Historia in marchia

As outlined in chapter 1, border writing foregrounds landscape as a cultural signifier. Geoffrey roots history in the land through the opening descriptio of the island, and then elaborates spatial signification by signaling the geopolitical consequences of historical relationships. The Historian cartographic representations are typical of colonial literatures, as recent investigations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialisms amply demonstrate. Islands in particular signify colonial ambivalence: they are both “fixed colonial territory” (in an imperialist mode) and a “dynamic space of becoming” (in a postcolonial mode).²³ In both medieval and modern contexts, land is bound to genealogical and etymological strategies: the descriptio is gentis and temporis as well as terrae.

Pointing to the Britons’ historiographical erasure, Geoffrey states explicitly that he seeks to remember their forgotten history, which he has been unable to discover in Bede and Gildas (71). This amnesia has changed the shape of the past; Geoffrey claims to restore the original shape, preserved in oral memories as reliable as written records (71). These memories extend from the distant past like a refrain, preserving Briton territory. Throughout the Historia, however, alternate memories undermine the integrity of the Briton border and the linear progress of history. Geoffrey’s text comes to occupy a double-time between memory and amnesia: it remembers the imperial past of a colonized people who became the indigenous Other of later conquerors. In a postcolonial performance, Geoffrey creates Briton identity in narrative as he teaches its contours. The word Britannia at the head of the first sentence after the dedication literally holds the place of this created memory.

Geoffrey goes on to describe the island in terms that evoke what Pratt calls “imperial eyes.” Drawing on the landscape narratives of Gildas, Bede, the Historia Brittonum, and Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey takes possession of the island through writing. The landscape narrative begins as a pastoral countermemory to the violent experience of territorial conquest. The island is the “best” (“insularam optima”), a most “pleasant site” (“amoeno situ”) full of natural resources and suitable for cultivation (73). The catalog of admirable qualities implies already a human presence,²⁴ yet it is a presence forgetful of its own coercive designs. The force of Geoffrey’s pastoral will is evident when his descriptio is compared with Henry of Huntingdon’s. Although Henry also describes the land in aesthetically superlative terms (“beatissima . . . insularum,” “insularum nobilissima”) (11, 12), he concludes with a summary of the island’s names—witnesses of successive conquests: “quondam Albion nomen fuit, postea uero Britannia, nunc autem Anglia” (Albion was once the name, then Britain, and now England) (12). Geoffrey, forgetful of the past and the present, refers only to Britannia.

Geoffrey rearranges his textual inheritance to emphasize the land’s generative potential by grouping all the pastoral elements together before describing the cities. Following Gildas, he incorporates the island’s principal rivers into the landscape; reflecting the island’s eventual tripartite division, he adds the Humber to the list. The emendation, however, turns Gildas’s anthropomorphic metaphor of the Thames and the Severn as two arms reaching out to gather in the world’s riches (90) into a monster with “tria brachia” (72). Indeed, whereas Gildas makes the island a bride bejeweled with cities (“electa veluti sponsa monilibus diversis ornata”) (90), Geoffrey’s three-armed figure wears the tattered garb of crumbling cities (“in desertis locis squalescunt”) (73). Geoffrey’s disintegrating cities break with the synchronic tableau of his sources; his allusions to violent conflict also contrast meaningfully with Bede’s harmonious landscape.²⁵ Just when he has established the aesthetic of time’s absence through the pastoral landscape, he exposes the colonial cataracts that trouble his imperial vision. The decrepit cities deconstruct the myth of metropolitan power and the fantasy of durable empire.

Having set the urban blight of the present within the beautiful landscape of the past, Geoffrey turns to the people responsible for the decay. By describing the people last, Geoffrey underscores not only the cultural signification of the landscape (which originates with humans), but also the human source of its destruction. Like the landscape description, the ethnographic outline introduces several troubling temporal disruptions. Recent conquest, for example, prompts Geoffrey to add the Normans to the list of four peoples he inherited from his sources. Geoffrey names the Normans first; he goes on to reverse the order of his sources by naming the Britons before the Saxons, Picts, and Scots (73). The list underscores the filial relation between the most ancient and the most recent peoples (the Normans and Britons at the head of the list) while alluding to the historiographer’s perspectival problems. The Normans’ history, for example, begins after the Historia. And Geoffrey refers immediately to the Britons’ submission to the Picts and the Saxons. The list thus testifies to the difficulty of the memory that Geoffrey sets out to create: through the combined countermemories of the Scots, Picts, Saxons, and Normans, the Britons’ history has become precarious. In the end, Geoffrey’s descriptio offers none of the nostalgic comfort proper to the landscape genre. Even at this originary moment, boundary fissures dominate the island’s surface.

Geoffrey does not merely preface the Historia with a descriptio, he makes the landscape a historical character. When the Britons first arrive at the island, Brutus possesses the land through both force and language, in what R. Howard Bloch calls “an eponymic fusion of names, land, and language.”²⁶ The land’s genealogy thus coincides with the Britons’; their divisions become those of the landscape. A unified territory becomes the ideal achievement of a unified people, and its fragmentation a sign of ethnic disintegration. The hunt for land begins in Troy, a space literally “removed from the map.”²⁷ Engaging in the hunt as a married man, Brutus cannot build his patrimony through kinship ties, on the model of the “predatory kinship” that Eleanor Searle discerns among the Normans. Instead, kinship commemorates alliances forged by the sword. Marriages are thus retrospective rather than prospective (with the exception of the Briton proposal to the Roman Maximianus, who subsequently initiates Britain’s fall). As a result, the obligation to acquire new land, along with the absence of empty land, repeatedly promotes political instability, just as it often did in medieval societies. From the Britons’ first thought of liberty to their last gasp of sovereignty, they imagine their authentic identity through territorial possession.

The defeated and enslaved Trojans express their desire for liberty specifically as a desire for reterritorialization: they ask Pandrasus for land, either in Greece or elsewhere (“aliarum terrarum nationes”).²⁸ When he refuses, the Trojans rebel and defeat him through cunning and force. As victors, the Trojans again demand the right to depart for “alias nationes,” with ships, provisions, and Pandrasus’s daughter Innogen. Nationes takes on a spatial dimension, implying the conquest of already occupied space. The Trojan hunt for land, then, envisages colonization from its inception. Once conquered, this land will be ruled by the descendents of a Greek mother and Trojan father. The Briton genealogy is thus founded on the union of conqueror and conquered. The Briton offspring of this marriage efface the boundary between antagonists, promising a future of peace and reconciliation. In this regard, Brutus’s marriage resembles many of those contracted in colonial dynamics, from twelfth-century Britain to nineteenth-century India.²⁹ Geoffrey’s patron Robert incarnates the generative potential of these kinds of colonial intimacy, for his mother is rumored to have been Nesta, sister of the Welsh prince Staffyd ap Rhys.³⁰ Most of Geoffrey’s representations, however, portray the dangers rather than the advantages of such intimate colonial contact.

Before arriving in Britain, Brutus passes over both unoccupied and occupied land. The island of Loegecia, uninhabited and agriculturally rich, presents the peaceful option for settlement. Loegecia’s descriptio echoes Britain’s, with its plentiful game and decrepit cities:³¹ both landscapes portray the troubling end of a civilization not yet begun. When Brutus asks the oracle Diana to prophesy the Trojans’ destiny, she offers a typical colonial cartography: his realm (“patria sua”) is a deserted island (“insula deserta”), empty and free for the taking, where he will build another Troy (“altera Troja”); ultimately, his race will subjugate the world (“[t]otius terrae”) (84). Although Diana’s description resembles Loegecia itself (“insula in oceano,” “deserta”), the Trojans never consider that this could be their new patria. As the site of a former civilization whose traces remain in the urban ruins, Loegecia is already inhabited by history. In fact, Loegecia is not deserta at all but full of conquered ghosts, and so too crowded for the Trojans.

When the Trojans, augmented by Corineus’s men, land in Aquitaine, the Historia presents the second option for land acquisition—armed conquest. Having anchored in the Loire, the Trojans explore “situmque regni” (the site of the realm) (85). The description of the land as a regnum distinguishes it from all previous references (which include nationes, locam, terra, and patria). A regnum is defined by its boundary (fines), which marks the difference between inhabitants and outsiders (externam gentem). When the Trojans land at the shore, they thus enter a governed civilization where their explorations constitute trespassing. Accordingly, King Goffar asks whether they intend war or peace, that is, whether they intend to recognize the limits of the realm (“fines regni”): Corineus answers an emphatic no by smashing in the head of Goffar’s messenger with his bow (85–86). In the war that ensues over the Trojans’ trespassing, Brutus seeks nothing less than to empty the inconveniently full land through genocide: “volens infelicem gentem usque ad unum delere” ([he] want[ed] to obliterate the unfortunate people down to the last one) (88). Since this goal turns out to be impracticable, and since Aquitaine is not the “promissam insulam” (90), Brutus takes advantage of a lull in the hostilities to set sail.

