 As everyone knows, wandering scholars were very common in the early Middle Ages. And part of what enabled them to be wandering scholars was that while wandering they could count on free accommodation at monasteries and royal courts. But of course not everybody's credentials as a wandering scholar could be accepted at first blush. The Court of Gwynedd in North Wales in the early 9th century imposed a test of academic credibility on wandering scholars who happened to turn up, especially from Ireland. A little verbal puzzle was set for these wandering scholars and its solution required a knowledge of the Greek alphabet. We know this because there's a letter from an emigre Irish scholar in France to friends in Ireland giving away the answer. But this delightful little vignette tells us three significant things about that period. One is that it was quite reasonable to expect Irish scholars to know a bit of Greek. The second thing it tells us incidentally is that not every Irish scholar knew quite as much Greek as he was expected to know. And the third thing is that the Court of North Wales in the 9th century was self-consciously trying to uphold academic standards. And it's against that background that I want to discuss our third text. The Historia Britonum, written in 828-829 so far as we can work out, and normally ascribed to a scholar of the period called Nenius, or Ninius. Unfortunately the inscription only comes in a rather late manuscript, along with a prologue about which more in a moment. So it's not particularly safe to identify the author with this otherwise moderately well-known Welsh scholar of the period. If I slip occasionally into referring to the author of the Historia Britonum as Nenius, that's just to save myself saying the author of the Historia Britonum all the time. The prologue into the work, which begins by saying that the writer is indeed Nenius, disciple of Bishop Elvodhu of Bangor, whom we know from other sources. The author describes how he has brought together material from British chronicles, Roman chronicles, Saxon and Irish annals and the lives of the saints. And he's brought them together, he says rather touchingly, in a heap. Ko Acharvavi, I have piled up the material. It's a word which has done the author no favours over the centuries people have imagined that he's a rather random writer, simply magpie-like, picking details from Hither and Young in a chaos of materials. But if the prologue to the work is indeed a late and spurious addition, what we see there is simply some later editor retrojecting what might have been the habits of an author of the 9th century. In order to produce a work like this, you would have to know material from British, Roman, Irish and Saxon chronicles. So the assumption made by that later editor is there must have been such chronicles. Current scholarship is very sceptical indeed of the existence of British chronicles prior to the Historia, and is almost equally sceptical of the systematic use of much of the other material mentioned there. And to speak of that rather later addition or emendation of the work is to remind ourselves that works like this in the early Middle Ages were very frequently edited and re-edited on a regular basis just as the chronicles of the age were supplemented as time went on. But at least that spurious preface to the work once again tells us a few things of significance. Not least that this is recognisably a work which attempts self-consciously to draw together a very diverse range of materials. This is not just a history from one point of view or with one set of perspectives. And it is indeed interesting to note that the use of Anglo-Saxon source material including Anglo-Saxon genealogies is very much in evidence despite this being a history of the British. So it's a work which makes some sense against what I've described as the rather self-conscious adherence to high academic standards of the court of Gwynedd at the time. Self-conscious but I suspect just a little exaggerated. I don't think there were very many devoted Hellenists in Diganwe in 28 or so. Nonetheless a memory of classical scholarship is still around and expectations about the knowledge of Greek are certainly part of the self-image of Irish and one imagines therefore to a lesser extent British clerical scholarship. The greatest scholar of the age, John Scoti seriugina, was as the name indicates an Irishman with an unparalleled knowledge of Greek in Western Europe for the period and someone who drew into his own theological and philosophical reflection a very wide range of material from the Eastern Christian world. But that's another story. But why should the court of Gwynedd have been self-consciously devoted to his standards? Why should it have seen itself as the kind of cultural center which could not afford to let Irishman slip through the scholarly net too easily? The answer is that at this period the North Welsh kingdom had undergone a fairly major political upheaval. What's usually referred to as the first dynasty of Gwynedd seems to have come to an end in the early 9th century and although we don't quite know by what process a new dynasty was establishing itself having married into what was left of the old. The first king of this new dynasty has the unforgettable name of Mervyn