that gains for them a hearing with Aldroenus’ King of Brittany, implying that their fortunes are tarnished but not bankrupt. An army of the most illustrious Britons conquer Amorica for Maximianus and Coranus Meriadorus, settling there and leaving their lower-born kinspeople in Britain. Yet it is through the politicking of what Brynley Roberts calls the “listless, low-born, and timid remnant” (x) left behind that the dynasty destined to produce Arthur—the glorious king and narrative center of Geoffrey’s work—returns to the island. Geoffrey’s representation of the conquest of Brittany implies a ruthlessness (rather than a forthright glory) of the invading Maximianus.40 Those left behind by Maximianus, moreover, testify to the losses this conquest wrought for his own kin, counting themselves “poverty-stricken” since “Maximianus despoiled [the] island of its soldiers.” And when Aldroenus, King of Brittany, refuses to accept the crown of Britain—an episode frequently cited as prime evidence of Geoffrey’s Breton, rather than Welsh, loyalties—he nonetheless keeps the crown in the family, offering his brother Constantine in his place, describing an island in “peace and tranquillity” as the most “fertile country in existence” (vi, 5). Finally Arthur, the central figure in Geoffrey’s monument to British kings, is descended from both insular and continental ancestors.
According to Monmouth’s story the Britons are a doubled people, occupying two places at once: they remain in the western reaches of the island, but have also migrated to the continent. The cultural migrations of the Britons offer a long history of continental and insular interaction. Geoffrey’s tale of the conquest of Amorica is, moreover, a direct inversion of Norman Conquest of the island of Britain; Norman migration from continent to island mirrors a previous, and British, migration from island to continent. In light of Geoffrey’s story of British conquest throughout all of Gaul, Norman invasion of the island of Britain amounts not to a new conquest so much as a recurrence: Britons left the island, conquering the continent; the Normans leave the continent, conquering the island. This conjunction of interactions implies geographic settlement is fluid; cultural exchange between continent and island has a long, and specifically British, history.
From an Anglo-Norman point of view, this double geography of Britain (as a number of scholars have suggested) marks Briton and Norman as distinct yet related cultures. Insular Britons, by virtue of their affiliation with this continental kin, deserve respect. Yet, as readers repeatedly point out, the Welsh Britons have none of the glory of the Normans, appearing debased and lost by the end of Geoffrey’s story. Their history is strikingly glorious, but their present is weak and unsteady. Despite such weakness, it is the Britons in Wales who offer hope for a future recovery: “Living precariously in Wales, in the remote recesses of the wood” Welsh Britons look for “the appointed moment” when “the British people would occupy the island again” (282–83; xxi, 17, 18). In the context of the geographic doubleness of British rule, Geoffrey’s text thus ends with the implication—the textual status of which will be clearer in a moment—that the promised British recovery might be displaced through Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman politics of Geoffrey’s history lies with the very important implication that the Normans can rightly inherit from the imperial Britons, a race on a par with the Romans who, “were able to conquer the island” (272; xii, 5). By implication—but only by implication—Norman presence on the island represents a British future, while the (Welsh) Britons figure its past. The Normans can, by learning and respecting the history of the isle of Britain, begin to weave their glory with the glory of the land they rule and with the British king Arthur. This history provides a way for a Norman aristocratic audience to capture the richness of a mythic Welsh past while still remaining the conquerors of those whose glorious history they wish to imagine as their own.
If historians since Geoffrey have been as happy to see his implication as the Normans themselves must have been, they have not considered the import of its status as an insinuation rather than a forthright claim. Elsewhere Monmouth emphasizes ambiguity as an important factor both for his own writing and for Merlin’s activity: in his self-conscious distancing from his text’s pleasures; in the ambiguity of the Merlin Prophecies; in the diversity of his dedications. In fact Geoffrey himself repeatedly notes that the ambiguity of Merlin’s prophecies were the source of Merlin’s popularity. All were “filled with amazement by the equivocal [ambiguitate] meaning of [Merlin’s] words” (Thorpe 170). “Ambiguitate” glossed as “inclined to both sides; hybrid” and “wavering, hesitating, uncertain, doubtful, obscure.” The OED notes the early English meanings taken from Medieval Latin pertain to the second of these connotations, “a wavering of opinion, hesitation, doubt, uncertainty as to one’s course.” The diversity of manuscript redactions points further to “a wavering of opinion” in the contradictory interests of Geoffrey’s multiple and diverse dedicatees. But it also points far beyond Anglo-Norman partisan concerns. The politics of “ambiguitate” explain the Historia’s diverse and complicated reception. Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s text will be important to Welsh nationalist politics at various times throughout the Middle Ages. In that context it is unsurprising that some redactions of Geoffrey’s text identify (in prophecies known as the “Breton Hope”) British recovery of the totius insulae with Welsh claims to the island kingdom while others call such interpretations explicitly into question. The Bern and Harlech manuscripts of the Historia, for example, end with a disclaimer that denies any hope for a future Welsh rule: “The Welsh, once they had degenerated from the noble state enjoyed by the Britons, never afterwards recovered the overlordship of the island” (Thorpe 284).
This disclaimer explicitly contests Welsh “oppositional texts” and precludes Welsh hopes that they are the Britons who will return to rule the land. Disclaimers like this one, combined with Geoffrey’s equivocation, helped consolidate the power of Geoffrey’s patrons. Yet Geoffrey’s “ambiguitate” also means that his text will prove useful to Welsh resisters of Anglo-Norman conquest. J. S. P. Tatlock notes the early popularity of the Historia in Wales, a fact corroborated by Brynley Roberts’s important account of the significance of the Brut ϒ Brenhinedd (the earliest Middle Welsh translation of Geoffrey’s text) for Welsh intellectuals in the twelfth century and beyond when it became “a potent element in Welsh national consciousness until the end of the eighteenth century” (“Historia and Brut ϒ Brenhinedd,” 113).41 The ambiguity of Geoffrey’s Historia—read especially in the final ambiguous implication of British return—meant that subversive “oppositional” Welsh material could gain influence even at court.
Such is a powerful (and effective) display of creative makyng in the face of constraint. By some accounts Geoffrey’s history gained political prestige for the Welsh Britons into the next generation of Anglo-Norman affairs, a time when the direct conquest of Wales seemed a likely corollary of a Norman colonizing program. According to Welsh historian R. R. Davies, Wales was initially “peripheral” to Norman conquerors concerned with the security of their position in England and Normandy. Yet during the late eleventh and into the twelfth century (and in partial response to Welsh aid to Saxon dissidents) the conquerors turned their attentions westward. A struggle for supremacy over Wales ensued with the map of Norman control of Welsh regions constantly changing. During the period of Geoffrey’s initial popularity, Norman control of the area had weakened enough that, according to Welsh chroniclers of the 1160s, “all the Welsh united to throw off the rule of the French” conquerors who desired “to carry into bondage and to destroy all the Britons” (Brut y Tywysogyon, 1165, 1167, as cited by Davies, Conquest 52–53). Henry II’s 1165 campaign to crush Welsh resistance proved a failure; that fact apparently inspired a change in Henry’s policy. By 1171, again according to Davies, Henry’s policies “toward native Welsh princes … had changed radically” and “no English king would again invade Wales for almost forty years” (53–54). If Henry II’s failed military campaign inspired in him a desire to change his policy toward Wales, such a desire could find an ideological justification in Geoffrey’s book. Furthermore, there is evidence that Henry was well acquainted with Geoffrey’s text: interested in literature and history himself, Henry II had been educated at the Bristol residence of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chief patron.42 LaƷamon’s Middle English Brut, a verse rendering of Wace’s
