2
The interpretation of the past that was widely disseminated in Wales by the later Middle Ages had its origins in post-Roman Britain, since medieval Welsh history writing began as the history of the Britons and embraced the island of Britain. However, the earliest texts, apart, perhaps, from Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (‘The Ruin of Britain’), were written by the Britons of what became Wales. One fundamental aspect of their understanding of the past was an identification with a wider Brittonic world that had been steadily curtailed as the result of Anglo-Saxon conquests. This helps to explain why the writing of historical texts in early medieval Wales formed part of a wider historiographical response to the major political changes of the post-Roman period. Thus Gildas provided a common point of departure for subsequent historians of both the Britons and the English, being excerpted at length by Bede at the beginning of his Ecclesiastical History (731), which used the De Excidio to introduce a narrative of English domination, presented as a divinely ordained instrument of conversion to Christianity.1 One result, according to the late tenth-century chronicler Æthelweard, was that ‘Britain [Brittannia] is now called England [Anglia], taking the name of the victors’—an elision with a long future.2
By contrast, Welsh historical writing followed Gildas by focusing on the other side of the story, namely the defeat of the Britons and their subsequent history in the Middle Ages within the much narrower boundaries of the remaining British kingdoms, especially in Wales. However, in order to achieve its aims, this writing looked beyond the Brittonic world and also drew on texts composed in continental Europe, Anglo-Saxon England, and Ireland. Conversely, historical works composed in neighbouring lands referred to the Britons of Wales, mostly either by giving brief obits of Welsh kings or by describing attacks on Wales, especially by the English: for example, the account in the Annals of Æthelflæd (also known as the Mercian Register) of the burning in 916 of the royal fort on Llangorse Lake in Brycheiniog by a force sent by Æthelflæd ‘Lady of the Mercians’ and the coverage of campaigns by Harold and Tostig Godwineson against Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1064) in the Life of Edward the Confessor.3 (The latter work also denigrated the Welsh by evoking their claims to Trojan origins.)4 An Anglocentric perspective likewise appears in the longest work of history by an early medieval author from Wales, namely the Life of Alfred (893), composed in Wessex by the cleric Asser of St Davids (d. 908 × 909), who wrote approvingly of the submission of the Welsh kings to the man he hailed as ‘ruler of all the Christians of the island of Britain, king of the Angles and Saxons’.5 By contrast, the tenth-century poem Armes Prydein Vawr (‘The Great Prophecy of Britain’), quite possibly responding to Asser, advocated Welsh resistance to the English, foretelling their defeat by a grand coalition that would lead to the Britons’ recovery of sovereignty over the island in the earliest known instance of a tradition of political prophecy that continued to the end of the Middle Ages and reflected Welsh poets’ cultivation of a Britain-centric past.6
Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae
Any attempt to understand the historiography of medieval Wales must begin, then, with Gildas’s De Excidio.7 Both its date and place of composition are uncertain. However, there are persuasive grounds for assigning it to the period c.530–545, possibly c.540, and at least three of the five kings it addressed may be identified as rulers of kingdoms in what became Wales.8 In any case, irrespective of where precisely Gildas wrote, the crucial points for the present discussion are his status as a cleric and his focus on, and identification with, the Britons. True, his depiction of the Britons was far from flattering. Expressly passing over the island’s past in the period before Christ,9 the De Excidio opens with an account of Roman and post-Roman Britain that emphasizes the pride of the Britons faced with the power of imperial Rome and relates how, faced with Irish and Pictish attacks after the Roman legions had departed, a ‘proud tyrant’ sought assistance from the Saxons, whose arrival led to extensive conquests and destruction. Like other Christian writers of this period, Gildas attributed such disasters to divine punishment for sin.10 The theme is developed in two further sections in which Gildas, adopting the mantle of an Old Testament prophet and armed with a panoply of biblical quotations, condemns both the secular rulers, termed ‘tyrants’, and clergy of the Britons of his own day for a multitude of failings, and calls on them to repent.11
The form and polemical character of the De Excidio has led some modern scholars to question whether it should be understood as a work of history, as implied by Bede’s description of Gildas as the ‘historian’ (L. historicus) of the Britons.12 It is true that Gildas introduces the work as an open letter (L. epistola) addressed to his fellow Britons and presents himself as a prophet denouncing the sins of his compatriots and urging them to mend their ways in order to avoid further divine judgement.13 However, if the De Excidio may seem to read like a sermon or polemic, Gildas relates historical events, both distant and contemporary, to make his case; moreover, at one point he explicitly calls it a history and implies that this was intrinsic to its condemnation of the Britons, referring to it as ‘this tearful history, this complaint against the evils of the age’.14 Above all, Gildas viewed the Britons as actors in a continued unfolding of the sacred history revealed in the Bible, especially God’s relationship with the people of Israel. Thus he declared that, in the onslaught of the Saxons on Britain, ‘comparable with that of the Assyrians on Judaea, there was fulfilled according to history for us also what the prophet said in his lament’, which was then illustrated by two passages from the Psalms.15 Even more explicitly, Gildas later described how, after the successes of Ambrosius Aurelianus, ‘victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies: so that in this people the Lord could make trial (as he tends to) of his latter-day Israel (L. praesentem Israelem) to see whether it loves him or not’.16 For Gildas, as a latter-day Old Testament prophet, the Britons, like Israel, were a people subject to the judgement of God.