the Freckled. Mervyn Vrych is quite clear that under the leadership of Mervyn the North Welsh kingdom was seeking to establish itself as the guardian of British identity in Western Britain. We know that in this period the long rivalry with the mid-Welsh kingdom of Powys was more or less resolved in favour of Gwynedd. And it sounds very much as if the author of the Historia Bretonum was somebody who came from another part of Wales originally. He's particularly well informed about folklore from the south-east of Wales, from Gwent and mid-Welsh. The area then called Bilt now around Bilt, Bilt Wales. Which suggests in turn that the author had so to speak opted for Gwynedd as the best political bet in Wales of that day. Had opted for this court and this scholarly community as the best guardian of the traditions of Britishness. We'll see in a moment what he meant by that. But we can I think take it for granted that despite modern skepticism about the existence in some library in north-west Wales of British Roman and Saxon chronicles we are dealing with a writer who has access to written materials and we are dealing also with a culture, a scholarly culture in which at least some written material in the Greek alphabet is not unfamiliar. Which in turn suggests a continuing close relationship with some of the great scriptoria and monasteries of Ireland. The point was made over half a century ago by the great Nora Chadwick that nowhere in Wales do we find any indication of a monastic scriptorium or a cathedral scriptorium as wealthy as well endowed as those in Ireland in corresponding period. And yet again as we'll see in a moment there's some evidence at least that something of the tradition which we were discussing in the first of these lectures had survived. So the motivation for a comprehensive scholarly history using diverse materials, a history of the British but written in the interest of a particular claimant to British hegemony that all of that was connected with the project of King Mervyn in Gwynedd in the early 9th century that what we're reading therefore is a bid to define a new kind of Welshness not only over against the Anglo-Saxons but in relation to a much longer and more complex tradition. The author of the Historia is quite clearly interested in assimilating into North Welsh history aspects of the history of other parts of non-Anglo-Saxon Britain which is why he has some sections on what's often called in Welsh the Hernogle of the Old North that is the British King in the Southern Scotland and Cumbria and Lancashire which figure very largely in early Welsh heroic poetry. He also mentions as a great king in his own age the figure of Maughan King Maglokunus of Gwynedd who's mentioned by Gildas an identification which I think is reasonably secure despite some scholarly hesitations here and there. Very puzzlingly he introduces a rather rootless little chapter though remarkably tightly composed dealing with the legendary figure of Arthur. He doesn't locate Arthur anywhere in particular and that has been a problem to generations of Arthurian enthusiasts who have wanted to demonstrate that King Arthur was really Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Lancastrian or whatever. But I suspect that the catalogue of battles in that chapter about Arthur is part of the historians deliberate strategy of broadening out a British and Welsh and North Welsh history to cover a very, very wide range of traditions and historical recollections. Certainly one of Arthur's battles in that chapter seems to have been fought in Southern Scotland but I think it would be very rash to assume that that means they all were just as it's very rash to assume that they were all fought by one person called Arthur. Mention of a battle fought in the city of the Legion probably refers to the Battle of Chester the beginning of the 7th century, long after the time of the other battles that are mentioned, the Battle of Mount Baden probably again in Somerset is associated by Gildersen Bede with the figure of Ambrosius rather than with Arthur and again suggests that broad geographical span which the historian, Pseudoniaus or whoever is trying to suggest as the background of this new Welsh identity he includes a great deal of material whose sources are completely obscure to us where Bede has a very brief mention of the Anglo-Saxon settlement being encouraged and supported by Wicked King Vortigern I mentioned last time giving us thereby a very useful clue as to his own use of British manuscript sources Meneus has a long section on Vortigern which draws heavily on folklore themes and what are obviously legends about the 5th century Vortigern here is portrayed systematically as a diabolically evil ruler he's in persistent conflict with Saint Germanus whom we've also met before he attempts to take the life of the young Ambrosius and he commits all kinds of what on the basis of reading Gilders one would assume to be routine royal sins of the British 5th and 6th century perhaps equally importantly we have from roughly the same period a memorial pillar set up in mid Wales, the so-called pillar of Elysea this has carved on it now in barely legible form but it was transcribed a few centuries ago a genealogy of the kings of mid Wales and they trace their origin to no less