Surely this is but a piece of book-learning spoilt in the application. Yet what says the author?
"This genealogy I found in the traditions of the ancients, who were the inhabitants of Britain in the earliest times."—Historia Britonum, cap. xiii.
The next two works are chronicles, so-called; one British and one Anglo-Saxon; the Annales Cambriæ and the Saxon Chronicle.
The notices of the Annales Cambriæ are remarkably brief and scanty. It has scarcely one for every second year, and what it has is short and unimportant.
It begins with A.D. 447, and ends with the Norman Conquest. It is closely confined to the events of Wales.
The date and authorship are uncertain. Of the three MSS. which supply the text, one is said to be as old as A.D. 954.
When the entries began to be cotemporary with the events registered is uncertain; indeed, there is no proof that they are so anywhere. On the other hand, they cannot be earlier than A.D. 521, since the event registered there is the birth of St. Columba. Now the entry of the birth of an illustrious personage is not likely to be a cotemporaneous entry; since his greatness has yet to be achieved, and it is only the spirit of prophecy and anticipation that such a record[124] would be made at the time he merely came into the world.
The year 522, then, is the earliest possible cotemporary entry, and this is, most likely, much too early.
But the work has not the appearance of being a register of cotemporaneous events at all. In such a composition the idlest chronicler would find something to say under each year, and notices of either local events, or the great events of general interest, could scarcely fail to be entered. No one, however, will say that such a series of entries as the following from A.D. 501 to A.D. 601, can ever have constituted cotemporary history.
LVII. Annus. Episcopus Ebur pausat in Christo, anno cccl. ætatis suæ.