They were also a people to whom the Old Testament prophets continued to speak. A passage that introduces a lengthy series of biblical exempla to support his attack on the five ‘tyrants’ declares:
Now, as before, therefore, let the holy prophets reply in my stead. So it was in the past. Favouring the good and forbidding men the bad, they were in a sense the mouth of God and the instrument of the holy spirit. Let them reply to the proud and stubborn princes of this age…17
This passage is also significant as an example of another important feature of the De Excidio, namely its deployment of the techniques of classical rhetoric.18 The prophets ‘reply’ in the manner of expert witnesses called by a pleader to support his case, and it has been shown that not only the structure but ‘the entire conception and style of the work is rhetorical’, as it exemplified the type of demonstrative rhetoric that established blame and also, as in the passage just cited, drew on the conventions of judicial rhetoric, originally designed for accusing or defending individuals; the same is true of the way Gildas directly addresses the five ‘tyrants’, which bears resemblances to speeches Cicero delivered against his opponents.19 This use of rhetoric, along with the Latinity of the De Excidio, in turn show that Gildas, as well as being profoundly immersed in the Bible, had received a traditional late Roman education which progressed from a training in Latin grammar to more advanced instruction in rhetoric.20 He thus takes his place among other late antique Christian authors whose writing was shaped by both classical and biblical models. He was also familiar with the Church Fathers and other early Christian authors, including the histories of Orosius and especially Eusebius (through the Latin translation of Rufinus),21 and his heavy reliance on the Bible to support a condemnation of his sinful contemporaries who suffered God’s punishment at the hands of barbarians has parallels with, and may even have been influenced by, Salvian of Marseilles’s De Gubernatione Dei (‘On the Government of God’), probably written in the early 440s.22
Nevertheless, while the De Excidio was conceived within a universal framework of Christian history and drew on the linguistic and rhetorical inheritance of the Roman Empire, in contrast to Salvian it did not target sinful Christian Romans in general or equate Old Testament Israel with the Roman Empire.23 Rather, its particular focus of attention was Britain, which Gildas referred to as his ‘fatherland’ (L. patria), and above all the Britons whom he described both as its ‘citizens’ (L. ciues) and as a ‘latter-day Israel’ firmly located in a universal pattern of sacred history.24 Indeed, his call to repentance was so urgent precisely because Gildas closely identified with the Britons as a Christian people, whom he showed to have enjoyed success in the past by obeying God, thereby implying that they might do so again if they repented.25 However great their failings, therefore, he expected better of the Britons than of the invading Irish, Picts, and, above all, Saxons, whose role as instruments of divine punishment was given all the more point by Gildas’s portrayal of them as savage barbarians.26 (The Romans, while presented in a positive light as having brought ‘the laws of obedience to the island’, established only a temporary presence there, and essentially serve as a foil for the failings of the Britons, whose response to imperial rule proved them to be ‘cowardly in war and faithless in peace’.)27 For Gildas, then, the Britons, despite their territorial losses, internal dissensions, treachery, tyranny, and immorality, occupied centre stage in the history of post-Roman Britain.
The Harleian Collection of Historical Texts
Over two centuries separate Gildas from the earliest historical texts found in a collection extant in British Library, Harleian MS 3859, copied c.1100 from an exemplar written in south-west Wales, very probably St Davids, between 954 and 988. This comprises three works: the Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’),28 composed in Gwynedd in 829/30 and ascribed in some manuscripts to Nennius, together with a chronicle and a set of genealogies which have been interpolated into it. The Harleian chronicle, commonly known as the A-text of Annales Cambriae (‘The Annals of Wales’), records events down to the death of Rhodri ap Hywel in 954, while the first two entries of the genealogies extend to Owain ap Hywel Dda (d. 988).29 However, the Harleian chronicle comprises entries made contemporaneously at St Davids from the late eighth century onwards, which were combined with material from two other sources. One was a chronicle from Gwynedd, quite possibly written at the church of Abergele, covering the period from the mid-fifth century to 858, which probably began to be written in the late eighth century and derived some of its entries down to the later seventh century from a northern British source also used by the Historia Brittonum. A revised version of the Gwynedd chronicle was then inserted as an appendix to the Historia Brittonum in the third quarter of the ninth century. The other source consisted of a version of the annals of Clonmacnoise in Ireland, datable to 911 × 954, which supplied retrospective entries back to the mid-fifth century as well as other additions.30 It has also been argued that the Harleian genealogies incorporated several earlier genealogical texts, mostly datable to the ninth century, the most substantial of which was composed in Gwynedd 844 × 872 as an illustrative supplement to the Historia Brittonum.31
The Harleian collection thus witnesses to a varied and evolving body of historical writing in Wales from the late eighth to the mid-tenth century as well as to a deliberate effort, very probably in the third quarter of the ninth century during the reign of Rhodri Mawr (Rhodri the Great), king of Gwynedd (r. 844–78), to combine in a single compilation three different genres of texts concerned with the British and Welsh past. Indeed, it contains most of the extant pre-Norman historical texts written in Wales, the major exception being the continuation of the St Davids chronicle after 954.32 As all three texts originated independently of the collection, each merits individual scrutiny, beginning with the Harleian chronicle and genealogies before moving on to the Historia Brittonum.
The Harleian Chronicle
It is likely that an important stimulus for writing the Gwynedd chronicle was the adoption in 768 by the Britons of Wales of the Roman method of calculating the date of Easter followed by the other churches of western Europe, a change ascribed to Elfoddw, termed ‘archbishop of Gwynedd’ in his obituary notice in 809.33 This brought the Britons of Wales into line with the other churches of Britain and Ireland, which had adopted the Roman Easter at various stages between the early seventh century and its acceptance by the monastery of Iona in 716.34 Three notices in the Gwynedd chronicle completed c.858, which was incorporated in the Harleian chronicle, indicate the significance attached to paschal orthodoxy: the changing of Easter to a Sunday by Pope Leo the Great in 453; the first celebration of Easter ‘by the Saxons’ in 665 (thus following the Synod of Whitby the previous year); and Elfoddw’s changing of Easter ‘among the Britons’ in 768.35 In addition, the chronological framework of the Harleian chronicle, again deriving from the Gwynedd chronicle it incorporates, is based on the nineteen-year Victorian and Dionysian paschal cycle favoured by supporters of the Roman Easter.36 As noted above, annals were also recorded contemporaneously at St Davids from the late eighth century, though how far this was due to the adoption of the Roman Easter is unclear.