than Vortigern Vortigern here is the parent of a monarch who is blessed by Saint Germanus rather than the opposite it's as if the two kingdoms of mid and north Wales are presenting different versions of 5th century history in one of which Vortigern is an unredeemed villain in the other of which Vortigern is a revered ancestor sorting out the details of this has kept many scholars in business for many decades and I'll spare you the details but it's a reminder of some of what the Historia Bretonam is attempting to do it's also notable that in the Historia we have a quite well informed and sympathetic summary of the origins of the Irish people it's clear that the author of the Historia is familiar with some form of what we know in Irish literature as the book of invasions that is the legendary history of ancient Ireland where a succession of tribes and peoples invade Ireland from different quarters and represent as there were different stages of civilisation in Ireland Neneas or wherever he is knows that tradition reasonably well in some early form he's not at all anti-Irish in fact but he does remind us that the roots of the Irish are in fact barbaric the Irish started off as Scythians of course if you're a Greek or Latin speaker you will know that Scythians are the worst kind of barbarian Neneas modifies this slightly by allowing us to believe that the Scythians who were the ancestors of the Irish were quite nice barbarians for some reason they had landed up in Egypt at the time of the Exodus and they'd been very friendly and sympathetic towards the Israelites at the time of the Exodus being exiled by the Egyptians and had very naturally taken themselves off to Ireland part of what's going on here is I think that the writer of the Historia is looking at what is said in some of his earlier sources and said in Beed indeed about the Scythian origins of the Picts in northern Britain and a little bit of confusion of Picts and Scots is already going on long before 1066 and all that but that reference to the barbarian origins of the Irish only helps up to point out the extraordinary story that Neneas has to tell about British origins the British are the descendants of the Trojans this is Neneas's great contribution to European literature there were many peoples and many communities which appear to have talked about speculated about Trojan ancestry in late antiquity there's a passing hint in one late classical historian that there were Celtic tribes in Gaul which spoke about their origins in the Trojan war presumably under the influence of Roman neighbours but it's Neneas who first gives us a story or rather two stories about the origins of Britain from the Trojan royal family Brutus who gave his name to Britain is a descendant of Neneas and the writer of the Historia knows of two diverse versions of that story in which Brutus is exiled from or voluntarily leaves the Italy of Neneas and his family and settles in Britain giving the island his name it's very difficult indeed to see what precisely the sources might be for this there's absolutely no prior text in any language or any context which suggests that story the encyclopedic work of Isidore of Seville in the 6th century which covers the origins of all the nations mentions no such tradition about Britain indeed Isidore is rather rude about Britain he says that some people say that the island of Britain takes its name from the fact that the inhabitants are Bruti, stupid I have a speculation here that Welsh scholars or British scholars of the 7th century reading Isidore and his use of that word Bruti his use of the Latin adjective Brutus for the British are deliberately making a rebuff yes we are indeed as British deriving our name from Brutus but not from the adjective in common use as stupid but from that well known and celebrated Roman family whose achievements were so familiar with in the history of Rome from its earliest days to the murder of Julius Caesar this may have begun and this is very much a speculation as a kind of literary joke among classically well educated clergy and clerks in the sort of community we were thinking about in the first of these lectures that is the well read rather self-consciously literary rather self-consciously elegant stylists of little villa based communities in western Britain the sort of environment from which guilders came of house which said Isid seems to have governed and it perhaps was the case that as occasionally happens in history what began as a rye joke at the expense of Isidore of Seville turned into a little saga of its own but I do believe that the author of the Historia had some written sources here I believe that for two reasons one is that both versions of the Brutus story which he gives contain extensive genealogies and some of the somewhat garbled forms of personal names in those genealogies might suggest miscopings rather than mishearings of names the second point is a little bit more recondite and I might go into too much detail about it but the story of Brutus's birth and youth in the first version that Nenius gives is a little puzzling Brutus's parents when he's born are told a prophecy by a neighbouring magician that the child will grow up to be deeply loved and highly successful and they then have the magician executed in later life