As Brutus arrives at the island with his band of Trojan exiles, Geoffrey again identifies the land as an amoeno situ: seeing through Brutus’s imperial eyes, he forgets the crumbled cities his own eyes have seen. While in these early contacts Brutus clearly exemplifies Pratt’s confident “monarch-of-all-I-see” (204–5), Geoffrey’s historical amnesia proves fleeting. He subsequently implies ambivalence in every colonizing gesture. Most important, the island is not deserted (as prophesied) but inhabited by giants. The fact of precedence thus immediately blurs Brutus’s imperializing gaze; he is not the origin of Insular civilization but an (at least) second-comer. Brutus and his Trojan companions establish a provisional boundary between themselves and the natives by driving the giants into mountain caves; the giants return, however, and kill a number of Britons (90–91). Brutus reestablishes the desired difference between the ruled and the unruly by slaughtering all the giants except Goemagog, whom he saves for a wrestling match with Corineus, “qui cum talibus congredi ultra modum aestuabat” (who burned beyond measure for such a fight) (91). Geoffrey has already established Corineus’s intimate relations with giants by comparing him to one when the Trojans first meet him (85) and explaining that he chose his lands because of their large population of giants, which he delights (“delectabat”) in wrestling (91). Corineus’s excessive desire to touch indigenous bodies expresses a colonial desire to resemble the native; his particular desire to wrestle the native exposes the violent antagonism of this desire for the almost-same. Corineus forcefully exacts dominion from the play of his similarity to giants.

Corineus approaches the encounter “maximo gaudio,” “abjectis armis” (with the greatest joy, casting down his arms). With great pleasure, Corineus divests himself of the signs of his civilized difference from the native. The contest begins with their locked embrace: “et alter alterum vinculis brachiorum adnectens crebris afflatibus aera vexant” (and each binding the other by fastening his arms, pressing together, they shake the air with their breath) (91). After Goemagog breaks three of Corineus’s ribs, Corineus heaves him onto his shoulders and carries him some distance before throwing him over a cliff: “At ille, per abrupta saxorum cadens, in mille frustra dilaceratus est et fluctus sanguine maculavit” (There, by falling onto broken rocks, he is torn to a thousand pieces and he stained the waves with his blood) (92). The fragmentation of the indigenous body on the shore figures the fatal multiplicity of differences in the border. The stain of giant-blood in the water that conveyed the colonizing settlers to the island marks—but only briefly—the contamination of colonial power. Geoffrey’s own mixing of present and past tenses casts the event into double-time, witnessing the split subjectivity of colonial experience. When people subsequently name the place “Goemagog’s Leap,” they commemorate the split between the old order (Goemagog himself) and its destruction.³² The name glosses over coercion, however, by implying that the native removed himself voluntarily.

After the destruction of the indigenous giants, the island’s colonization continues with land distribution. Once Brutus has divided the patria among his men, Geoffrey presents the new boundaries as timeless elements of the landscape by noting the rapid disappearance of signs of conquest: “ut brevi tempore terram ab aevo inhabitatam censeres” (after a brief time you would have thought the land inhabited since forever) (90). This declaration effaces the temporal boundary between the Trojan dominion and all previous ones, appropriating all time for the Trojans.³³ The willful forgetting of prior history, however, has threatened Briton ownership of this past (as the descriptio has already indicated). Brutus’s laudable achievement thus depends on a historiographic maneuver that Geoffrey will condemn when deployed against the Trojans’ descendents.

The change of name from Albion to Britannia seals the possession of land and time. Geoffrey explains that Brutus intended to preserve the memory of his founding; in the same fashion the men are known as Britons and the language (formerly called “curvum Graecum”) as Britannica (90–91). The narration of these changes, however, presents a troubling alternative memory, for it preserves the older, threatening identities of the giants and the Greeks. Indeed, as Jean-Yves Tilliette observes, “uncurved Greek” is nothing less than the classical tradition (229). The Trojan speakers of “curved Greek” thus distort a history of Greek triumph that Brutus intends to forget. Although Brutus does fuse his genealogy with the new landscape, the old name of his language reminds us that his progeny are half Greek (through Innogen) and thus conceived in an anxious union between conqueror and vanquished.

Equally disturbing to future unity is the fact that Brutus’s eponymous achievement does not cover the whole island. Following Brutus’s example, Corineus names his land and his people after himself—Corinea, “corrupted” to Cornubia (91). Cornubia (Cornwall) thus takes shape externally to Britain, yet vaguely included in it. Unifying solutions to divisive strife will repeatedly originate in Cornwall: as O. J. Padel first emphasized, five of the nine major dynasties, including Arthur’s, originate in Cornwall (5–8); even in Merlin’s prophecies, relief comes from the Bear of Cornwall.³⁴ Cornwall can reunite the island because it lies both inside and outside of Britain, set out in a cartography of paradox before Britain’s own division. Geoffrey’s construction of Cornwall as a salvific, independent space, however, collides with the region’s contemporary captivity. At the time of Geoffrey’s writing, Cornwall was subjected to complicated, and still somewhat obscure, jurisdictional disruptions. According to Judith Green’s assessment, Reginald son of Henry I (and therefore Robert of Gloucester’s half brother) married the daughter of William lord of Cardinham and drew the county away from Stephen’s influence in 1140. Stephen’s appointed earl briefly ousted Reginald, but Reginald regained the territory and held it to his death in 1175.³⁵ Cornwall’s contemporary resonances render the region a space of equivocation, typical of Geoffrey’s other border constructs. Indeed, it remained, and remains, an unstable margin of British identity.³⁶ From its inception, then, Insular history occupies fragmented space.

Brutus concludes the island’s colonization with urban architecture, building a city on the shore (“littora”) of the Thames (92) (the first of the description’s three rivers). If the Severn bounds the west and the Humber the north, the Thames represents the boundary of the island per se, the inland expression of the ocean edge. New Troy thus occupies the shore, recalling both Brutus’s arrival from across the ocean and Goemagog’s burial. Brutus’s city inaugurates a recurring practice of architectural innovation as a sign of completed conquest, one that echoes the Norman castle-building practices of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.³⁷ Throughout the Historia, building projects commemorate the unification of the realm.

The unification contained in New Troy, however, lasts no longer than a sentence. Narrating the name’s creation, Geoffrey is drawn into an alternate, prospective chronology that leads directly to fratricidal war. The etymology refers to the conflict that breaks out between Lud and Nennius when Lud tries to change the city’s name to Kaerlud to commemorate his own civic improvements (92). Lud’s renaming threatens to efface the memory of his predecessors, just as Brutus’s displaced Albion. While Lud (like Brutus) looks to the future, Nennius (like Geoffrey) defends the past. The simultaneity of these perspectives disrupts the chronological thread, introducing discord into the founding moment of peaceful unification.³⁸ In the compressed time of the etymology, Geoffrey thus thematizes the loss of memory. He holds the narrative in check by deferring to Gildas, who (Geoffrey claims) has already provided a superior account of the war. Since Gildas’s history does not in fact contain such a story, the name Gildas holds the place of an absent history. The reader, of course, can already perceive that Lud won out, since Kaerlud leads to London more readily than Trinovantum does. As in the descriptio, the simultaneity of temporal references problematizes the project of history and the prospect of legitimation.

The suggestion of fratricidal conflict contained in the naming of New Troy introduces the conflicts that will arise from the partition of Brutus’s patrimony among his three sons. After Brutus’s death, they divide the island, naming each part after themselves (Loegria, Kambria, Albania). Geoffrey’s description of this process is fraught with temporal discord, as he marks off Kambria along the Severn (whose origin has yet to be narrated) and refers to the twelfth-century names of both Kambria and Albania (93). Cornwall, of course, is not part of the division, having already been established in a line of descent separate from Brutus’s. The division of the island founds a “disunited kingdom,”³⁹ generating long-term topographical trauma from which the island has yet to recover. While the partition of conquered territory reflects some contemporary Norman inheritance practices,⁴⁰ it also recalls their often violent consequences. The rest of the narrative recounts the ambivalent cycle of efforts to erase these lines from the landscape.

The two rivers that mark the boundaries of the three realms, the Severn and the Humber, soon receive their names from the death of figures who transgress boundaries. Humber the Hun disturbs the Insular border when he invades Albania and kills Albanactus. Locrinus and Kamber march against him, and he drowns in the river that comes to bear his name (93). Like Goemagog, Humber is submerged in the water that defines the limit; the boundary again contains and destroys the agent that threatened to displace it. Similarly, the Severn takes its name from Habren, Locrinus’s daughter by Estrildis (a German princess from Humber’s entourage). Locrinus’s Cornish wife Gwendolen kills him in battle and has the mixed-race daughter and her foreign mother put to death in the river (95). She then propagates legislation to name the river after the girl. Gwendolen wants to honor the girl because she was the daughter of her own husband—the same reason apparently that she would want to kill her. This “spatial deployment of collective memory,” as Monika Otter calls it (70), literally encodes history in the land. This honor, however, has been both preserved and forgotten, as the “britannica lingua” still calls the river Habren but “per corruptionem nominis alia lingua Sabrina vocatur” (by corruption of the name it is called Sabrina in another language) (95). Like Lud’s “corruption” of Troja Nova, the incursion of “another language” effaces Gwendolen’s commemorative gesture. Habren herself embodied a union of ethnic differences (Briton and German); her river now marks the limit of Gwendolen’s realm (she rules the whole island except Kambria). The aquatic division is thus named for a figure who incarnated division while blurring differences. The river hides the body of the illegitimate child, sign of an unauthorized lineage; the name commemorates the concealment while keeping it visible. The name’s corruption reconceals the threat and enables a perfect forgetting—except that the Historia preserves Habren’s memory in the etymology. This episode illustrates succinctly the complex dynamic of memory and forgetting that shapes the Historia into a compelling border text.