The Harleian chronicle indicates, then, that the earliest known Welsh chronicles date from the late eighth century onwards, and thus considerably later than their Irish and English counterparts: the Chronicle of Ireland originated in the later sixth century at the Hebridean monastery of Iona, while annals were composed in Northumbria from the early eighth century and in Wessex quite possibly from the mid-seventh century.37 This contrast may, of course, simply be an optical illusion resulting from the loss of sources. At the very least, though, it appears that any earlier chronicles kept at Welsh churches were not available to the compilers of the Harleian chronicle and its antecedent texts. On the other hand, the structure of the Harleian chronicle, very probably deriving from the Gwynedd chronicle interpolated into the Historia Brittonum, was modelled on that of late antique Easter tables and chronicles. This is suggested by the Harleian chronicle’s chronological framework, which consists of a sequence of 533 years from 445 to 977 based on the great 532-year cycle of the nineteen-year Easter cycle, as well as by the system of giving a number every ten years that is also used in Prosper of Aquitaine’s Epitoma Chronicon, a history of the world down to 455, and ultimately derived from the chronicle of Jerome (c.380), which in turn was a translation and adaption of the early fourth-century chronicle of Eusebius.38
The Harleian chronicle conformed, then, to a well-established type of western European historical writing.39 Its contents were also typical of early medieval chronicles elsewhere. To begin with, it is important to stress that through its use of Dionysiac reckoning the chronicle recorded the passing of time within a Christian framework designed to facilitate the correct calculation of the date of Easter and correlated with Christ’s incarnation.40 From this perspective, arguably the most significant aspect of the Harleian chronicle, as it survives from the tenth century, is that over 70 per cent of its annals are blank: that is, they only record the passing of a year (L. annus).41 The events which are recorded in the remaining annals thus make only fitful appearances in the text as a whole. They are also usually brief, mainly concern the religious and secular elites or plagues and unusual natural phenomena, and range across the Insular world.42 While their geographical scope partly reflects the assimilation of sources from northern Britain and Ireland, especially for the period down to the mid-eighth century, these notices were evidently considered appropriate for inclusion in the chronicle and thus throw light on their authors’ assumptions about what merited inclusion in Welsh churches’ records of the past.
Unsurprisingly, in view of the text’s clerical authorship, one prominent theme is the progress of Christianity and the history of individual churches, witnessed not only by annals concerning the adoption of the Roman Easter, already mentioned, but by obits of numerous Irish and British religious figures, including Brigit, Patrick, Columba, Gildas, and David, by references to the conversion of the English and the death of Bede, and by notices of destruction suffered by the church of St Davids.43 The world of secular politics also receives considerable coverage, with annals recording conflicts among the Britons and their neighbours and the deaths of secular rulers in the kingdoms not only of the Britons but also of the English, Irish, Picts, and, in one case, the Franks.44 The occasional appearance of terms in Old Welsh suggests that some of these entries derive from material transmitted in the vernacular, notably the use of gueit(h) or, in two instances, cat, rather than the more frequently used Latin bellum, for a ‘battle’, followed by an Old Welsh place-name—as in ‘Gueith Cam lann (‘the battle of Camlan’), in which Arthur and Medrawd were killed’.45 Another example is the notice of Gueit Conguoy (‘the battle of Conwy’), followed by an explanatory phrase that uses another Welsh term to present this in terms of a feud: Digal Rotri a Deo (‘God’s revenge for Rhodri’).46 The appearance of such Welsh phrases, together with the frequent use of Welsh forms of proper nouns, not only show that the compilers of the Harleian chronicle were able to write in the vernacular as well as Latin but may also imply that they were open to the historical culture fostered by the native learned classes.