Brutus is responsible for the accidental killing of his parents classical themes are clearly around here but it sounds very much as if what has happened is that a paragraph has slipped out that as in so many legendary stories the prophecy was that the child would indeed be beloved and successful but would kill his parents and it's exactly this version of the story that we find 300 years after the Historia of Brutonum in Geoffrey of Monmouth's great history of the kings of Britain I don't for a moment believe that Geoffrey had independent access to a source used by Nenius but I do believe that Geoffrey was an extraordinarily intelligent imaginative writer and reader who could see that there was some kind of lacuna in what had been copied out here so somewhere behind the story in the Historia of Brutonum I believe is another bundle of written sources not British chronicles but it may be notes it may be marginalia perhaps even marginalia in a manuscript of Isidore of Seville built up by other writers presented as some kind of traditional history by the time of Nenius but what's interesting about this association with Troy is that it is of course implicitly a claim for Bruton to be on a par with Rome the British and the Romans alike derive from Troy the story of Nenius and we've already seen how massively influential and widespread the use of Virgil still is in this literature the history of Troy is the source of both Roman and British identity so Britishness is here identified not exactly with Romanitas with Roman identity but with a kind of parallel track classical ancestry the British are to be taken as seriously as the Greeks and the Romans because their origins lie in Troy back beyond the beginnings of Roman Empire so curiously enough the one thing that the Historia Britannum does not do is to go back to the quarrel between Gildus and Bede over who the chosen people are the writer of the Historia Britannum is not particularly interested in claiming for the British the status of a chosen people even in opposition to Bede's claim that the English are the chosen people he takes a very different path cutting run so to speak at an angle to that debate and identifying the British with Trojans, Romans and indeed in his genealogies interweaving also Greek ancestry too so he's making a claim for a parity with civilized antiquity the claim to familiarity with Greek in 9th century Wales was not just a minor quirk of the royal court it illustrates something about the self-awareness of the learned class in western Britain by this time and I'll return a bit later to some of the long term implications of this intriguing story and intriguing identification but before moving on it's worth just noting in passing that Ninius or whoever he is is not completely indifferent to biblical typologies in his brief and rather condensed account of the life of St. Patrick he notes towards the end that there are several ways in which St. Patrick resembles Moses because he seems here to be dependent on an Irish life of St. Patrick rather than on Patrick's own confession he's probably picking up a theme that had become conventional in Ireland by that time Patrick as the leader of God's new people in Ireland is someone who can be seen as a kind of Moses for the Irish the lack of knowledge of Patrick's own work is a curiosity here I noted that neither Gildus nor Bede mentions Patrick that if Gildus mentions him indirectly which he just may do it's not in a very friendly way but here the tradition has come back from Ireland to Wales and here it is inserted at a very strategic point and at some length in the history of the British Patrick is implicitly claimed for the British by this means and the story of his capture by the Irish and his later escape from slavery is mentioned very very briefly in passing with none of the elaboration in account of these events and he's then firmly tied down to a Biblical typology Nicolaus Hyam one of the foremost scholars of this period has suggested that that might prompt us to read the following chapter on Arthur as based on a Joshua typology Arthur is described in the Latin text as Dux Bellorum the leader of the wars Arthur's Joshua in the Latin Bible is Dux Belli the leader of the war I'll admit to being agnostic about this particular suggestion but it fits quite well with the Patrick typology and it fits in a general world of assimilating recent history to Biblical history but my hesitation is simply due to the fact that I don't see the history overall as nearly as interested in Biblical typology as either Gildus or Bede so the jury is perhaps still out on that thus far then we've seen that the Historia Bretonem comes out of a self-consciously learned tradition in a cultural context where it's quite important for a slightly arrivist court in North Wales to establish its credentials its cultural credentials we've seen that it is struggling to keep up with the Irish reputation for scholarship by making much of its acquaintance however thin with the Greek language and we've seen that as part of that cultural world the legend of Britain's origins in classical antiquity in the Trojan War and in the Virgilian world is affirmed as the origin story of the British people in opposition to both the Irish who although amiable are still at