hegemony. This flexibility has to do in part with the very term “Britain,” a name with a doubled medieval etymology. Traditional etymologies of the word “Britain,” trace its roots in two directions: from the classical figure of Brutus (the etymology listed in the OED), and from the common Welsh phrase “Ynys Prydein” (Island of Britain). Emphasis upon the first of these linguistic histories has traditionally eclipsed the second.⁴⁷ In Monmouth’s Historia we find both: the story of Brutus and the Merlin’s prophecies linked to the Armes Prydein. Insofar as the eponymous name for the island came from Brutus and his classical conquering army, “Britain” designates a conquering people, a race of invaders adopting the island as their home. Thus is “Britain” a cultural import from Troy, a legacy of conquest displaced from the heart of the Roman world. With Welsh tradition in mind, the category of Britain also refers to hopes for particular geographic integrity—to wholeness and to a native insular geography. “Britain” signifies a geographic completion lost, a unity gone from a people (and an identity) once imperial in power.

This doubled Britain will prove pliable enough, richly ambivalent enough, to accommodate the desires not just of parvenu Anglo-Norman aristocrats anxious to take part in glorious sovereign fantasies, but of later English kings and conquerors. In the fifteenth century, Monmouth’s history, with its representation of a native, British glory, captivates the imagination of English kings who, in the wake of the Hundred Years War, wish to repudiate their dynastic ties to France (resisting their history as the heirs of Norman conquest). Through Arthur they claim an insular, native tradition, and a heritage more ancient than Norman invasion. For these English kings part of the useful doubleness of Geoffrey’s story is that it figures an insular wholeness, and a British identity, as both a loss to be mourned and as a rightful inheritance to be regained. Since the Britons “once occupied the land from sea to sea,” the category of “Britain” provides the imagination with a new insular hegemony as a very old heritage. Later sovereigns will deploy both native and classical traditions in imagining their sovereignty—English kings and aristocrats will wage war against Welsh, Scots, and Irish, building colonial outposts in the edges of the realm while encouraging court poets to tell of their classical roots. This doubleness will render insular hegemony a rightful legacy of a mystical Welsh past as well as domination forged through military, economic, and political policies.

The cultural doubleness legible in my reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia (and in the important work done by scholars of medieval Wales to whom my work is indebted) disappears from later notions of “Britain” and its empire. This disappearance means that William of Malmesbury’s denigration of Welsh “ravings” with which we began successfully located Welsh oppositional fantasies outside the realm of the “real.” The trivialization of these alternative versions of “Britain” suggests an interpretive history that favors one portion of Geoffrey’s readers. Alternative fantasies have nonetheless left their traces. Those traces remain legible today thanks in part to Monmouth’s careful ambiguity, and to his use of the traditions of a linguistic minority in the authoritative genre of a Latin history. In this instance, Latin becomes a vehicle for legitimizing (and rendering massively influential) a popular vernacular tradition.

These remarks again suggest some of the power medievalists can offer to postcolonial cultural studies. A consideration of the longue duree of British identity can offer readings of resistance that seem to have disappeared from later discussions of nation or Empire, perhaps precisely because Wales remains a colony of England today. This is not to suggest that the story of Welsh resistance told here replace (or displace) important contemporary efforts at analyzing the racist and imperialist aspects of contemporary British (or American) culture or politics. It does remind us, however, to watch for traces of a variety of resistances already obscured in authoritative accounts of history.

Furthermore, the condensation of resistance and conquering aggression told through Monmouth’s Historia, and repeated in the history of its reception and dissemination, might offer a useful qualification to recent debates within postcolonial cultural studies. Benita Parry critiques Homi Bhabha’s work as overly focused on texts produced in the colonizer’s locale. She argues that such an emphasis obscures the agency of the colonized, and she calls for “a cartography of imperialist ideology more extensive than its address in colonialist space, [and] a conception of the native as historical subject and agent of an oppositional discourse” (“Problems,” 44). Yet Parry’s formulation itself implies that “oppositional discourses” are never found in “colonialist space”; this implies that Europe’s conquerors were (ever) the only inhabitants of Europe, a fact that (with regard to the medieval colonial scene at least) overemphasizes the power of dominant cultures at the expense of the conquered. In so doing Parry inadvertently discounts the powerful intimacies of medieval borderlands, and the complicated minglings of medieval textualities. The divergent reception of the Historia instead suggests that both desire for and resistance to conquest can be read in a single text. My reading of the Historia offers the history of cultural contestation both passionately fraught and deeply intimate.

Colonial histories would, in subsequent centuries, continue to contest and disavow Welsh oppositional sovereign fantasies. They will, in fact, continue to disavow some versions of Arthur’s story as fable, fancy, or mad ravings. Such a complicated literary history should, however, give us pause before charges of truth or fable, charges that will recur throughout the Middle English corpus. Through such charges Arthurian traditions, widely known and widely used for centuries, became increasingly tied to the pleasures of Europe’s conquerors. Yet oppositional uses of Arthurian traditions will also persist for some time. The interpretive pleasures of Welsh separatists will face repetitive insistence that they are mad, utterly false, and thus unreal.

This history of disputes and contests over interpretive legitimacy, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, also structures what I am calling Arthur’s national fantasy. In later chapters of this study I will argue that this contentious narrative history renders Arthur a king for all Britons, and helps explain the diversity, the seeming contradictions, and the impressive expansiveness of the Middle English tradition. A Middle English tradition of political prophecy, propaganda, and genealogy built upon a textual futurism borrowed from Welsh poetry means that Welsh poetic practice becomes a way of encoding England’s doubled history as both conquered space and conquering sovereignty (see Chapter 2). Monmouth’s tale of Merlin and Arthur offers a set of differential readings of British destiny and how it might be legitimately fulfilled. In the late medieval period, and in a century marked at one end by the Glyn Dwr rebellion and at the other by Tudor succession, these versions of Arthur constitute a crucial—and crucially contested—account of British sovereignty.