The Harleian Genealogies
The genealogies in the Harleian collection provide further evidence of an interest in the history of royal dynasties, though both their purpose and their geographical horizons were narrower than those of the Harleian chronicle or the Historia Brittonum, being designed to furnish political legitimacy for British dynasties in northern Britain and, above all, Wales.47 The genealogical collection, parts of which very probably derived from a ninth-century ‘Gwynedd collection of genealogies’, reached its present form c.954 and contains thirty-two pedigrees.48 These consist of lists of varying length that go backwards from the subject to his ancestors; the names are mostly written in Old Welsh orthography and linked by the patronymic map (‘son [of]’), although some of the pedigrees add explanatory glosses, usually in Latin. Gerald of Wales observed that Welsh poets recorded and memorized genealogies in the twelfth century (see Chapter 3), and these may well have played an important role in the compilation and transmission of pedigrees in the pre-Norman period. However, like the other texts in the Harleian collection, the genealogies in their extant form were almost certainly written by clerics, who must have collaborated with poets who, as in early medieval Ireland, may themselves have been experts in native learning.49 This was surely the case with respect to passages in Latin that aimed to synchronize dynastic figures with episodes in Christian history. Thus, the first pedigree traces Owain ap Hywel (d. 988) through his paternal ancestors in the dynasty of Gwynedd back to Amalech ‘the son of Beli the Great and Anna his mother, whom they say was the cousin of the Virgin Mary, mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ’, and the second traces him through his maternal ancestors in Dyfed to Constantine the Great and Helen, who ‘departed from Britain to seek the cross of Christ as far as Jerusalem, and brought it with her from there to Constantinople, and it is there until the present day’.50 Likewise the pedigree of Rhun ap Neithon includes a lengthy list of Roman emperors, which inserts references to the persecution of the Christians by the Emperor Diocletian, including the martyrs Alban, Julius, and Aaron in Britain, as well as to the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul under Nero and the birth and passion of Christ.51
The pedigrees of the Dyfed kings and of Rhun ap Neithon are among the few in the Harleian genealogies that sought to legitimate dynasties by endowing them with Roman ancestry. A further instance of this in the Dyfed genealogy is the inclusion of Macsim Guletic (Mod. W. Macsen Wledig, ‘the ruler Macsen’), who is also named as the progenitor of the dynasty of the Isle of Man.52 The inclusion of Macsen reflected the legends that developed around Magnus Maximus, the Spaniard who was proclaimed emperor in Britain in 383 and, after invading Gaul and then Italy, was executed near Aquilea in 388.53 Gildas presented Maximus as a tyrannical usurper from Britain who left the island prey to foreign invasion after removing all its troops in his bid for imperial power.54 The more positive view of Maximus implied by the genealogies is closer, however, to the version of the story in the Historia Brittonum, which, while agreeing that the removal of troops had left Britain defenceless, lacks any explicit condemnation of Maximianus (as he is called there) but rather stresses his power, stating that he had ‘killed Gratian, king of the Romans, and held the empire of all Europe’ before establishing the British colony in Armorica (Brittany).55 However, most of the Harleian genealogies lack any reference to Roman emperors and instead trace the descent of dynasties from British ancestors, a preference in line with the widely attested notion of the Britons as the oldest people of Britain who had formerly enjoyed sovereignty over the whole island. Thus the legendary Beli Mawr (Beli the Great) is named as the ultimate ancestor of the dynasties of both northern Britain (the ‘Old North’) and Gwynedd,56 though these are differentiated by emphasizing their descent from more proximate ancestors, namely Coel Hen (Coel the Old) for most of the northern British dynasties and Cunedda for that of Gwynedd and other territories in north and west Wales which were conceived as its dependencies.57
The Historia Brittonum
The origins of the Britons and the history of their rulers in the post-Roman period are central preoccupations of the Historia Brittonum, the longest and most ambitious of the texts contained in the Harleian collection.58 Different versions of this survive in about thirty-five medieval manuscripts;59 the discussion here will focus on the Harleian recension, the version closest to the original work composed in 829/30.
The contents of the Historia Brittonum may be summarized as follows.60 After briefly describing the ages of the world and the island of Britain, the text relates origin legends for the Britons, Picts, and Irish. It then continues the narrative through Roman Britain to the arrival of the English and their acquisition of kingdoms at the expense of the Britons, led by Gwrtheyrn (Vortigern), whose sins led to his condemnation and pursuit by St Germanus and his eventual death. The hagiographical theme is continued by a summary of the Life of St Patrick, after which the focus shifts back to the increasing power of the English, its temporary arrest by King Arthur, and the history of English dynasties and their relations with the Britons, especially in northern Britain, down to the Picts’ defeat of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria at the battle of Nechtansmere in 685. The final sections of the work return to descriptions of the island, with a list of its twenty-eight ciuitates and a series of marvels and miracles, mainly located in Wales and its borders with England but including two in Ireland.
Internal evidence in the text shows that the work was written by a scholarly cleric with access to a diverse range of sources. The case for dating it to 829/30 rests on a passage which calculates the period that had elapsed from the arrival of the Saxons in Britain down to ‘the fourth year of King Merfyn’ (Merfyn Frych, king of Gwynedd, r. 825–44), presumably referring to the time of writing.61 This also indicates that the text was composed in Gwynedd. Whether the author can be identified more precisely is a matter of debate. A prologue extant only in manuscripts of the mid-eleventh-century ‘Nennian recension’ names the author as Ninnius (rendered Nennius and Nemnius later in the text) and a pupil of Elfoddw, almost certainly the ‘archbishop of Gwynedd’ whose death in 809 is recorded in the Harleian chronicle.62 The association with Elfoddw is chronologically plausible, as is the similarity of the author’s name with a Nemniuus stated in a Welsh manuscript written in 817 to have composed a Welsh adaptation of the Old English runic alphabet; moreover, the latter text bears some striking verbal similarities with the prologue in the ‘Nennian recension’. However, differing interpretations of the work’s textual history have resulted in disagreement as to whether that prologue formed an authentic part of the original version of the Historia Brittonum composed in 829/30, or was rather a later interpolation introduced in the ‘Nennian recension’.63