bottom barbarians and the Anglo-Saxons who are not even amiable some confirmation of this ambitious self-crafting that's going on in the Historia Bretonem can be found from a very different source one of the things that Nenius mentions in passing in the Historia is that the 6th century was a period of great poetic achievement and he names four poets from northern Britain that is from the southern Scotland Cumbria Lancashire region from that period who are clearly seen as the paradigm poets of their day they include the figure of a Nairin or Nairin author of the Gododin that great epic poem about the defeat of the British by the Angles at the Battle of Catrith sometime in the 590s perhaps more significantly there's mention of the poetry of Taliesin and we have ascribed to Taliesin about a dozen poems whose location is indeed the Old North the Cumbrian Kingdom of Rheged in the 6th century the poems as we have them can't in fact be 6th century their language is manifestly later but there's quite a good case for seeing them in their present form as 9th century in other words they come from much the same era as the work of Nenius there may be earlier elements within them some of them may be re-writings in slightly more contemporary Welsh of older texts but the interesting thing is that in Wales in the 9th century somebody was collecting or revising or reworking traditions about northern Britain as part of the literary heritage of north Wales that fits I think you'll agree very nicely with this picture of a court in north Wales determined to establish itself as the centre the cultural centre of Britishness drawing into its orbit so to speak the history of the Old North just as in the history of the British we have a section on precisely the royal patron some of Taliesin's poems address King Irian of reggae last quarter of the 6th century as far as we can tell so the history of conflict between British and English represented by some of these ancient poems and by some of the traditions about reggae that Nenius reproduces the tradition of conflict between the British and the English is revived in the context of Welsh self-consciousness in the 9th century and the old trope of how British Christians resist Germanic paganism is clearly at work in the chapter on the battles of Arthur it's made very clear that Arthur is a devout Christian in one of his battles he carries an image of the mother of God into battle with him similarly the struggles of Irian of reggae against the angles of Northumbria it's made reasonably clear that he is a Christian fighting pagans and in some of the poems ascribed to Taliesin Irian is given the very evocative and interesting title of Ys-Bedith literally the lord of baptism or the commander of the faithful that's to say he is presented again very self-consciously as representing a Christian civilized world over against Germanic barbarity and paganism and although of course by the 9th century the English were Christians it doesn't hurt Neneus's aims to suggest in a roundabout sort of way by the use of the material that he uses by the tropes he uses in talking about Arthur that the English may look Christian but real Christianity still belongs on the British side of the divide it means that in the 9th century the Welsh court and its intellectual elite are quite deliberately reviving a semi-legendary pattern of struggle between British and English the English of course in the 9th century and quite an expansionist mood some of the lesser Welsh kingdoms in the 9th and 10th centuries end up as tributaries to their English neighbors and so to dust off the old tradition of warfare between the rightful owners of the island and the pagan invaders is yet again an appropriate manageable move for a 9th century Welsh historian to make and somewhere around this period certainly between the 9th and the 11th century we find the beginnings of a genre of early medieval Welsh poetry which could be described as roughly nationalist prophecy that's to say pseudo prophetic texts looking forward to the day when the British once again recover their rightful control of the island of Britain the greatest and the longest example of this preserved interestingly enough in the so-called Book of Taliesin is the Armes Pradain whose earliest form may be 9th or 10th century though we don't quite know North Wales then is the new rallying point for British identity the North Welsh Kingdom and all the heroic traditions of earlier Britain especially the heroic traditions around those figures those semi-legendary figures who fought against the invaders like Arthur and Irian it's also a community which looks back to remote origins which set it up in a kind of cultural parity with Rome itself and to go back to the anecdote then it struggles as I say to maintain some viable contact with the classical languages what then was in Neneas's library presumably at the Ecclesiastical Centre of Bangor in North West Wales he has all the usual things that we've come to associate with British chroniclers he's reading Jerome and Eusebius he now has Isidore at his disposal he has Bede too at his disposal he knows the universal history of Erosius as everybody does and in that sense his library is an orthodox in the looser sense British library of the period he has the books we