Geoffrey’s account of the first generation of Britons thus establishes intimate and agonized connections among land, ethnic identity, the language of history, and the possession of time. The cultural politics of these identity issues play out through the rest of the text, repeatedly confronting the original fractured circumstances as Geoffrey underscores again and again the dangers of discord, the gains of multilingualism, and the value of memory. Within each of these boundaries lie coercive force and judgments of legitimacy.

The hunt for land continues throughout the Historia. When rulers achieve Insular unity, they hunt overseas; foreign invaders like the Romans and the Saxons target Britain in their own hunt. The vocabulary of dominion represents the whole island under a single ruler as the ideal, its division a recurring wound. Seven times after Brutus, rulers reconstitute dominion over the whole island, from sea to sea (totam insulam, a mari usque ad mare).⁴¹ By encompassing dominion within the limits of the sea, Geoffrey projects political achievement as a measurement of land. The Historia nostalgically recalls this original whole and sustains the emerging aristocratic ethos of primogeniture. Implicitly, then, the Britons’ decline derives from their willingness to divide the patrimony; their fate illustrates how partibility diffuses ethnic and family power. The divisions tend to return to the unstable lines first set by Brutus’s sons along the Severn and the Humber.⁴² Since instability inheres in aquatic boundaries, the island’s internal borders remain unstable as long as topography defines limits. Only by negating navigation, as the Britons do when they plant iron spikes in the Thames to sink invading Roman ships (130–31), can the Insular boundary stabilize and foreclose dangerous paradoxes. Rulers achieve greater stability when they create architectural space (as Brutus does with New Troy). Paradoxically, condemnable fratricides also establish laudable hegemonies. These homosocial murders, like Gwendolen’s of Habren and Estrildis, repeatedly normalize domination by destroying near-resemblances. Eventually, the divisions run so deep that the insula cannot recover and dominion resides in the regnum. Indeed, as Walter Schirmer first argued, the Historia’s hero is the regnum rather than the reges (the kings of the title) (29). The regnum, however, is a fallen hero, a sign of territorial loss and a permanently fragmented insula.

The most lethal challenge to Insular integrity comes from the Britons’ own overseas expansion. Maximianus creates the fatal division with his conquest of Armorica. Across the water, he discovers a second locus amoenus, and Geoffrey offers a new descriptio in the mouth of the conqueror, addressed to Conanus:

Ne pigeat igitur te regnum Britanniae insulae cessisse mihi, licet possidendi eum spem habuisses, quia, quicquid in ilia amisisti, tibi in hac patria restaurabo: promovebo etenim te in regem regni hujus, et erit haec altera Britannia, et eam ex genere nostro, expulsis indigenis, repleamus. Patria namque fertilis est segetibus, et flumina piscosa sunt, nemora perpulchra, et saltus ubique amoeni, nec est uspiam meo judicio gratior tellus. (160)

[Do not therefore grieve that the rule of the island of Britain has been ceded to me, when you had hopes to possess it lawfully yourself, because whatever you have lost there, I will restore to you in this patria, because I will promote you to the kingship of this realm, and it will be another Britain, and out of our own people, after expelling the indigenes, we will repopulate it. For this patria is fertile with corn, and the rivers with fish; the woodlands are very beautiful and the forests pleasant—in my judgment no land is more agreeable.]

From the verbal description of aesthetic possession (which casts the fertile ground as compliant, with shades of grateful in gratior) to the dismissal of the natives, Maximianus replicates the founding of Britain. By proposing to recreate the original land and procreate the original people, he imagines a perfect semblance extended through space and time. Nonetheless, the difference from the original is drawn by the Channel that touches both; the very idea of an altera to Diana’s unique promissa insula foreshadows the end of the Briton empire. Moreover, Maximianus’s conquest leads directly to Britain’s invasion by foreigners from overseas. The undefended Briton plebes seek Roman protection in vain. As a result, they inhabit a bloody border bounded by colonial aggression on one side and the nonnavigable sea on the other: “Nos mare ad barbaros, barbari ad mare repellunt. Interea oriuntur duo genere funerum: aut enim submergimur, aut jugulamur” (The sea drives us to the barbarians, the barbarians to the sea. Meanwhile two kinds of death arise: either we are submerged or our throats are cut) (167–68). Murdered or drowned, the Britons play the role of the indigenous giants for a new group of aggressive settlers.

These foreign settlements prompt Geoffrey to deterritorialize the measurement of rule by identifying Briton sovereignty through the regnum and name Britannia. Constantine of Brittany, for example, takes on the crown of the realm (“diadema regni”) rather than the island (170); his successor Vortigern treacherously acquires the justice of the realm (“totiam justitiam regni”) (171). From this point forward, regnum displaces territorial measurement and identifies the Britons’ loss of Insular sovereignty. Although Uther briefly reverses the process, wearing the crown of the island (“diadema insulae”) (219), Arthur inherits from him a crown of the realm (“diadema regni”) (228). And despite Arthur’s own spectacular territorial achievements, he leaves his successor a crown of Britain (“diadema Britanniae”) (278). The name recalls the original founder Brutus, but as a nostalgic memory rather than a territorial achievement. As Saxon settlement proceeds, Cadvan wears the crown of the realm (“regni diademate”) (285), and Cadwallo the last crown of Britain (297). In the end, neither the Britons nor the English merit any crown at all because each maintains a divided dominion ruled by the three kings (283). While the Britons never recover their pristine dignity (“pristinam dignitatem”), the English also fail to quantify their rule: the Armorican Britons Ivor and Iny promulgate “inquietatione” against the English, limiting their rule to Loegria (“toti Loegriae”) (303). Geoffrey thus presents English rule as partial, located neither in the landscape nor in legal concepts. Instead, the ghost of Loegria’s eponymous founder, Brutus’s eldest son, Locrinus, haunts their dominion.

The displacement of the insula by the regnum witnesses territorial loss, rendered dramatic by the primacy of landscape in Geoffrey’s representation of Briton identity. Indeed, alongside this terminological pattern, Geoffrey deploys landscape and architectural narratives as signs of significant jurisdictional shifts. Where landscape encodes ambivalence toward colonial settlement, architecture promises to resolve troubling paradoxes. The resolutions, however, can sustain domination as easily as they overturn it. Where Belinus and Aurelius consolidate their rule through architectural innovation, for example, similar efforts by the Romans and Saxons solidify Briton losses.

In a unique example of successful Briton architecture, Belinus bolsters his dominion by building roads. His massive construction project aims explicitly to resolve the roads’ ambiguous edges and thus clarify the extent of royal jurisdiction (“omne ambiguum legi suae auferre volens”) (112). He builds four roads with clearly defined stone borders—one the length of the island (“longitudinem”), one the width (“latitudinem”), and two diagonally (“ab obliquo insulae”). Each road literally carves a limit independent from the natural topography; nowhere does Geoffrey mention the traditional river boundaries. Belinus’s roads thus safeguard the stability of the future by resolving spatial ambiguity and dismissing topographic ambivalence. Indeed, Belinus’s mastery of the Insular border is so secure that he builds a gate on the banks of the Thames to facilitate the safe crossing from water to land (“Desuper vero aedificavit turrim mirae magnitudinis portumque subtus ad pedem applicantibus navibus idonem”) (118). Conceiving of boundaries other than the rivers and the island, Belinus is rewarded with what Geoffrey judges to be the most prosperous reign of all time. When he dies, his citizens commemorate his architectural skill by placing his ashes artfully (“mira arte”) atop his gate. His body fuses with his architectural creation rather than with the land, completing his own valuation of constructed space over topography.

Stonehenge represents a second spectacular monument to unified rule, directly predicated on colonialist success. The project begins when Aurelius seeks a suitable memorial for the Britons who died fighting the Saxons: he asks his craftsmen (“artificibus lignorum et lapidum”) to design an innovative structure (“novamque structuram”) (211). Since they are unable to imagine the novel, Merlin suggests importing the Giants’ Ring (“chorea gigantum”) from Ireland (212). These stones belonged to the giants defeated by Brutus and Corineus: they thus recall indigenous culture and the coercive origins of Briton dominion, itself now threatened by new settlers. The giants themselves brought the stones from Africa for medicinal purposes (213), implying an ancient history of settlement akin to the Trojan-Britons’. The stones are further linked to colonial ambition because to acquire them, the Britons must invade Ireland. Although the Britons subdue the Irish, they only succeed in conquering the stones through Merlin’s superior mechanical skills (“suasque machinationes”) (214). The lesson Geoffrey draws—that craft (“ingenium”) outmaneuvers strength (“virtuti”)—touches Geoffrey’s own ingenious engagements with bellicose patrons.⁴³ The Giants’ Ring thus signifies the Britons’ (and Geoffrey’s) mastery over a lengthy and geographically disparate colonial heritage, as well as their successful defense of Insular dominion against the Saxons. At the same time, however, the Giants’ Ring surrounds Briton corpses, the dead traces of successful Saxon conquest. The monument’s indigenous origins are ultimately forgotten, as the English (“Anglorum lingua”) call it Stanheng (280). The stones, then, come to signify Briton defeat.