The prologue also explains the author’s purpose, namely as an attempt to remedy previous neglect by writing down ‘some extracts that the stupidity of the people of Britain cast out; for the scholars of this island of Britain had no wisdom, nor did they set down any records in books’. The author had therefore gathered together all he could find from various Roman, patristic, Irish, and English written sources ‘and from the tradition of our elders’.64 Even if it was a retrospective invention, the prologue raises important questions about the sources available to the author of the Historia Brittonum as well as his aims and methods. How far his reliance on non-Brittonic sources reflected the paucity of Brittonic sources available to him, as the prologue suggests, can only be guessed. The latter certainly included Gildas, as we shall see. The author was also receptive to the wider historical culture in the vernacular transmitted by the native learned classes, both orally and quite possibly also in writing: thus he probably derived his account of the battles of King Arthur—the first reference to this figure in medieval Wales—from a Welsh poem and later listed Brittonic poets, including Aneirin and Taliesin, whom he synchronized with rulers of the sixth century.65 Nevertheless, he clearly considered Brittonic sources insufficient for his task, and was ready to use a diverse range of texts in order to construct a work that conformed to conventions of Latin history writing in his day. His access to English sources, in particular, implies connections with churches in England that may have been facilitated by Elfoddw’s adoption of the Roman Easter in 768.66
The reliance on a range of Insular texts in turn implies an assumption that history writing should be based primarily on written sources, even if attributions of origin legends to ‘the traditions of the elders’ and ‘the most learned of the Irish’ suggest mediation by authoritative individuals.67 In common with other early medieval historians, the author confronted the challenge of harmonizing different chronological frameworks and accounts from different sources; more specifically, he has been seen as attempting to synchronize the disparate materials at his disposal in a manner comparable to synthesizing historians in early medieval Ireland.68 Though his success in this respect was limited, the ambition that underpinned his efforts is notable. So too is his readiness to record conflicting interpretations. Particularly striking is the citing of a ‘twofold explanation’ of the origin legend of the settlement of Britain by Britto or Brutus. The first of these was attributed to unidentified Annales Romanorum (‘Annals of the Romans’), and made Britto a descendant of Aeneas who had fled to Italy after the Trojan War; the second, introduced as a digression and said to come ‘from the old books of our elders’ (and ultimately derived from the early sixth-century Frankish ‘Table of Nations’), proposed a descent from Japhet son of Noah via Alanus, portrayed as the ancestor of all European peoples; that in turn is followed by a different genealogy for Brutus that sought to reconcile the two previous accounts by combining a classical and biblical pedigree traced back through Aeneas and thence to his purported great-grandfather Japhet.69 The author later observed: ‘In the ancient tradition of our elders there were seven emperors of the Romans in Britain; however, the Romans say there were nine.’70 Likewise, after attributing his account of the conflict between St Germanus and the British ruler Gwrtheyrn (Vortigern) to a Liber Beati Germani (‘Book of the Blessed Germanus’), he noted that ‘others say differently’, and proceeded to give two alternative accounts of Vortigern’s end.71 The author may also reveal an awareness of the special status given to eyewitness testimony by classical and early medieval writers in explicitly claiming to have seen two of the marvels described at the end of the work.72
How did the Historia Brittonum view the past and what does this imply about its purpose? One striking characteristic is its focus on the ancient past. Origins—of peoples, kingdoms, and conversion to Christianity—formed one central preoccupation: a widespread preoccupation among medieval historians that would dominate much Welsh history writing over the following millennium.73 Above all, the work focused on major political changes in Britain from the fifth to the later seventh century and thus to a point about 150 years before it was composed.74 Therefore, though written in Gwynedd by an author familiar with other Welsh kingdoms, it was clearly intended to be much more than a history of the Britons in Wales. Rather, the significance of the work lies precisely in its premise that the history that mattered embraced the island of Britain as a whole (as well as, to some extent, Ireland and, briefly, Brittany) and should privilege the Britons as its original inhabitants. These are presented not only as the earliest occupants of Britain—whose name, like theirs, derived from the first settler, Brutus (or Britto), who had arrived in the third age of the world—but as having ‘formerly filled’ the island and ‘ruled it from sea to sea’.75 However, they failed to maintain this exclusive possession owing to conquests, in the fourth age, by the Picts and Irish, eventually followed by the English. The history of the Britons was thus inextricably linked to that of the other peoples who had subsequently settled in Britain. Moreover, since the author held that the English, specifically, had ‘occupied Britain, not by their own strength, but by the will of God’, against which it was futile to resist,76 the work implied that their rule was legitimate (as was also, presumably, that of the Irish in Dál Riata and the Picts). True, an earlier passage seems more equivocal. This explains that the Emperor Maximianus had taken British soldiers to the Continent to support his bid for imperial power and then settled them in Brittany, whence they had never returned to Britain. ‘Because of this, Britain has been occupied by foreign peoples and the citizens (cives) have been expelled, until God will have given them help.’77 Yet one implication of making any future change contingent on divine aid was that, in the meantime, the present state of Britain enjoyed God’s approval.78 It appears, then, that the Historia Brittonum accepted that other peoples shared the island of Britain with the Britons who had been its original inhabitants and rulers, and thus commemorated a decisive period in the definition of territorial boundaries between the Britons and the English.
The author aimed, then, to record, and thereby appropriate, a Brittonic inheritance that had extended over much of northern Britain as well as including kingdoms in what became Wales. We can only speculate about his reasons for writing, and especially about why he did so when he did. Clearly the author believed that the distant past he commemorated was relevant to the present. This was partly because past and present were linked in an overarching framework of sacred universal history that continued to the author’s own time, a point encapsulated in the statement that the ‘miracle’ of two waves of the Severn Bore fighting each other had occurred ‘from the beginning of the world to the present day’.79 More specifically, though, the past held the key to understanding the position of the Britons and their neighbours in the early ninth century: the settlements of peoples in different parts of Britain, as well as in Ireland and Brittany, were said to have lasted ‘until today’, as did a great monastery founded by St Germanus.80 This may have been all the more salient for a writer in what, by the early ninth century, was the most powerful of the remaining British kingdoms, which had recently been subject to a new ruler, Merfyn Frych, very likely an intruder from a British dynasty on the Isle of Man who had legitimated his position in