might expect it seems he also has access to some Irish annals perhaps or chronicles like the one I've mentioned before he has access to some traditions about indigenous literature probably oral it's notable that although he has quite a bit to say about King Irian of Regaed the traditions he reproduces have no parallel at all in the poetic material about King Irian associated with the work of Taliesin so we don't know if he really knew any epic poems about the period nonetheless there's a case for saying that in several passages of the Historia the simplest explanation for the way the story evolves is some kind of knowledge of a poem in the British language much ink has been spilled once again over the Arthurian question for a long time it was taken for granted that the list of Arthur's battles in the Historia was a Latin translation of some early British poem about Arthur's achievements more recent scholarship especially the work of Guy Hussle has pointed out that this particular passage of the Historia is very very carefully crafted even down to word cunt in other words it's most unlikely to be a translation of an existing text but equally unlikely to have been composed from scratch himself admits that it's perfectly possible I would say overwhelmingly likely that there's one or more earlier poetic sources behind it even if it's not originally a poem about Arthur it's a wide library therefore but not particularly deep it's an antiquarians library rather than historians in the fullest sense but I think shows itself most of all in the enthusiasm that the writer of the Historia shows for genealogies he will at the least excuse give you a long royal genealogy to break up his story genealogies of the Anglo-Saxons of the British of Brutus and his family and anybody else you care to name really and that as I say is more of a local antiquarians habit may reflect written sources as I've suggested there are misspellings and mistranscriptions apparently misspellings and mistranscriptions in what he has which suggest that he was copying something so it's a library which includes some indigenous poetry in some form even if only in the form of an informant and it includes some of that scholarly fantasy which I've argued lies behind the Brutus legend and it includes a new kind of hagiography a new kind of literature about the saints a literature which is some way removed from the kind of source that Gildus for example or even Bede uses about the saints St. Jimenez and St. Patrick are in the Historia of Brutunum almost indistinguishable they are standard issue saints they go around performing wonders and rebuking tyrants which is what saints do but not very specifically so unspecific is the story about Jimenez that there's absolutely no mention of the historical circumstances which Bede reproduces so painstakingly in his history if Nenius knew anything about the supposed Pelagian problem in Britain in the 5th century he certainly concealed that knowledge as I say is a standard issue saint which has led many people to suppose that the Jimenez of the Historia is not in fact the same person as the one mentioned at such length by Bede but maybe a local border Welsh saint Mid Wales Shropshire whose name is preserved in St. Harmon in the border area and who may or may not be the same as the Jimenez or Garmon commemorated in the Isle of Man and indeed in Cornwall we have no way of disentangling all this but the one thing we can be sure of is that narratives reproduced by Nenius are not of the same kind as the early chronicles of the saints the records in Bede not only of Jimenez but of course of Augustine and Aden but of the same kind of narratives at close quarters the British then are the ancient proprietors of the land and their ancient legitimate proprietorship of the island is somehow reinforced by that sense of classical antiquity behind them Anglo-Saxondom intrudes on this ancient and semi-sacred identity this proprietorship but there's at the same time that that proprietorship is realistically a thing of the past if it's to come back into existence it has to be fought for the legacy of the governance of the island is now in abeyance and only extant in Wales happily with the advent of the new dynasty in Gwynedd there is, Nenius implies literally a fighting chance that Wales may recover some of the ancient British glory but for now the kingdom of Gwynedd and Mervyn Vrich can congratulate itself that it is indeed the legitimate heir of Brutus and of Arthur and Virion and of Patrick the Moses of Ireland it can congratulate itself on having preserved that ancient identity and never having given up its claims to the ancient authority over the island and that leads me finally to some thoughts about the irony of what the Historia achieves I mentioned a little while ago the way in which Geoffrey of Monmouth takes up this story in the 12th century Geoffrey's history of the kings of Britain from that period is a work which I think you could properly call the Tolkien of its day it was the great imaginative fiction that provided a corporate myth for a people in search of a corporate myth if you can imagine Lord of the Rings being presented as a plausible national history you'll get some sense of how the history of the kings of Britain worked it is a quite brilliant