The popularity of Geoffrey’s History was immediate and immense; it is indeed difficult to find a parallel to it before the age of printed books. So much is largely attested by the number of extant MS copies of the work.[83] But the most striking evidence of the impression it made is to be found in the number of translations, adaptations and continuations of the Historia compiled from the moment of its first appearance down to comparatively recent times. Not long, if at all, after its author’s death, Geoffrey Gaimar translated it into Anglo-Norman verse.[84] By 1155 Wace had completed his Brut, which in substance is almost entirely based on Geoffrey’s Historia. Early in the next century Layamon wrote his English Brut, embodying, with many interesting additions and embellishments of his own, the main features of Geoffrey’s and Wace’s narrative. Then follow a long line of English chroniclers, in both prose and verse, from Robert of Gloucester down to Grafton and Holinshed, who pass on Geoffrey’s fables as authentic history. In the Elizabethan age, in spite of attempts made to discredit him by critics and antiquaries, like Polydore Vergil and Camden, Geoffrey continues to be drawn upon by the poets. Sackville and Spenser, Warner and Drayton, and others, give a new currency to his British legends, and Drayton even goes out of his way to defend his impugned reputation.[85] Spenser, in borrowing from his record of British kings, pays him a well-known tribute in the second book of The Faerie Queene. But, perhaps, the finest tribute of all to Geoffrey’s History is that of Wordsworth in ‘Artegal and Elidure,’ where he sings of the “British record” in which
“We read of Spenser’s fairy themes,
And those that Milton loved in youthful years;
The sage enchanter Merlin’s subtle schemes;
The feats of Arthur and his knightly peers;
Of Arthur, who, to upper light restored,
With that terrific sword
Which yet he brandishes for future war
Shall lift his country’s fame above the polar star!”
Although Geoffrey’s book found so much acceptance in his own time and afterwards, it is significant to note that, even soon after its appearance and in the very heyday of its repute, a few shrewd critics ventured to question its authenticity. William of Newburgh, as we have seen, denounced it unreservedly as a tissue of impudent lies. He, at any rate, had no scruple in treating the work as a deliberate experiment in fiction under the guise of a chronicle. A different attitude towards the book might have been expected from Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welshman proud of his race and of its “old and haughty” traditions, who was himself not unskilled in the art of fiction. Yet it is Gerald who, of all Geoffrey’s critics, says much the unkindest thing on record of the Historia. He tells us of a Welshman at Caerleon named Melerius, or Meilir, who had dealings with evil spirits, and was “enabled through their assistance to foretell future events.” “He knew when anyone spoke falsely in his presence, for he saw the devil as it were leaping and exulting on the tongue of the liar.... If the evil spirits oppressed him too much, the Gospel of St John was placed on his bosom, when, like birds, they immediately vanished; but when that book was removed, and the History of the Britons by Geoffrey Arthur was substituted in its place, they instantly reappeared in greater numbers, and remained a longer time than usual on his body and on the book.”