In this, the giants’ stones resemble nearly every other architectural innovation imposed on the Insular landscape. Marius, for example, commemorates his victory over the Picts with a stone inscribed with the story of the battle (142). He then gives northern Albania to the surviving Picts. As a result, this part of the island is alienated from Insular history: “Sed haec hactenus, cum non proposuerim tractare historiam eorum sive Scottorum, qui ex illis et Hibernensibus originem duxerunt” (But no more about this here, since I do not propose to handle their [the Picts’] history or that of the Scots, who descended from them and the Irish) (143). Foreclosing his own narrative entanglements, Geoffrey exposes here the shameful fact that no history of a single people can encompass the whole island—and that any history of the whole island must encompass several peoples. Marius’s stone stands on this durable geographical and historiographical boundary, marking a permanent Insular divide.

Two generations later, the Romans build a wall designed to contain the threat of these same northerners (146). Sited to the north of the Humber, the wall manifests (less poetically than Marius’s stone) the geopolitical tendency for stable boundaries to be marked to one side of a navigable waterway. Likewise, after Maximianus depopulates the island with his conquest of Armorica, the Briton plebes construct another wall in an effort to stem the tide of foreign settlement (165). Both walls extend from sea to sea (“a mari usque ad mare”), recalling the formula used to describe paninsular dominion but here describing an architectural boundary that forecloses that possibility (both walls are clearly visible on Matthew Paris’s map; see figure 2). The walls immure the fantasy of impermeable borders, a fantasy that here turns against the dream of unified Briton dominion.

Architecture turns against the Britons most spectacularly with the beginning of Saxon settlement. When Vortigern refuses to give Hengist a title to go with his farmland, Hengist proposes to quantify a defensive space instead:

Concede, inquit, mihi, servo tuo, quantum une corrigia possit ambiri infra terram quam dedisti, ut ibidem promuntorium aedificem, quo me, si opus fuerit, recipiam. (178)

[“Concede,” he asked, “to me, your servant, as much as a thong can encompass within the land you have given, so that I can build a fortress to receive me if trouble comes.”]

Once Vortigern agrees, Hengist uses the thong like a line on a map to manipulate the scale of topography and encompass a vast territory:

[C]epit Hengistus corium tauri, atque ipsum in unam corrigiam redegit. Exinde saxosum locum, quem maxima cautela elegerat, circuivit cum corrigia et infra spatium metatum castellum aedificare incepit, quod, ut aedificatum fuit, traxit nomen ex corrigia, quia cum ea metatum fuerat: dictum namque fuit postmodum britannice Kaercarrei, saxonice vero Thanecastre, quod Latino sermone Castrum Corrigiae appellamus. (178)

[Then Hengist took the hide of a bull and rendered it a single thong. Then he encircled with the thong a rocky place, which he selected with great care, and within the measured space he began to build a castle, which, when it was built, derived its name from the thong since it had been measured with one: thus it was called afterward in the Briton language Kaercarrei, in the Saxon Thanecastre, which we call in the Latin language Castle of the Thong.]

The rawhide thong represents a new technology of conquest, and Hengist a new kind of conqueror in the image of a land surveyor (a “monarch-of-all-I-survey”). As a colonial cartographer, Hengist imagines a boundary with no concrete relation to nature or history: he does not claim the land between two rivers or the land of his ancestors, as others do in the Historia. Hengist’s acquisition of land represents a mode of colonization without an aestheticized imperial gaze: instead of discovering a locus amoenus, Hengist creates a “saxosum locum” (which slyly suggests a Saxonum locum). The rocky site is of course strategically prudent (“cautela”), but the space itself is defined by strategic measurement (“spatium metatum”), not the shape of the rocks. Hengist proceeds to build his colonial headquarters on the rocky material of Goemagog’s destruction (“abrupta saxorum”), founding his domination on a site that recalls native disintegration. Geoffrey’s concluding trilingual naming of the fortification moves through the languaging process of conquest right into the collective present tense of Latin dominance.

Hengist’s settlement and construction signal the beginning of the end of Briton dominion, which ultimately comes in territorial and architectural terms. Soon after Hengist completes his fortification, Vortigern’s failed tower immures the fragility of dominion and portends the fall of Britain itself; Merlin even prophesies that the warring dragons who disturb the tower’s foundations represent the Britons and Saxons (188–91). In the end, as Cadwallader sails into exile in Armorica, he presents a final descriptio that ironically disowns the land that Brutus claimed. Addressed to the Romans, Scots, Picts, and Saxons, Cadwallader’s speech grants them all the deserted land (repeating redite three times) (300). The landscape resembles once again the promised insula deserta; at the same time, it is inhabited by most of the peoples of Geoffrey’s own descriptio. The Historia thus opens and closes with an emptied landscape, the natural space of colonial dreams and postcolonial nightmares. In the ultimate paradoxical maneuver, Geoffrey portrays Briton dominion as unstable while rooted in the land, but crushed by the stabilizing effects of architectural innovation.

The ideal of unified Insular space sustains the ideal of a unified Insular race, a single people possessing a single land through time in a seamless genealogical progression. The fusion of territory and genealogy connects land to reproduction: marriage becomes a territorial strategy, and irregular intercourse (adultery, sodomy, rape, etc.) undermines Insular unity. But just as land acquisition is treated paradoxically (expansion and preservation are both laudable and condemnable), so are kinship strategies: marriages can destroy group cohesion; adulterers and sodomites can create stable kingdoms; fratricide repeatedly enhances Insular unity. Geoffrey deals with these tensions by stating positive ideological interpretations overtly, and then silently eliding the negative consequences. The result is a deeply ambivalent portrayal of expansionism and aggressive settlement.

Several aquatic allegories bridge the conceptual distance between spatial and ethnic identity. As Heinrich Pähler first suggested (80–81), Geoffrey’s representation of the marvelous square pool at Loch Lomond captures his approach to ethnic ideology. In a twenty-by-five-foot shallow pool, a different species of fish occupies each corner; none ever visits any other part of the pool (236). The invisible yet impermeable boundaries represent an ideal of ethnic segregation, where the fish represent the four peoples named in the opening descriptio. Geoffrey’s representation is forcefully ideological when compared with the marvel’s description in the Historia Brittonum. There, men fish in every part of the pool, catching all kinds of fish from every part (“et aliud genus piscium trahitur ex omnibus partibus”). The marvel, however, is that such a small pool, with no rivers flowing in or out, can support such a great variety of species (81–82). In contrast to this naturalistic wonder, Geoffrey’s fishy marvel imagines a perfectly segregated Insular space.

The second aquatic marvel, located along the Severn, also offers an allegory of ethnic relations, this time as a lesson about the dangers of intermingling. Geoffrey explains the marvel with less topographical precision than the Historia Brittonum but with the same general import: water flows in but the level does not rise; when the tide goes out, this water is spewed forth, and if anyone in the whole country (“totius patriae”) faces it and is touched by its drops, nothing will save him from being washed away, but if his back is turned, he has nothing to fear and will stay unharmed on the shore (“non est irroratio timenda, etiam si in ripis astaret”) (237). As an allegory of the Welsh border, the Severn marvel represents how safekeeping depends on turning one’s back to outsiders. The Severn and the fish pool both capture the value, and wonder, of segregation. These marvels embed ethnic fantasies in the aquatic landscape, fantasies that resist the mingling actually taking place on land.

From the Historia’s very beginning, Geoffrey tries to segregate Briton genealogy from historical multiplicities. Turning his back on the four genealogies of Brutus offered by the Historia Brittonum (59–63), Geoffrey gives him a single Trojan father. Geoffrey’s genealogical reasoning responds to the new prominence of genealogical discourse in the twelfth-century aristocratic consciousness, expressed succinctly by Francis Ingledew: “British history is . . . systematically genealogized for the first time at the same moment that it is first systematically imperialized” (678). In a structure of vertical lineage and primogeniture, anxiety about lineage runs high; this widespread twelfth-century anxiety permeates the Historia.⁴⁴ Exogamy, for example, can extend land holdings, but it also destabilizes group identity by introducing outsiders. Endogamy, by contrast, preserves land holdings but can destabilize allegiances within the group. In the Historia, the Britons both find and lose their identity through exogamous marriage. Ambivalent as always, the Historia alternates between the value of preservation (primogeniture and endogamy) and the value of expansion (partibility and exogamy). According to James C. Holt, this paradox characterizes the twelfth century in general, as the aristocracy struggled to reconcile the tensions between inheritable patrimony and partible acquisitions.⁴⁵ The Historia’s patent ambivalence, however, might inflame rather than calm the anxieties it illustrates. Indeed, Brutus’s genealogy may be singularly Trojan, but it is also founded on patricide (however accidental).⁴⁶ As with many of the Historia’s patterns, Brutus’s lineage is both laudable and transgressive.

