Geoffrey of Monmouth - Historia Regem Britanniae

Arthur is given the Malory-style birth of the trick of Merlin allowing Uther into bed with Ygerne while her husband dies in battle with Uther’s soldiers. Merlin then disappears. He isn’t raised outside of the court, seems to have known his father, and basically isn’t mentioned after his birth until Uther dies. He then becomes king without the major struggles and insurrections Malory’s Arthur deals with. Instead, Arthur of his own will decides to go off and fight the Saxons, and is remarkably successful in this. This is what Malory seems to replace with the fights against the Northern Scottish kings in the early parts of Arthur’s reign. Arthur is thus fully represented as King of the British, fighting against the Saxons and the Angles.

The fight with Lucius is unprovoked, but welcomed as it allows the knights who have spent five years wasting their talents fighting against each other in tournaments to actually go into real battle. The point of this is that Arthur frees the Britons from their Roman bondage and from the tribute they had been required to send to the Romans – Arthur thus makes Britain into a fully free country, rather than one that has been in some sense bonded to the Romans either through occupation or through custom. There are also elements of Romance in this section – Arthur defeats a giant, people kill 3000 men each in battle, etc. This particular section, and the section before it during the peace time, seems to be the section most appealing to the French Romance writers, who use the scene set up at Caerleon for their Arthurian court.
- The French writers don’t bother with any of the fights against the Saxon, preferring (as do Welsh romances) to have Arthur be already all-powerful – they don’t seem to worry about how Arthur actually rose to power, and let Arthur rum amuck in England and Wales and Cornwall without bothering to distinguish between them. The only real territorial boundaries seem to be a question of whether a particular episode is taking place in a French territory or a territory someplace in the British Isles. This seems to help erase the role of the British/Welsh in the tales, so that by the time Malory is writing, Arthur can be basically British or English or whatever, as the two terms seem to mean essentially the same thing.

Notice that by the end of the Arthurian episode, the various different knights have all set up cities and kingdoms in France, which works to create a British/French cultural and imperial alliance that can prove useful to the Anglo-Norman audience for whom Geoffrey writes. Many of Arthur’s knights are buried in towns or cities that they’ve either created or that are the capitals of their respective kingdoms. This lays the groundwork for a Celtic-French overlap, so that one could read the eventual takeover of the Normans as being a return of the British to power in their home country, over and above the marauding Saxons.

The Arthur/Mordred episode is the start of a series of civil wars wherein British rulers, all deriving lineage from Arthur’s cousin Constantine, formerly Duke of Cornwall, either give in to pointless power lust by conquering all the islands of the North Sea (everything from Iceland to Norway and Denmark, which seem to be considered islands by virtue of their association with Vikings). The reigning Britons eventually draw God’s wrath for being prone to homosexuality and paganism. Interestingly, it is the latter two that Gildas complains most about in his history, where he announces that the British deserve their fate at the hands of the Saxons for being so sinful. The Saxons ally themselves with Gormund, king of Africa, break their oath of fealty to the British, and take advantage of the near-constant British civil wars fomented by their leader, Keredic, to wrest power once and for all from the British.

Cadwallader, the last king of the British, is eventually forced to flee Britain due to the plague – he goes to King Alan in Brittany for a while, and when he resolves to go back and re-take Britain from the Saxons, who at this point have completely overrun the whole island, he is given a vision from God and told not to return to Britain until the time appointed in the prophecies when Arthur shall rise again to take back Britain for the British and restore its true name. The loss of Britain is thus seen as a punishment for offences against God. These offences all seem to be in the immediately-post-Arthur phase, starting with Arthur’s own nephew Mordred. When Cadwallader is barred from re-entering his homeland, the British also lose their name and thus in a sense their history – in losing the name “British,” they lose their link to Brutus and to the glorious history they had once had, and are instead condemned to be “Welsh,” which Geoffrey links either to a ruler or to their habitual barbaric tendencies – the latter makes most sense as Welsh derives from ‘waelisc’ in Saxon, meaning barbaric foreigner.