[67] Roman de Brut, 1. 9994
[68] See above, p. 31.
[69] See the final chapter, on “Great Britain and Little Britain,” in Rhys’s Arthurian Legend.
[70] Ariegal and Elidure.
[71] Hist. Reg. Brit., Chap. I. (Dr Sebastian Evans’s translation). I have used this translation for nearly all the extracts from Geoffrey given in this chapter.
[72] This hypothesis is ingeniously elaborated by the late Dr Sebastian Evans in the epilogue to his translation of Geoffrey (Temple Classics, 1903).
[73] This explanation of the name “Britain” is not, as has been pointed out (pp. 60, 61), original to Geoffrey. It is his elaboration of the Brutus legend that is significant.
[74] William of Newburgh, the severest of all Geoffrey’s critics, writing about 1190, suggests that either this, or his own “love of lying,” was the motive of the work. “It is manifest that everything which this person wrote about Arthur and his successors, and his predecessors after Vortigern, was made up partly by himself and partly by others, whether from an inordinate love of lying or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.” William also held that Geoffrey’s account of events before the time of Julius Cæsar was either invented by himself, or “adopted after it had been invented by others.”
[75] Jusserand, Lit. Hist. of the English People, Vol. I. p. 131.
[76] One MS of the History, preserved at Bern, contains a double dedication addressed to both Robert, and King Stephen. I have given some account of this MS, and of its bearing upon the date and character of the History, in a paper on Geoffrey published in the Transactions of the Cymmrodorion Society (London, 1899).