To browse Academia. There is also a line map of Hungary especially intended to match names and places in the text of the Chronicon. A good index completes this important and satisfying opus. T oday is t he anniversary of t he Battle of Hastings.
Called by many hist orians one of t he "Decisive Bat t les of Hist ory", Hast ings was t he culminat ion of years of dynast ic int rigue surrounding t he English t hrone; f ollowing t he deat h of t he childless King Edward t he Conf essor. T hat year, , saw England t he prize in a t hree way war; a war of T hree Kings. This article surveys a range of twentieth-century scholarly discourse concerning Geoffrey of Monmouth's apparent political sympathies in his mid-twelfth-century Anglo-Latin The History of the Kings of Britain, especially in regard to his stance toward the Welsh and his use of source materials.
In contrast to recent critics, especially Monika Otter and Michelle Warren, who see Geoffrey's enormously popular and influential pseudo-history as fundamentally ambivalent or ambiguous, the present author aligns Geoffrey with his Norman patrons and contends that The History of the Kings of Britain creates a past that posits the ancient Britons, the ancestors of the twelfth-century Welsh, as eminently fit for conquest.
In terms of its general historiographic emplotment, The History of the Kings of Britain narrates pre-Saxon British history as a long decline. In tandem with this larger narrative structure, Geoffrey's strategic use of the prophecies of Merlin likewise subverts any potential rallying point for British or Welsh resurgence. Both historiographically and teleologically, Geoffrey's History of the Kings of Britain ultimately works against the ancient Britons and their Welsh descendants, legitimating Norman colonial ambitions in Wales.
At the time of the government of the last Norman king of England, Henry I , an idea of Norman identity as a unit was in direct absorption process in relation to the English, conquered 70 years earlier. This picture is well synthesized by Ralph Davis, I quote:. The paper challenges the rapid conquest described in the Gesta and presents a case for a prolonged Conquest of England.