Gwynedd through a maternal or marital connection with its previous line of kings.81 True, it is difficult to see the Historia Brittonum as propaganda primarily intended to glorify Merfyn and his dynasty. The legitimacy of several other British kingdoms in Wales is taken for granted, and Merfyn makes only a fleeting appearance.82 On the other hand, the accession of a king connected to another British dynasty, and who was, moreover, a patron of scholars, may have provided an impetus for the composition of a scholarly work devoted to the history of the Britons.83 More specifically, Merfyn’s Manx origin may have helped to stimulate the author’s interest in the ‘Old North’, as its location in the Irish Sea made the Isle of Man ‘crucial for the continuing links between the Britons of the north and those of Wales’.84 Two other aspects of the text may also have been of particular interest to Merfyn and his court. One is its material on earlier rulers of Gwynedd who claimed descent from the sixth-century king, Maelgwn, especially those who fought the Northumbrian kings in the earlier seventh century, since these rulers appear via his mother among Merfyn’s ancestors in the Harleian genealogies, which thus took pains to connect Merfyn with previous kings of Gwynedd.85 On the other hand, an origin legend for the kingdom of Gwynedd relating how Cunedda and his sons came from Manaw Gododdin (the region around Falkirk) and expelled the Irish could have been seen as a legitimizing precedent for the arrival of Merfyn from another Manaw, namely the Isle of Man, even if it is unlikely to have been concocted by the author of the Historia Brittonum especially on the king’s behalf.86
Irrespective of the precise motives for its composition, the work largely portrays the Britons in a positive light, and one of its aims has been described as providing an apologia pro gente sua.87 This is clear when the Historia Brittonum is compared with the earlier works of Gildas and Bede. The author was indebted for central elements of his view of the past to Gildas, whose De Excidio he evidently knew, quite possibly at first hand rather than through the extensive excerpts in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (731).88 This is particularly true of the focus on the Roman conquest of Britain and the subsequent invasions of the Irish, Picts, and English, together with the Britons’ responses to these events. Yet there are obvious differences in form and tone. Although, like the De Excidio, the Historia Brittonum held that God ‘rules and governs all peoples himself’, and that the English conquests resulted from the workings of divine providence,89 unlike the earlier work it did not attribute the Britons’ territorial losses to the sins of the secular and ecclesiastical elites or call upon the latter to repent for their sins. Instead, God’s will appears inscrutable, and British sinfulness was deflected on to one leader, Vortigern, based on the ‘proud tyrant’ whom Gildas had accused of inviting the Saxons to Britain.90 This also meant a rejection of Bede, who had explicitly followed Gildas and cited the refusal of the Britons to preach Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons, and to adopt the Roman Easter, as further evidence of their sinfulness.91 The Historia Brittonum may therefore be seen as offering an alternative perspective on British history not only to Gildas but also, more especially, to that of Bede. Indeed, it has been aptly suggested that ‘[t]he Historia Brittonum reads almost like a reply to Bede’.92 Most famously, whereas Bede states that King Edwin of Northumbria and his followers had been converted by the Roman missionary Paulinus, the Historia Brittonum attributes his conversion to a British bishop, Rhun son of Urien, ruler of the northern kingdom of Rheged (possibly situated around Carlisle).93 The account of St Patrick’s missionary work in Ireland, not known to Bede, further demonstrated the Britons’ role in the conversion of other peoples.94 If the De Excidio, followed by Bede, accused the Britons of being woefully defective Christians, the Historia Brittonum emphasized the antiquity of their Christian credentials. It was their king, Lucius, who had initiated their conversion ‘167 years after the coming of Christ’, while their faith contrasted with the paganism of the invading Saxons: the god from whom Hengist and Horsa claimed to be descended was ‘not the God of gods…but one of their idols’, while in one of his battles King Arthur, bearing an image of the Virgin Mary, drove ‘the pagans’ to flight in ‘a great massacre through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the power of the holy Virgin Mary his mother’.95
The Historia Brittonum further demonstrates, then, that the origins of what became Welsh history writing are to be found in attempts to explain the past of Britain and the Britons, although its portrait of the latter was considerably more flattering than that drawn by Gildas. As its textual history demonstrates, the Historia Brittonum also circulated more widely than the De Excidio, which remained a rare work in the Middle Ages,96 and continued to evolve until the early thirteenth century. As we have seen, the original version of 829/30 was augmented in the later ninth century by the insertion of the chronicle and genealogies, which were subsequently expanded after it was transmitted from Gwynedd to south-west Wales by c.954; this in turn was copied c.1100 in Harleian 3859, the earliest surviving manuscript containing the Harleian recension.97 In addition, a revised version is attested in Gwynedd in 912. It is uncertain whether that was transmitted together with the chronicle and genealogies to which it had become attached, but three later versions attest to its transmission as an independent text: the ‘Vatican recension’, made in England in 944, the ‘Chartres recension’, probably composed in tenth-century Brittany, and the ‘Nennian recension’, datable to the mid-eleventh century and known principally through an Irish translation (Lebor Bretnach), which may well have been produced in Scotland, perhaps at Abernethy, though a north Welsh provenance has also been suggested.98 The dynamic nature of the work’s transmission is illustrated by the Nennian recension’s preference for the biblical origin of Britto, which it places before a brief reference to the alternative account of the Trojan Brutus prioritized in the Harleian recension.99 Moreover, the text continued to influence historical writing thereafter, both in Britain and Ireland and on the Continent, mainly through a widely copied Anglo-Norman version of the Harleian recension of c.1100 wrongly ascribed to Gildas—an ascription that helped to fuel historiographical debate in the sixteenth century (see Chapter 5).100 In addition, a composite version comprising a text of the Gildasian recension heavily glossed with material taken from the Nennian recension and other sources was produced between 1164 and 1214 at the Cistercian abbey of Sawley, Lancashire.101 However, though copied until the end of the Middle Ages, from the mid-twelfth century, in Wales as elsewhere, the Historia Brittonum lost its authoritative status as an account of the early history of the Britons to a much fuller and more coherent narrative which it helped to inform: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’) or De Gestis Britonum (‘On the Deeds of the Britons’), completed c.1138. This was by far the most influential of the Welsh historical works composed during the two centuries down to the Edwardian conquest, although it was not alone in continuing and adapting the legacy of pre-Norman texts, as we shall see in Chapter 3.
Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0003
1 HE, I. 1, 8, 12–16, 22. See further Miller, ‘Bede’s Use of Gildas’; Charles-Edwards, ‘Bede, the Irish and the Britons’, esp. 45–9; Stancliffe, Bede and the Britons, esp. 4–6, 13, 18, 37–40; Murray, ‘Bede and the Unchosen Race’.
2 The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. and trans. Campbell, 9; but cf. 56, and Molyneaux, ‘Why Were Some Tenth-Century English Kings Presented as Rulers of Britain?’.
3 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Taylor, 50; The Life of King Edward, ed. and trans. Barlow, 42, 57–9. See also Stafford, ‘ “The Annals of Æthelflæd” ’.
4 Elizabeth M. Tyler, ‘Trojans in Anglo-Saxon England’, 16–18.
5 Asser’s Life of King Alfred, dedication, c. 80, ed. Stevenson, 1, 66–7; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 67, 96.
6 Armes Prydein, ed. Williams and Bromwich; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 519–35; Rebecca Thomas and David Callander, ‘Reading Asser’. See also Sims-Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories’.
7 Recent assessment in Charles-Edwards, Wales, 202–19.
8 Stancliffe, ‘The Thirteen Sermons’, 177–81; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 210–11, 215–18.
9 DEB, c. 4. 2.
10 DEB, cc. 2–26.
11 DEB, cc. 27–65 and 66–110. For Gildas’s use of the Bible see O’Loughlin, Gildas and the Scriptures.
12 Bede, HE, I. 22. For these issues see Charles-Edwards, Wales, 203–5; Charles-Edwards, ‘Celtic Britain and Ireland’, 147–52. For refutation of the recently revived argument that the De Excidio comprises two originally separate texts see Guy, Review of Llythyr Gildas a Dinistr Prydain. Note also descriptions of Gildas as a ‘historian’ (historiographus) in twelfth-century Welsh Lives of St Teilo and St Oudoceus (Euddogwy), ed. Evans and Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, 100, 138, and St Illtud, c. 19, VSB, 222–3.
13 DEB, c. 1. 1 (epistola).
14 DEB, c. 37. 1. All translations of the De Excidio given here are those of Winterbottom in his edition.
15 DEB, c. 24. 2.
16 DEB, c. 26. 1.
17 DEB, c. 37. 3.
18 Winterbottom, ‘The Preface’; Lapidge, ‘Gildas’s Education’, 43–7; Kempshall, Rhetoric, 161–3, 218; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 213–15.
19 Lapidge, ‘Gildas’s Education’, 44–7.
20 Lapidge, ‘Gildas’s Education’, 33–49; for a different view of how Gildas may have received his education in grammar and rhetoric see Charles-Edwards, Wales, 214–15.
21 Wright, ‘Gildas’s Prose Style’, 108–11.
22 Hanning, The Vision of History, 46–8, 58; Winterbottom, ‘The Preface’, 281–2. For Salvian’s criticism of his contemporaries see David Lambert, ‘The Uses of Decay’, 115–30; Brown, Salvian of Marseilles.
23 Cf. David Lambert, ‘The Uses of Decay’, 127–9.
24 DEB, cc. 1. 1, 18. 1, 30. 1, 64. 1 (patria); 19. 3, 26. 4, 32. 1 (ciues).
25 DEB, cc. 12. 1–2, 25. 2–3, 26. 2–3. For repentance and redemption see O’Loughlin, Gildas and the Scriptures, 119–20.
26 DEB, cc. 14, 19. 1, 23. Cf. Merrills, History and Geography, 277–8, 288.
27 DEB, cc. 5–6.
28 On the title see Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 415–17.
29 Although blank annals continue to 977, it is likely that the Harleian annals were not continued after c.954: Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae’, 144.
30 Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 68–73; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 27–45; Grabowski and Dumville, Chronicles and Annals, 207–26.
31 Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 51–79, esp. 76–9.
32 As explained above, Gildas’s location is uncertain.
33 Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae’, 162, 163.
34 Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, ch. 9, esp. 408–10.
35 Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae’, 152–3, 158–9, 162; Dumville, Celtic Essays, 2: 25–33; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 38–9, 42.
36 Dumville, Celtic Essays, 2: 28–30; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 39–42 (which suggests that the framework may indicate that the Gwynedd chronicle, here attributed to Abergele, was intended as a continuation of the 445 edition of Prosper of Aquitaine’s Epitoma chronicon).
37 The Chronicle of Ireland, trans. Charles-Edwards, 1: 8–9; Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms, 73, 128; Kenneth Harrison, ‘Early Wessex Annals’, 530.
38 Annales Cambriae, a.d. 682–954, ed. and trans. Dumville, xiii; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 39–42.
39 Cf. McCormick, Les annales.
40 Dionysius Exiguus’s influential Easter cycle, which commenced in 532, calculated years from the supposed date of the birth of Christ: McCormick, Les annales, 14–15, and see also 22–4.
41 The blank annals are included in Phillimore’s edition of HC. Cf. Foot, ‘Finding the Meaning of Form’, 95–6.
42 Plagues: HC, s.aa. 537, 547, 682, 683. Other natural phenomena: HC, s.aa. 624, 650, 676, 684, 689, 714, 721, 812, 814.
43 HC, s.aa. 454, 457, 562, 595, 601, 735, 810, 906.
44 E.g. HC, s.aa. 607, 617, 644, 714, 736, 887.
45 HC, s.a. 537. Examples of cat: HC, s.aa. 722, 869.
46 HC, s.a. 880. Other annals using gueith as the only word for ‘battle’: HC, s.aa. 613, 630, 722, 817, 848, 873, 876, 906, 921; and for its use as a gloss on bellum, HC, s.aa. 750, 760.
47 The geographical affiliations of 11 of the 31 pedigrees in the Harleian genealogies were probably connected with Strathclyde, the Isle of Man, and the ‘Old North’, the rest with kingdoms in Wales: Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 60–3.