work it's written with immense energy and imagination and even occasionally wit it's completely unscrupulous in its use of sources it simply fabricates it's a great historical novel it plunders the work of classical historians and it shakes out a bag full of names from Welsh genealogies and organises them in completely arbitrary patterns as king lists from ancient Britain as you all know Geoffrey Monmouth is remotely responsible for quite a lot of Shakespeare in the form of King Lear and Cymbeline at the very least responsible for the amazing efflorescence of the Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages and much else beside but what Geoffrey does is to pick up Nenus's Brutus story and make it not just a story about the Welsh but about some new reality newly conceived 12th century reality which is the Kingdom of Britain as understood by the Plantagenets we've already seen that the Welsh are manifestly not in charge of the island of Britain and Geoffrey hastens to tell us that that's because they don't deserve to be the Welsh have long since abandoned the glory of their ancestors and on our decadent and unwall like race a theme which we've already seen is a bead Nenus valiantly appropriately fights back against that stereotype but for Geoffrey the Welsh have essentially lost it and the Saxons have never had it so with the arrival of the Normans and the establishment of the Plantagenet dynasty we have now a chance to reimagine Britishness on quite new scale arguments about who the chosen people are are now in the remote past they are indeed in cold storage until the Reformation but the Brutus story presents the Norman rulers of the islands with a foundation myth which they can absorb and appropriate as their own and I say that's ironic because of course it entails overthrowing the entire logic of Nenus's Historia Britannum in favour of a people who have no ethnic connection at all with the ancient British but Geoffrey is colossally successful in this enterprise and the story of Brutus' ancestry of the British becomes as you'll know normative right up until the 16th, 17th century it's a renewed reinvented British identity the ancient identity that has been lost by the Welsh and was never possessed by the English becomes part of the British mythology of independence and empire it's fascinating to see how the statement that this realm of England is an empire is dusted off and used in 16th century polemic not least in the period of the Reformation Henry VIII evidently sees himself as the heir of Brutus and Arthur in his battles with continental tyranny so the greatest literary success of the writer of the Historia Britannum was also in a sense his greatest ideological failure he develops and elaborates with some energy a classical or pseudo classical mythology for the origins of Britain and in the hands of a far more brilliant and creative writer Geoffrey of Monmouth it becomes an ideology which helps to justify the Plantagenet suppression of independent Welsh kingdoms you could say then going right back to where we started that in the story of the inventions of British identities of various kinds through British libraries of various kinds a sort of Romanitas a sort of Romanus eventually triumphs through Geoffrey of Monmouth but it's in a way quite foreign to the Romanitas of Gildas say and beads doctrine of the displacement of the Canaanite British by the Israelite English is given a new twist by the Middle Ages it's now the Normans who, superseding the English and the Welsh become the inheritors not of a biblical but of a classical inheritance a classical typology and yet at the same time because of the way these histories have worked by the 12th century both English and Welsh identities are quite strong the Welsh identity created in the Historia remains strong for Wales the Kingdom of Gwynedd right up to its brutal suppression in the 13th century by Edward I continues to generate these narratives and myths of essential Britishness the prophecies of victory over the English are recycled and elaborated yet more poems are edited reworked in the name of Taliesin and other ancient writers and the sense remains strong of the Welsh as the true inheritors of the island in England we've seen how the English crown appropriated with a kind of ensouciance the British origin legend and made it its own so a number of things are going on by the High Middle Ages in the wake of all these historians the new Britishness of Geoffrey of Monmouth gives ground for a new and wider doctrine of British read English exceptionalism the English now standing in for the British that's to say the Norman English and their successors in the High Middle Ages have absorbed that legacy of what it is to be British and it is an imperial legacy not on the sense of global empire but in the sense of radical political independence you might even see in the legend of Brutus the remote ancestry of some of the rhetoric around Brexit and the final flowering of this language of imperium and independence in the 16th century as I've said weaves itself in in fascinating and subtle ways with the polemic of the Reformation not only against foreign rule but of a revived interest in the notion of the British people as chosen the language around King Edward the 6th for example