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“... that there might be some doubt about its authenticity. Much of the phenomenon must be ascribed to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Born some thirty years after the Norman Conquest, Geoffrey, with his Norman name and strong Welsh connections, was probably the child of a mixed marriage. His ...”

“... to the utterly unreliable History of the Kings of Britain by the 12th-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lud rebuilt the walls of London, ‘encircling it with countless towers. He also commanded the citizens to construct houses … so that no city in all the surrounding kingdoms (some far distant) could ...”

“... Still, Nennius’s Arthur might have remained in scholarly oblivion had he not been picked up by Geoffrey of Monmouth 300 years later, and expanded into a whole book of his Historia Regum Britanniae. This immensely successful work – more than 200 surviving manuscripts, and translations into Old French, Middle ...”

“... In 1173, Eleanor’s sons, Henry ‘the Young King’, Richard (later called Lionheart) and Geoffrey of Brittany, rebelled against their father, encouraged by Louis VII. Most chroniclers agree that Eleanor supported their revolt. Why she did so isn’t clear, but Henry was publicly unfaithful and the couple had long been estranged. Eleanor probably ...”

“... beyond Shetland. This sort of mental mapping went back to the medieval chronicles: according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, King Arthur routed the Picts and Scots, and ruled the entirety of Britain, thus underpinning English claims to overlordship of Scotland. But Arthur’s legendary transatlantic northern empire became even ...”

“... robust rejection of the ‘Brutus books’ and the mythical tradition of British history set up by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century. Was there really no King Arthur, and no King Lear either? Milton clearly did not want to believe it, arguing patriotically if defensively: ‘those old and inborn names of successive ...”

“... in the Roman army. At the time, Foche’s claims were perhaps no stranger than those made by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s that traced the kings of Britain back to Brutus the Trojan, a descendant of Aeneas. As Britain sought to distance itself from France, Foche’s ideas had a certain appeal, but they didn’t ...”

“... It was Chrétien who first realised that the legendary history of Arthur, largely invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth a few decades earlier, allowed huge scope for making up adventures for his knights. Of all his creations, the grail has turned out to be the most extraordinary. He gave it no origins or purpose or any kind ...”

“... and 16th, of what has come to be called ‘humanist history’. It is an entertaining section: Geoffrey of Monmouth on the achievements of the probably inexistent Arthur (and his spear, called Ron), an account, Burrow observes, which seems so convincing, yet does not convince; the scurrilities of Matthew Paris, not least ...”

“... ancestry of Arthur’s prophet, Merlin. In his 12th-century bestseller, Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of Monmouth told the story of how Merlin’s mother was visited in her convent by a being in the form of a handsome young man, who could appear and disappear at will. He is characterised, on the authority of ...”

“... of Merlin as a druid is familiar from film and fiction, but there are no druids in Malory, or in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the sorcerers with whom Ambrosius contends in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, from which so much of the Arthurian legend derives, are just magi. Druids got their start in the modern imagination ...”

“... after the Roman legions departed. At the other pole, six centuries later, stand the heroic liar Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae conjured up Arthurian splendour from scrappy British memories that they had had a champion against the Saxons, and some ingenious Welsh bishops who, furious at the unholy ...”

“... idea of this side of their own historic past, all lost in a jumble of King Arthur and Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, strongly Scandinavian though his vocabulary is, had only the ‘Brutus legend’ to guide him to his own history; four centuries later, Dr Johnson was little ...”

“... pope, who was supreme in the land. Much of the material was drawn from the fanciful romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose ‘Arthurian fables’, to quote Diarmaid MacCulloch in his Life of Cranmer, ‘have met their nemesis in Walt Disney and Monty Python’. The king lapped it all up, and now so do the Jacob ...”

“... mentions the interest expressed by some 17th-century Welsh writers in the old stories recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the status and currency of the Arthurian legends across the archipelago during the period leading up to the Union is never explored. The fact that Milton, who drafted his own ‘History of Britain’, once ...”