48 See n. 31 above. Since the version of the story of the conquest of Gwynedd by Cunedda and his sons at the end of the Harleian genealogies appears to treat the two dynasties descended from Cunedda (the Maelgyning descended from Maelgwn Gwynedd and the lineage of Rhos) as more or less equal, it is possible that the ‘Gwynedd collection’ drew on an earlier text composed in the late eighth or early ninth century, when the two dynasties probably shared the kingship of Gwynedd, and thus before the taking of the kingdom by Merfyn Frych: cf. Charles-Edwards, Wales, 180–1, 333, 359–62, 476–7; for Merfyn see also the discussion of the Historia Brittonum below.
49 Cf. Ó Corráin, ‘Creating the Past’, esp. 187–9.
50 HG 1–2.
51 HG 16.
52 HG 2, 4.
53 Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain’, 179–81; Breudwyt Maxen Wledic, ed. Roberts, xliii–lii.
54 DEB, c. 13.
55 HB, c. 27. The Manx pedigree (HG 4) refers to the killing of Gratian in the same words as the Historia Brittonum. Similarly the inscription, only parts of which are now extant in early modern transcripts, on the ninth-century Pillar of Eliseg near Llangollen erected by Cyngen (d. 854), king of Powys, refers to ‘Maximus the king, who killed the king of the Romans’: Nancy Edwards, A Corpus, 322–36, text and translation at 325–6; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 447–51.
56 HG 1, 10; Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. and trans. Bromwich, 281–3. Cf. Rebecca Thomas, ‘Remembering the “Old North” ’.
57 Coel Hen: HG 8–12, 19. Cunedda: HG 1, 3, 17–18, 26, 32–3; HB, c. 62; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 180–1, 328–9, 360–2. Two of the northern dynasties are said to be descended from Dyfnwal Hen: HG 6–7.
58 Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’; Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 437–52.
59 Dumville, ‘ “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’, 78. Manuscripts described in Dumville, ‘The Textual History’, 1: 124–50; 2: 301–5, 352–72, 510–86, 593–601.
60 Fuller summary in Charles-Edwards, Wales, 438–45.
61 HB, c. 16.
62 HC, s.a. 809.
63 Dumville, ‘ “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 47–53.
64 Full text of prologue in Dumville, ‘ “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’, 79–80; translation partly adapted from Guy, ‘The Origins’, 50. The work is more coherent than this description implies through its use of thematic parallels, including the foreshadowing of one event by another: Sims-Williams, ‘The Death of Urien’, 35–7.
65 HB, cc. 56, 62; cf. Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’, 13, 16–19.
66 Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’, 24. Connections may have been similarly facilitated with churches in Ireland, all of which had adopted the Roman Easter by 716: cf. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 408–10.
67 HB, c. 15. For authoritative human witnesses see Kempshall, Rhetoric, 218–19, 284–5.
68 Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’, 5–7; Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 419–25, 432.
69 HB, cc. 10, 17–18; detailed discussion in Rebecca Thomas, History and Identity, 89–103. See also Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 408–10; Waswo, ‘Our Ancestors, the Trojans’, 274–7; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 438, 441; Wadden, ‘The Frankish Table of Nations’, esp. 3–7.
70 HB, c. 27; Rebecca Thomas, History and Identity, 112–14.
71 HB, cc. 47–8.
72 HB, cc. 72, 73. For the superiority of eyewitness testimony see Kempshall, Rhetoric, 51, 63, 123 (quoting the influential view of Isidore, Etymologiae, I.xli.1), 183–7.
73 Cf. Sims-Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories’; Goetz, ‘The “Methodology” of Medieval Chronicles’, 28.
74 Charles-Edwards, Wales, 438. However, as well as the reference to Merfyn Frych, the text contains a few allusions to individuals in England down to c.800: Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 434, n. 182.
75 HB, c. 9. See also c. 10.
76 HB, c. 45.
77 HB, c. 27.
78 Cf. Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 414.
79 HB, c. 68. See also Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 411–12.
80 HB, cc. 10, 12, 13, 14, 27, 48.
81 Sims-Williams, ‘Historical Need’, 11–20; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 467–79.
82 HB, cc. 35 (Powys), 48–9 (Buellt and Gwrtheyrnion), 61–2, 64–5 (Gwynedd).
83 Nora K. Chadwick, ‘Early Culture and Learning’, 93–110.
84 Charles-Edwards, Wales, 14.
85 HB, cc. 61, 62, 64–5; HG 1.
86 Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain’, 182; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 4–6, 180–1; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 72–6.
87 Charles-Edwards, Wales, 447.
88 Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 432–3.
89 HB, c. 45.
90 Charles-Edwards, Wales, 447.
91 HE, I. 22, II. 2, V. 23.
92 Sims-Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories’, 117.
93 HB, c. 63; HE, II. 9. For Rheged see Charles-Edwards, Wales, 10–12.
94 HB, cc. 50–5.
95 HB, cc. 22, 31, 56. The conversion of Kent by missionaries sent by Pope Gregory is mentioned in HB, c. 63.
96 Chronica Minora, ed. Mommsen, [2], 13–15, 21–4; Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 416–17.
97 The text may have already reached St Davids by the late ninth century as it was probably used by Asser in his Life of King Alfred (893): cf. Alfred the Great, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, 54, 229, 232.
98 Dumville, ‘ “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’, 86–9, 93; Clancy, ‘Scotland’; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 45–50; Wadden, ‘The Frankish Table of Nations’, 7–12.
99 Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 410; Wadden, ‘The Frankish Table of Nations’, 11.
100 Dumville, ‘Historical Value’, 20; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 45.
101 Dumville, ‘Celtic-Latin Texts’.