describing him as the new King Josiah or the new King Joash underlines that sense that there is something about the English Christian identity which is analogous to the chosenness of ancient Israel and that in turn does something to help and to animate the sense of mission behind the British empire when it becomes the empire that we recognize from the 17th century onwards but if there's anything to be learned from this trawling of otherwise unknown and abidingly obscure British libraries in the post-Roman period I suppose it might be broken down into two elements the one is very obvious and that is that Britishness is always a project always something which involves imagination and yes invention it involves looking for analogs in the classical or the scriptural tradition it involves finding a narrative that's as true now as it was then and one of the dangers against which we need to keep watch is the danger of supposing that there is an absolutely given clear and authoritative narrative about what it is to be British which was never invented or created or refined by any historian or poet at all history suggests the contrary at the same time a second point is worth bearing in mind for all the awkwardness of the language used by Gildus and Bede about the functional identity of a Christian race British or Anglo-Saxon with ancient Israel both of them Gildus consistently Bede increasingly as he grew older both of those historians see the chosenness of this Christian chosen people as a cause not for self-congratulation but for deep self-examination it's a story not of unbroken success and victory of failure and betrayal repentance and restoration all national histories find it very difficult to cope with themes of repentance and restoration they're comfortable with absolute victory or absolute defeat absolute triumph or absolute victimhood paradoxically enough the models around in Gildus and Bede and to a lesser extent even in Nenius but the creation of national and corporate identity does not necessarily leave out of account the need to confront failure the need to consider what repentance might mean and the need for narratives of hope and forgiveness and so this brief set of reflections on the libraries of post-German Britain may perhaps leave us with a few interesting questions about what our own libraries are in thinking about national identity even about national moral horizons but that's a question I'm happy to leave you with gosh it's very bright up here first of all let me introduce myself my name is Caroline Brazier and I'm the chief librarian here at the British Library and I'm also on the member of the Penitze Selection Council it's my great privilege and pleasure this evening to give a vote of thanks to Dr. Ryan Williams for what I'm sure you will all agree with me has been an absolutely fascinating and wonderful series of lectures the Selection Council and there are hopefully most of the members here this evening has the very enjoyable task of drawing up a very long list of possible speakers to give the Penitze lectures and then it has the very difficult task of selecting one to invite each year and we're always looking for clearly the most outstanding speakers that we can think of so I have to let you know that when Dr. Williams was first suggested as a possibility he shot straight to the top of our list and we're delighted that he was able to find the time in an incredibly busy life to prepare and to give this year's lectures the lectures have not only enlightened us about a period of history that is normally the history of these islands which is normally considered dark but he's done so with great clarity and great thought and with an incredibly gentle humour by examining the literary and the book culture of the of his chroniclers and the culture of Britain England, Wales and the identities that go with those however you choose to define them through this he's helped us to understand more clearly the links which existed between the earlier classical world and the early medieval world which followed to me this was a fascinating story of legacy and continuity which shaped not only people's thinking and their writings but as he's so clearly demonstrated has shaped future generations and eras of thinking about identity so I for one have gained a much deeper understanding not just of the individuals in as much as we can know about them including some fascinating insights into their their characters but also of the intellectual and the culture world through which they lived and wrote and that context the clear context you've given us has been wonderful so on behalf of all of us I'd like to thank Dr Williams most sincerely for this wonderful series of lectures and ask you all to join with me in giving him a warm round of applause before I finish I have two very short messages the first one is by way of an advert the Penitzi Lectures next year will be on the 4th the 7th and the 11th of December 2017 when our lecture will be Professor Jermaine Greer who will be talking on the theme of Sappho Lost Found and Invented so we cordially invite you to come back and join us next year and last but not least to close this year's series we now invite you all to join us for a drink and some light refreshments in the foyer, thank you very much