Brutus enters further into the shadows of ambivalence with his exogamous marriage to Innogen, daughter of the Trojans’ Greek oppressor. Brutus refuses Greek colonial land, as well as Trojan and Greek history, but he takes a Greek wife on his hunt for new land. Paradoxically, the mixed marriage results from the Trojans’ refusal to remain immingled (“immixti”) with the Greeks (81). Subsequently, Brutus and Innogen’s descendants protect their ethnic integrity and police the boundary of their collective identity through endogamy. Ebraucus, for example, keeps his daughters within the extended ethnic family by sending them to marry Trojans in Italy (97). Later, the Britons refuse to marry with the Picts (143)—who nevertheless end up “cum Britonibus mixti” (mixed with Britons) (148). Thus although the lineage is founded on exogamy, it can only be maintained through endogamy.

Conanus states the endogamous principle overtly when he requests women from Britain to complete the colonization of Armorica:

Cumque sibi cessisset victoria, voluit commilitonibus suis conjuges dare, ut ex eis nascerentur heredes, qui terram illam perpetuo possiderent. Et ut nullam commixtionem cum Gallis facerent, decrevit ut ex Britannia insula mulieres venirent, quae ipsis maritarentur. (162)

[Once victory had been ceded to him, he wanted to give wives to his fellow warriors, so that heirs would be born to them who would possess the land in perpetuity. And so that they would not commingle with any of the Gauls, he decided that women should come from Britain to be married to them.]

By maintaining the boundary between the Britons and the native Gauls, Conanus envisions a stable possession of land. Like the caves that harbored the giants, the endogamous marriages promise to contain the difference between the Britons and the natives. But the threat of illicit sexual mingling remains, as did the giants—and here there is no definitive solution analogous to the wrestling match. Even more troubling, the seventy-one thousand women sent from Britain never reach Armorica: a storm destroys the ships, and those who do not drown are killed or enslaved on the shores of Germany. Conanus’s statement of the endogamous imperative, then, is followed immediately by the silenced suggestion that the Britons must have married Armorican women (carefully preserved from the massacre of the men). Commixti, the Armorican Britons embody a genealogical rupture that no Briton can mention. The invisible encounter of Briton men and Armorican women hides the sexual heritage of colonial ambivalence toward the female native. The Armorican Britons’ secret genealogical history threatens their bond with the Insular Britons, as Cadwallo demonstrates when he gives Salomon a lengthy genealogical lesson in order to convince him to help his Insular relatives (293). Cadwallo’s genealogical text overlooks all women, establishing a purely Briton agnatic line in defense of ethnic purity.

The danger of colonial sexual compromise invades Brittany during Arthur’s reign when a giant abducts the duke’s niece Helen and her nurse (255–57). The giant tries to rape Helen, but she dies of fright at the very thought; instead, he violates the old nurse. The substitution ensures that there will be no offspring of native aggression. The giant’s sexual desire for the women represents the menace of heterosexual rape to genealogical integrity, and thus to expansionist settlement. When men try to rescue Helen and her nurse, the giant captures and eats them. His cannibalism enacts the native’s power to subsume colonizing difference.⁴⁷ Cannibalism and rape both force monstrous intimacies; both invade the bodily integrity of difference. Only the valiant Arthur can put an end to this terrifying scene of colonial breakdown. Arthur’s victory leads him to the same joy as Corineus, for the mutilated giant-body inspires his laughter (“in risum”). Arthur’s victory over resemblance is even greater than Corineus’s because he uses a sword (sign of his civilized difference) instead of his hands. As he attacks, kills, and then repeatedly stabs the giant with his steel phallus, he enacts a metaphoric passage from conquest as heterosexual rape to a homoerotics of colonial desire. Indeed, Sara Suleri has argued that colonial rape metaphors derive from an avoidance of colonial homoeroticism (17–23). Arthur in fact pursues the homoerotic subtext by immediately narrating his encounter with the giant Ritho (257). Ritho resembles Arthur in that he wears a royal coat, but its material—the beards of the men he has conquered—declares his difference. When Ritho demanded Arthur’s beard to complete his colonial fetish, Arthur refused, and they met in battle: the victor would win the coat and the other man’s beard. Geoffrey does not specify whether they wrestled or dueled, but when Arthur takes on the coat made of human beards, he looks troublingly like the native cannibal. The coat itself represents the portability of resemblance, whose transference contaminates the difference between men and giants.

The monstrous ambivalence embodied in native giants takes a tamer, but no less lethal, form in Geoffrey’s exposition of the Britons’ Roman relatives. As both kin and foreigner, the Romans present a special problem in the interpretation of endogamy and territorial possession. Upon sight of the island from across the Channel, Caesar makes a possession speech that effaces apparent ethnic difference and declares unity through shared Trojan roots (“ex Trojana gente processimus”) (126). Caesar goes on to summarize the Britons and Romans’ common history (the beginning of the Historia itself) and to claim tribute from the Britons because they are inferior. Caesar’s reasoning disinherits the Britons by invalidating their ethnic difference, that is, the genealogical and territorial boundaries of their identity. Indeed, the Britons’ claim to possess their patria depends on a denial of any pater before Brutus. Caesar instantly remembers a more distant past and refers to Priam (“antiquam nobilitatem patris nostri Priami”); Cassibellanus counters with a rival father, Aeneas (126). The Roman wars are thus fought between cousins over a conflicting vision of genealogical difference. These fundamentally fratricidal conflicts demonstrate a genealogical doubling that both forms and deforms the boundary of group identity.

Subsequent marriages to Romans turn on endogamous interpretations of the common genealogy (most skillfully illustrated by Caradocus [155–59]), while rebellions against Roman domination turn on exogamous interpretations of these same marriages. The risk of these unions surfaces when Arviragus and Claudius build Gloucester on the banks of the Severn to commemorate Arviragus’s marriage to Genvissa (140): the city’s liminal position joins Kambria and Loegria, just as the marriage joins Britain and Rome—but at the site of Habren’s death, a foreigner who divided realms. The divisive potential of Roman matrimony is clear in the conflict between Geta (son of the Roman Severus and a Roman mother) and Bassianus (Severus’s son by a Briton woman): although the Britons initially support Bassianus on account of his mother, after he wins the kingdom they reject him as a Roman (147). Once the lineages mingle in a post-colonial society, any individual can be identified with any group.

The genealogical sign of the Britons’ downfall is Vortigern’s marriage to Hengist’s daughter Ronwen, the first (recognized) exogamous marriage since Brutus and Innogen. The Saxons, in a typical move of predatory kinship, eagerly marry into a new domain. The marriage explicitly provides for the colonization of Briton land by the Saxons, as Vortigern disinherits a Briton in order to give Hengist land in exchange for the girl (179). The marriage not only damages the unity of the ethnic group, it transgresses the boundary of religious difference: the Saxons are not only foreigners (“alienigenis”) but Pagans (“pagani”). Indeed, Geoffrey portrays Vortigern’s desire for Ronwen as the work of Satan (179): unlike ethnic difference, genealogical reasoning cannot efface religious identity. Initially, the threat posed by the Saxons is in fact more religious than ethnic, as their presence threatens to blur this essential boundary: through intermarriage, it becomes impossible to distinguish Pagans from Christians (180–81). The mixing of blood and religion distills the boundaries of Briton identity, and facilitates Saxon colonization as miscegenation. Aurelius’s subsequent efforts to counteract Saxon settlement retrace the boundaries of blood and faith: Geoffrey identifies the combatants as Christian Britons and Pagan Saxons (207).

The Britons ultimately value their ethnic solidarity higher than their Christian identity and refuse to help with the Saxons’ conversion: they assert that they have no interest in the Saxons’ religion and as much in common with the Angles as with dogs (284). Christianity, however, mediates the Britons’ restoration to Britain, for an angelic voice informs Cadwallader that they will return when their relics do (they have been removed because of the Pagan invasions) (301–2). The relics carry the memory of historical dominion; they are the fragmentary signs of divinely sanctioned unity. Through this spiritual manipulation of scale, the Britons are promised a complete reterritorialization and a restoration of all proper boundaries.

The Britons, then, are made strong through endogamy and destroyed through exogamy. Contact with others, whether cousins from Rome or Pagans from Germany, always threatens peace and stability. The most dangerous figures of ethnic conflict are bicultural and bilingual: Hamo (brought up among Britons in Rome) nearly defeats the Britons by using their language (and armor) to infiltrate their army (138–39); likewise, a Saxon knowledgeable in Briton culture uses his bilingualism as a weapon against Aurelius (216). These bicultural aggressors perform the conquest of language implicit in Geoffrey’s own project. Geoffrey’s claim to translate casts him as a bilingual insurgent, colonizing the Briton past for the future. At the same time, he authenticates the witness of the colonized source: while other Trojan histories derive from Greek sources and thus present an incommensurable textual gap,⁴⁸ Geoffrey claims to translate a book with a direct linguistic link to remote Trojan origins. Since only the Historia can identify the historical moment when the Trojan language became Briton (90–91), Geoffrey alone masters the vicissitudes of Insular translation.

