And there is the story of the 40,060 kings who never existed—which is more almost than ever did exist. And of the coming of St. Augustine to England, bringing with him the gentle religion of Christ.
It would be very nice if all this about Merlin and the dragons and the Giants' Dance were what might be called true history. Alas, it is not! In the first place, Geoffrey tells stories which vary greatly from what was actually known to be history. Then, too, this chronicle is full, as you have seen, of miraculous stories of one sort or another. And there are other reasons, also, why these delightful stories of Geoffrey of Monmouth must be taken with a pinch of salt.
But it is because Geoffrey did sit at his window in the little town of Monmouth, writing these stories which have to be taken with a pinch of salt, that English story-telling began to grow. Geoffrey's imagination was to English story-telling what the sunlight is in making a tulip grow. Story-telling grew out of the Chronicles, the so-called historical literature. The men of Geoffrey's time said that "he had lied saucily and shamelessly." No doubt he had. Yet these same men could not help reading the stories he told, for they were so interesting that all men read them. What he had done was to take several Welsh legends, put them together cleverly, as a carpenter joins a delicate bit of woodwork, translate these Welsh legends into Latin and call the work a Chronicle. Not only was it read in England, but it was read all over the continent of Europe, too. It had great success.
Geoffrey Gaimer put these stories into French. The stories traveled to France. Once there, other legends were added, and when Geoffrey's Chronicle turned up again in England it came back as the work of Wace, a Norman trouveur, or ballad-singer. But Geoffrey's stories were too good to let drop even after they had been through so many hands. An English priest in Worcestershire by the name of Layamon, translating the French poem which Wace had made out of Geoffrey's prose stories, retold the stories in English poetry. That was in 1205, after Geoffrey had died.
Geoffrey of Monmouth must have been very happy as he sat in his sunny, golden window and heard about the tales he had written there. He must have chuckled many a time over what the world had made out of his nimble story-telling wits. English literature could not be at all the same, in either prose or poetry, if it were not for that golden palace door over which was written Welsh or that window upon the stairway where Geoffrey sat.
But it was the Normans who brought the taste for history with them to England in 1066, when they conquered the land which had been King Alfred's land. It was some time before the Normans became what we call English in their feeling. Probably the Normans would never have become so strongly English in feeling if English patriotism, even after the conquest of 1066, had not remained very much alive. The English had written down in English some of the proverbs of their former King Alfred. The parents of the chronicler, William of Malmesbury, were both English and Norman. And, strangely enough, Layamon's "Brut" is not unlike the poetry of the cowherd Cædmon, the first of the great English singers, the first of English poets.
Perhaps this very hour the sun is shining down upon that golden window of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and laughing for joy because the man who "lied so saucily" was the first of the great English story-tellers.