Defense of Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth is a medieval historian. About the first half of his book is a history from Adam, mostly about the kings of England, and the second half is about King Arthur.

Geoffrey lived in a dangerous time for documents, so he claims to have "made a heap" of all he could find and put them into his own book. Modern scholars are--well, quite discourteous about this, actually. They say he invented most of his book outright.

I have yet to be convinced he was a liar of that magnitude. I have, incidentally, read him all the way through, parts of it more than once.

The first charge is that, since we don't have any of his sources, he must have made them up. I reply, he put them in his book because he was afraid they wouldn't survive. And he was apparently right.

The second charge is that his material is internally inconsistent. I reply, well, if he was copying diverse materials, they could quite easily be inconsistent with one another. It is in fact a testimony to him being a trustworthy scribe.

A third charge is that the information in the book is improbable--he speaks of giants and dragons and King Arthur. I reply that the Bible talks about giants and dragons, not to mention quite a lot of external evidence to their existence--and if he was copying other sources, it's not his fault they talked about King Arthur. Possibly Geoffrey found him interesting and did extra research.

Fourth, they complain about his genealogies. True, he traces them to Adam. If you believe in Adam's historical existence, this is quite sensible, as Adam did have children. He also traces certain lines to Brutus. Two responses: if Brutus existed (which he might well have: I dislike the modern "Troy-never-existed-at-all" mindset), he might have had children too. Second, Geoffrey could potentially have been copying someone else's mistake.

I think a lot of this scholastic animus is against the medieval mindset. They, unlike us, really didn't consider a text guilty until proven innocent. They liked texts and "auctores" and learning, and generally considered them reliable. They also had a different approach to translation and sources than we do with our footnotes and quotes. They saw nothing whatever wrong with half-translating and half-rewriting a good story from the French, for instance. They would say, "I got this from Chretien de Troyes" and everyone would be perfectly happy. The medievals might make a good story better, but they hardly ever invented things out of the blue. When they did, it was generally in a dream-format, like Pearl.

So. All that is to say that I think Geoffrey of Monmouth was not a liar, but was a quite dependable passer-downer of otherwise lost information. The information might or might not be dependable; that requires further historical investigation.

But poor Geoffrey should not be dismissed out of hand.