Within the Historia, Geoffrey portrays Gildas and Alfred as figures for his own declared translation practice. They first appear as translators of the Molmutine Laws, Gildas taking them from Briton to Latin and Alfred from Latin to English (113); Geoffrey later represents Alfred as the translator of Marcia’s Laws (“Merchenelage”) (120). Gildas’s text turns from the conquered vernacular (Briton) to imperial Latin, which resembles Geoffrey’s ostensible production of a Latin text from a Briton source. Alfred, for his part, ratifies English conquest by twice taking Briton laws into his own language, recalling Geoffrey’s invitations to Robert and Waleran in the dedications. In both instances, Geoffrey’s representation of translation is strategically ideological, since neither the laws nor their translations seem to have existed.⁴⁹ Geoffrey thus creates both Gildas and Alfred as figures of the conquering translator. Geoffrey himself combines their ostensible practices of transferal: he turns Bede’s villainous Britons into heroic defenders of Christianity and legitimate sovereignty, Gildas’s depictions of Briton failures into episodes of triumph, and Roman monuments into Briton edifices.⁵⁰ Through these kinds of inversions and negations, Geoffrey conquers his Latin sources for the Britons’ greater glory. In these historiographic conquests, the history of conquerors serves the conquered.

Throughout the Historia, Geoffrey uses language to take possession of historical territory. At several key moments when the Britons are losing ground historically, Geoffrey reasserts their sovereignty historiographically by reminding readers of Briton place-names. Just as the island reaches its greatest period of Romanization under Constantine, for example, Geoffrey locates the Roman general Trahern in a Briton landscape by having him land near the city “called Kaerperis in Briton”; Octavius marches to meet him at the camp “called Maisuria in Briton” (153). By calling the Briton names to narrative action, Geoffrey presages the return of Briton sovereignty. Geoffrey also avoids referring to the later names of these places, suggesting enduring Briton ownership. Likewise, as the power of the Saxons is about to ascend with the death of Vortimer, Geoffrey describes his burial “in urbe Trinovantum” (182). In the midst of the growing Saxon threat, Geoffrey reminds readers of the city’s Trojan origin, even though he has already referred to it as London.

Elsewhere, Geoffrey uses language to witness the passing of Briton sovereignty. He signals the Saxons’ impending colonization, for example, in Saxon speech. At the feast celebrating the completion of the Castle of the Thong, Ronwen toasts Vortigern in Saxon; he burns for her immediately (“incaluit”) (just as Corineus burned, somewhat less aggressively, for Goemagog [“aestuabat”]). Following his interpreter’s instructions, Vortigern gives the appropriate reply in Saxon; after Ronwen drinks, Vortigern kisses her and drinks himself. As guests of the royal host, the Saxons should follow Vortigern’s custom, yet Vortigern immediately mimics theirs. Born of his desire for the foreign woman, Vortigern’s mimicry makes him a partial colonial subject, and creates discursively the Saxons’ colonial power: although he is king, he plays the role of the colonized native (which he is, from Hengist’s perspective). Like Corineus and Arthur with the giants, Vortigern’s imitation creates the “classificatory confusion” typical of colonial “mimic men.”⁵¹ Vortigern, however, illustrates the fatal side of this play, where the confusion of power differences overpowers the powerful. Whereas Corineus and Arthur turn the menace of near-resemblance against the natives, Vortigern’s desire to resemble the Saxons positions him on the dominated side of power. As the bearers of desirable culture, Ronwen and Hengist take power from Vortigern’s attraction. When Geoffrey reports that Vortigern’s mimicry originated an enduring tradition for toasts (178–79), he views the Saxon arrival in the double-time of retrospection and prospection: the tradition endures because the Saxons conquered the Britons. Geoffrey subsequently confirms Saxon success when he says that Constantine was buried at a place “called Stonehenge in the language of the Angles” (280), and refers to Guallias instead of Kambria before the Britons have in fact lost their name and dominion (282).

Etymologies confront directly the coercive origins of linguistic change. In Trinovantum’s prospective etymology, for example, Geoffrey signals the Normans’ conquest of the English by referring to the new name Lundres given by foreigners (“alienigenis”) (125). This kind of translation crosses the historiographical boundary of the Historia itself, and disturbs history with multiple chronologies. Elsewhere, etymological uncertainty witnesses the potentially permanent loss of origin. Gloucester, for example, is either named after the Roman Claudius or his son Glouis (140): the cultural identification remains the same, but the true origin has been forgotten. Likewise, Geoffrey states that Altera Britannia was formerly called Armorica or Letavia (168). Here, Geoffrey cannot even explain the difference between the possible origins: the two proper names simply mark a forgotten past (reminiscent of Albion and Britannia). These linguistic disruptions replicate the occasional genealogical disruptions that disturb Geoffrey’s narration of royal succession.

The most dramatic case of etymological equivocation concerns the Britons themselves. Whereas their translation from Trojan to Briton occurs in linear, patronymic fashion, their translation from Briton to Welsh is fraught with uncertainty: “Barbarie etiam irrepente, jam non vocabantur Britones, sed Guallenses, vocabulum sive a Guallone, duce eorum, sive a Gualaes regina, sive a barbarie trahentes” (As the barbarians grew in strength, they were no longer Britons but Welsh, a word deriving either from Wallo, a duke of theirs, or from Queen Walas, or from barbarian) (303). If named after their duke, the Welsh originate just like the Britons. If named after their queen, they commemorate the fusion of genealogy and territory that connects women to the land. The final option, however, represents the colonial judgment of their conquerors (barbarians themselves at the beginning of the sentence): barbarie only refers to Guallenses through a silent translation from the English wylisc, meaning foreign.⁵² The shadow presence of English in Geoffrey’s already equivocal etymology renders an (at least) triple ambivalence toward genealogy and conquest: Geoffrey cannot decide between the queen and the duke (matrilineal and patrilineal identity), between Welsh self-identification and outside judgment, or between the conquered English and conquering Normans. The sentence itself performs the shifting status of barbarian in the twelfth century, from foreigner at the beginning to degraded culture by the end.⁵³ With this ethnic etymology, Geoffrey concludes the Historia on the edge between colonial and post-colonial identities.

All of the representations of identity I have discussed so far implicate time and the processes of history per se. Topography, genealogy, and etymology all measure the time of conquest and colonization. Ingledew has already characterized the Historia as “a vast act of spatial as well as temporal colonization” (687), and Otter has compared Geoffrey’s imperial relation to the past to Brutus’s imperial relation to the island (81–83). Yet, as R. R. Davies points out, Geoffrey’s historiographic victory was hollow in that he reclaimed the distant past while giving up more recent history to the English.⁵⁴ Geoffrey’s historiographic mode is thus simultaneously nostalgic and prospective, caught in an ambivalent double time of past and future.

Geoffrey may value the preservation of a peaceful status quo, but he communicates this value through an aggressive historiographical expansion of Briton dominion. As R. William Leckie Jr. has demonstrated, Geoffrey appropriates over two hundred years of Anglo-Saxon history for the Britons, repositioning the passage of dominion from the fifth to the seventh or even the tenth century. For example, Bede represents Oswald as the first Saxon to unite the island (230), but Geoffrey limits his domain to the north (296) and attributes the first English crown to Aethelstan (303). This new temporal boundary creates historiographical inquietatione, whose troubling effects Leckie traces in the historiography of the later twelfth century.

Genealogical revision enables this historiographic colonization of time, and genealogical time provides the Historia’s basic temporal structure. Geoffrey, however, calculates time in several ways, undermining the genealogical mode. Moreover, even the genealogies do not accrete value smoothly. The result is a temporal order that witnesses a dissipation of value through the multiplication of reference. The seven periods of Insular unification highlight the Historia’s genealogical reasoning, as well as its limits. The first period of unification after Brutus represents an ideal regnal chronology: dominion passes regularly from father to son, and the duration of each reign can be measured in years. Thus the period of unity from Mempricius through Leir can be calcuated as exactly 215 years. One cannot, however, calculate the duration of the second period of unity: apart from Cunedagius’s 33 years, Geoffrey gives no duration for any of the reigns. Only the genealogical progression—the names themselves and their relations—provide a sense of continuity. The genealogy itself breaks twice when Geoffrey passes over in silence the parentage of both Sisillius and Gorboduc. Likewise, the fourth period of unity (from Belinus to Elidurus) cannot be measured, and the mysterious Guithelin disrupts the genealogy (120). The worst fragmentations of time and genealogy occur in the fifth period, when Geoffrey provides a long list of successive rulers without any mention of temporal or genealogical relationships (124–25). These discontinuous genealogies disrupt regnal time and cast shadows of illegitimacy over Briton dominion.

Geoffrey keeps time outside the regnal sequence through references to events beyond Britain’s shores and through annalistic dates. Synchronic references include allusions to events in Judea, Rome, and Greece. Most occur early in the narrative, anchoring the most shadowy periods of Briton history to recognized Old Testament and Roman events; they often follow conspicuously invented episodes.⁵⁵ These very synchronies, however, threaten to unravel Geoffrey’s linear chronology because they introduce tangential events that disrupt the boundary of a history defined by a single group and their dominion over a single place. Geoffrey must forcefully exclude contiguous Roman history, for example, to avoid “prolixity” and “diversion” from his purpose (118). Likewise, he consigns the Scots to another historiographical domain (143). The annalistic entries after Christ’s birth (Lucius’s death in 156, Arthur’s in 542, Cadwallader’s in 689) introduce a universal scale that invites further disruptive references to other events in these years and other years, irrespective of reign or realm. The keeping of historiographical time thus sustains and weakens Geoffrey’s conquest of the past. Temporal boundaries, like others, join differences as much as they separate them.

Geoffrey’s most dramatic temporal incursion is the insertion of Arthur’s lengthy reign between those of known historic kings, anchored by the annalistic terminus 542 A.D. From within this temporal border, Arthur’s reign iterates many aspects of his predecessors’ reigns, rendering him both typical and exemplary.⁵⁶ He thus crystallizes the Historia’s colonial ambivalence. He is born, for example, of Uther’s most irregular intercourse with Ygerna (an adulterous union disguised as marital relations by Merlin’s magic). His genealogy, moreover, encompasses the island’s doubles, descending as he does from Cornwall through his mother and Brittany through his father. Arthur’s body thus reunifies prior history, gathering the Britons’ temporally and spatially dispersed bloodlines. His own childless marriage to a Roman woman (237), however, forecloses the future of this idealized unification. As a barren couple, Arthur and Guenivere fail to enter into genealogical time. As if to compensate this lack, Arthur relies more on legal definitions of dominion than any other king.

At the beginning of his reign, Arthur receives the only official symbols of kingship mentioned in the Historia (“Insignibus itaque regiis initiatus”). He immediately proceeds against the Saxons: “Commonebat etiam id rectitudo, cum totius insulae monarchiam debuerat hereditario jure obtinere” (the righteousness [of his cause] encouraged him, for he should have obtained the monarchy of the whole island by lawful inheritance) (229). Rather than fulminating against Pagans, foreigners, or personal enemies, Arthur rationalizes the legal legitimacy of the attack. His right, rather than originating in territorial possession, leads to it. His second major encounter with the Saxons adds divine sanction to jurisprudence, as Arthur and the archbishop Dubricius both make speeches before the battle (232–33); royal and Christian reasoning fuse most powerfully in Arthur’s arms. The arming description (the only one in the Historia) introduces Arthur’s regalia and provides the first elements of the biography of the sword that will enforce Arthur’s imperial progress:

Ipse vero Arturus, lorica tanto rege digna indutus, auream galeam simulacro draconis insculptam capiti adaptat, humeris quoque suis clypeum vocabulo Pridwen, in quo imago sanctae Mariae Dei genetricis inpicta ipsam in memoriam ipsius saepissime revocabat. Accintus etiam Caliburno, gladio optimo et in insula Avallonis fabricato, lancea dexteram suam decorat, quae nomine Ron vocabatur: haec erat ardua lataque lancea, cladibus apta. (233)

[Arthur himself, dressed in a hauberk truly worthy of such a king, bore on his head a golden helmet sculpted in the form of a dragon, and on his shoulder the shield called Pridwen on which was depicted an image of Saint Mary Mother of God, which summoned her to his memory frequently. Girded with Caliburn, the greatest sword and made on the island Avalon, the lance whose name was called Ron adorned his right hand: this lance was hard and broad, apt for destruction.]

Each element obliquely engages boundary thematics and the legitimacy of Arthur’s cause. The sculpted helmet, for example, recalls the allegory of the dragonlike star that Merlin interpreted for Uther (217–19). Bearing this image on his head, Arthur supports the center of the realm spanned by the star’s vectors. The shield likewise encodes a relation to jurisdictional boundaries, as divine sanction literally defends Arthur by standing between him and his enemy. The sword itself points to a concrete spatialization of dominion through Avalon. An island within an island, Avalon represents a place of creation, where things are fabricato in the same way that Belinus’s gate, Cadwallo’s statue (299), and other important monuments are fabricated as symbolic border guards. Finally, the superlative lance (rendered in rhymed hexameter)⁵⁷ reminds the reader of the arms’ destructive purpose—to impose the irrevocable boundary between life and death. Together, Arthur’s regalia trace the bounds of the heroic body and merge with it, reinforcing the physical barrier between Arthur and the enemy’s sharp assaults (the body itself nearly disappears from the final lines).

Arthur’s portrait suggests genealogical legitimacy, represents dominion through allegory and topograpy, and foregrounds the role of force in the just formation of political boundaries. Arthur carries this legitimizing matrix into battle and succeeds gloriously with Caliburn. He sets out explicitly to restore the realm’s pristine dignity (“pristinam dignitatem”) in terms of the Britons’ inherited territorial rights (“paternojure”), which the Saxons have displaced (237). This prosecution of inheritance in legal terms represents a new mode of territorialization in the Historia, one that refers to law and memory before force. Through Arthur, Geoffrey thematizes the difference between de jure and de facto possession. This juridical monarchy represents the most abstracted, and most stable, mode of dominion—a mode partly communicated through the sword. Synecdochic double of Arthur, Caliburn signifies the imperial progress of a destroyed (and forgotten) empire.

Inspired by his own force, Arthur sets out on extensive imperial campaigns, subduing foreign kings and installing his own colonial governors (238–39). In this imperial progress, Frollo’s defeat at Paris represents in compressed form the spatial and cultural engagements of colonizing conquest. First, the Britons and Gauls do not meet as armies. Instead, Arthur and Frollo engage in a duel. The vast multiethnic composition of the empire is thus reduced to their individual bodies. The site of the duel, an island in the Seine River outside of Paris, also expresses the containment of conflict. Water bounds the space, isolating it yet also connecting it to the metropolitan capital and territories beyond. Through this manipulation of scale, Geoffrey constructs a spatial icon of Britain, colonized and colonizing space. Like Britain and Avalon, the Parisian island shapes colonial ambivalence.

Arthur fights and wins the duel with Caliburn in hand. This second appearance of the sword’s name constructs a narrative pair, joining the defensive maintenance of the Insular boundary to its offensive extension. The decisive stroke itself inscribes an indelible boundary between the two sides of Frollo’s head:

Manante igitur sanguine, cum Arturus loricam et clypeum rubere vidisset, ardentiori ira succensus est atque, erecto totis viribus Caliburno, impressit eum per galeam in caput Flollonis, quod in duas partes dissecuit. (241)

[Then when Arthur saw hauberk and shield turn red with the flowing blood, more hotly is his rage inflamed, and raising with all his strength Caliburn, he pressed it through the helmet into the head of Frollo, which he sliced into two parts.]

The blood presumably obscures the image of Mary, replacing her as Arthur’s inspiration. Cut off from the memory of the divine sanction that she represents, Arthur now acts autonomously as a warrior-hero of superlative strength. His success indicates that there is more than one kind of legitimate conquest—defense of the demesne and augmentation of its lands. Since Geoffrey sites this resolution in an insular space, it serves as an allegory of the colonization and defense of Britain itself.

This scaled use of space, suggesting allegory, opens the duel to typological interpretation. The site at Paris, conjoined with the naming of the sword, focuses further attention on this last of many conquests as paradigmatic (indeed, Arthur has conquered many lands but this is the first time since the Saxon victory that Geoffrey mentions Caliburn). Typology, like so many colonial issues in the Historia, engenders ambivalence because it invites conflicting interpretations. For Geoffrey’s Norman patrons, for example, the conquest of Paris might represent the ultimate colonial fantasy; Arthur’s installation of Bedver and Kai as lords of Normandy and Anjou certainly supports the image of a Norman-Angevin alliance. Along similar lines, J. S. P. Tatlock and more recently Stephen Knight cast Arthur as a figure for William the Conqueror, and Paris as a figure of Britain.⁵⁸ At the same time, however, the Briton conquest of anywhere represents the contemporary resurgence of Welsh power in England. Indeed, Bedver and Kai are two of the most recognizably Celtic names of Arthur’s entourage:⁵⁹ their lordship of Normandy and Anjou can represent a counteroccupation of the lands associated with recent Insular conquest. Arthur’s defeat of Frollo, then, cannot incite Anglo-Norman fantasies without also provoking nightmares.

Arthur’s celebration of victory back in Britain performs symbolically his unification of Insular dominion and successful colonization of Europe. The names of the guests outline the empire’s geography, while the procession for the crown wearing conjoins the Insular realm to the sword’s juridical force: “Quatuor autem reges, Albaniae videlicet atque Cornubiae, Demetiae et Venedotiae, quorum jus id fuerat, quatuor aureos gladios ferentes, ante illum praeibant” (Four kings, of Albany, Cornwall, Demetia, and Venedotia, as was their right, processed before him [Arthur] carrying four golden swords) (245). The kings embody four insular regions, and their swords the authority that patrols their boundaries. The need for patrol surfaces abruptly with the arrival of messengers bearing a letter from Arthur’s imperial rival, Lucius of Rome. Lucius complains about the new boundary that Arthur drew when he killed Frollo. The letter refers to injury and injustice (“injuriam . . . Romae,” “injustis actibus”) and seeks retribution before the Roman senate; if Arthur refuses court, Lucius promises to prosecute his complaint with the sword (“gladiis”) (248). In this case, adjudication by the sword will signal the failure of jurisprudence. Lucius and Arthur thus deploy legal reasoning, whereas Caesar and Cassibellanus argued a similar dispute through genealogy. Since the Historia grounds genealogy in territory, the difference once again abstracts Arthur from the landscape.

Arthur of course will not acquiesce to Lucius’s jurisdiction, just as Arviragus refused Cassibellanus’s and invited the Romans to Britain in the first place. Arthur characterizes the message as an aggressive disturbance (“inquietudinem Lucii”) and proceeds to deconstruct its legal legitimacy. He refers several times to the case’s irrationality (“irrationabili cause”), arguing that the claim has no justice (“jure”) because the Britons were weakened by civil discord when the Romans first came. Moreover, they took the island by force: no possession taken by violence is just (249). Here, in Arthur’s mouth, Geoffrey invalidates force as a legal basis of sovereignty, implying a firm distinction between de jure and de facto possession. Geoffrey sustains Arthur’s ruling at the battle’s conclusion in an apostrophe, referring to the unjust disturbance (“injustis inquietationibus”) and the unjust demand for tribute (“tributum quod ab ipsis injuste exigebatur”) (273). The correspondence in judgment suggests that Arthur’s pronouncement corresponds closely to Geoffrey’s purposes: to denounce the legitimacy of political boundaries formed with the sword.

Nevertheless, Geoffrey undermines the clarity of Arthur’s initial theory when Arthur goes on to assert that the illegitimate Roman claim against him justifies an illegitimate claim against Rome. Arthur concludes that Lucius should in fact pay tribute to Britain because Britons previously conquered Rome (249). Here, Arthur reverses the logic of de jure and de facto, blurring the distinction between ratio and irratio. Arthur posits the illegitimacy of violent conquest while pursuing a violent solution that protects his own interests. The argument expresses clearly the ideological paradox of the Historia and medieval aristocratic culture in general: inquietatione legitimately enlarges one’s own rights, but others should remain quiet. Hoel’s reply sustains the logic of justified reversal: he asserts that those who steal deserve to be stolen from (250). What’s more, Hoel begins his speech by praising Arthur’s “Tullianian fluidity” (“tua deliberatio Tulliano liquore lite”) (250), an allusion that appropriates the rhetorical prowess of the Roman Marcus Tullianus Cicero for the defense of the Briton patria.⁶⁰ The troubling consequences of founding liberation on the oppressor’s rhetoric surface when Hoel goes on to cite the prophecy that three Britons would rule Rome, noting that Arthur will be the third: since Arthur himself has just named three Roman emperors from Britain (Belinus, Constantine, and Maximianus), the prophecy seems to condemn rather than fortify Arthur’s claim. Auguselus encourages us to forget this paradox by speaking rapturously of war’s “sweet wounds.” From these legal theories, genealogical principles, suspicious prophecies, and aesthetic pleasures, the war over who has greater right (“maius jus”) begins.

Once the Britons and the Romans meet in full-scale battle, Arthur’s forces do not achieve immediate success. As Arthur seeks to encourage his men to more effective performance, Geoffrey joins action to symbol and rhetoric:

Ipse etenim, audita suorum strage, quae paulo ante eisdem dabatur, cum legione irruerat et, abstracto Caliburno, gladio optimo, celsa voce atque verbis commilitones suos inanimabat, inquiens: “Quid facitis, viri? Utquid muliebres permittitis illaesos abire? Ne abscedat ullus vivus!” (272)

[Having heard a little before of the slaughter being made of his [men] by [the Romans], he attacked with his division and, drawing Caliburn the greatest sword, raising his voice, with these words he inspired his comrades, crying out: “What are you doing, men? Are you letting these women leave? Don’t let any leave alive!”]

As always, the sword operates in the ablative case, as the means by which Arthur accomplishes victory. “Abstracto caliburno gladio optimo” in fact repeats exactly the description of Arthur’s charge against the Saxon Cheldric. Against Lucius, however, Arthur draws the sword to verbally incite others to military prowess. Displaying his sword alongside his speech, Arthur admonishes the men to use their own swords better. The gesture implies both encouragement and coercion, and recalls Brutus’s persuasive speech to Anacletus.

Arthur continues his speech in a highly structured rhetorical pattern. Each of the next three sentences begins with the imperative to remember (“mementote”): first their physical strength (“dextrarum vestrarum”), then their ancestors (“avorum vestrorum”), and finally their own freedom (“libertatis vestrae”). Each element forms part of a complete argument of justified action: they have strength and historical precedent on their side, and they fight to defend themselves. Following these rhythmic appeals to memory, Arthur ends by repeating his opening question and command in reverse order (272). Framed by the interrogative, Arthur’s speech leaves the answer to performance: it conjoins memory (the critical faculty of history) to Caliburn and the Britons’ own lethal weapons. Arthur himself enforces history in battle, as “Caliburnus” compels the Romans to vomit their souls along with their blood (“cogeret eos animas eructare cum sanguine”) (272). In this last appearance, Geoffrey makes the sword the agent rather than the subject of action for the first time. It governs and executes an absolutely effective action. In the end, Caliburnus performs the sword’s effective autonomy, that is, its direct role in securing the hero’s success and its ability to answer fully the rhetoric of imperial counterconquest. It strikes here as the sign of its own legitimate action.

Arthur achieves his military victory over Rome with Caliburn in hand, completing a trio of battles grouped by the name of the sword. With this third naming, Caliburn emerges as a sign of imperial success: its presence traces the path of Arthur’s expanding empire from Britain through Gaul to Rome. Yet despite the justification of Arthur’s cause against Rome and the legitimacy of his Insular sovereignty, he loses both when Mordred steals his island and his wife. Like Brennius, Arthur loses “regnum et sponsa”—after rather than before gaining the right to Rome (274–75). Geoffrey implies that the transgression is sexual as well as territorial by noting that Guenivere has violated the law of her first marriage (“violato jure priorum nuptiarum”) and committed adultery (“copulatam”) (274). Once again, however, Geoffrey passes over irregular intercourse in silence, this time explicitly: “Ne hoc quidem, consul auguste, Galfridus Monemutensis tacebit” (About this, august lord, Geoffrey of Monmouth says nothing) (274–75). At the line of transgression, Geoffrey names himself as source. He withholds historical knowledge from his patron, refusing to remember the details of sexual compromise. Moreover, as if to protect subsequent narrative from contamination, he reminds readers that what follows comes both from the Briton source and the learned Walter of Oxford (275). Irregular intercourse thus threatens not only political power and genealogical reproduction, but the processes of historiography itself.

As Arthur fights to recover his Insular jurisdiction for the second time, he faces both Pagan Saxons and a relative. This army of indigenous and foreign usurpers ultimately defeats Arthur, but Mordred himself is also defeated: such is the danger of legislating by the sword. In the course of several battles, Arthur’s sword never appears by name: its performance is limited to imperial success. Caliburn’s absence at the moment of defeat indicates not just the absence of success, but of memory. Forgetting the landed basis of his authority, Arthur left his inheritance open to attack. The defeat demonstrates the fragility of territorial control and conquered gains. Ultimately, the Historia’s narrative structure appeals to moderation and quiet: expanding the bounds of authority increases the value of the family, but more than modest expansion is impossible. Arthur himself ends in Avalon, the land of Caliburn’s origin. This regression negates the intervening imperial progress, circumventing both its past and future with an appeal to an insular border beyond time.

The sword’s presence in the Historia thus comments on the ideology of territorial expansion. The commentary continues with each new redaction and translation, for the Historia achieved its own form of cultural imperialism when it became the focus of ideological expression for subsequent historians. Because the Historia controls the shape of Briton history and the pattern of the sword’s presence, its literary effect mirrors the desired effect of military conquest; the Historia becomes a prescriptive rather than descriptive form of history. In the process, as Lee Patterson has also observed, Geoffrey transmits the instability of his own ambivalent vision (202). Yet as the Historia amply demonstrates, conquest incites resistance as the dispossessed seek to reappropriate their territory: Geoffrey’s colonizing historiography also invites counterconquest.⁶¹ In the Historia’s reception, judgments of cultures past and present can be read through overt apostrophe as well as in the very detailed ways in which the text is “correcta et abbreuiata.”⁶² The “correction and abbreviation” of landscape, genealogy, etymology, and chronology provide the most cogent examples of how border cultures penetrate the languages of history. In each case, Arthur serves as a boundary figure, and the narrative of his reign as a mechanism for interrogating cultural bounds.