VIII - Remembering Brutus: Aaron Thompson's British History of 1718

Summary

In 1842, The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth appeared in the series The Monkish Historians of Great Britain. Already published were Bede's Ecclesiastical History, a volume of Gildas's and Nennius's Histories and the Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, along with Richard of Cirencester's description of Britain. Further works of Bede, histories by William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh, the Saxon Chronicles and Asser's Life of Alfred were all in press. The series page announced that several of the volumes were appearing ‘in an English dress’ for the first time, but this particular book was a revised edition, by the prolific editor and translator J. A. Giles (1808–1884), of Aaron Thompson's 1718 English translation of Geoffrey's Historia regum Britannie. Giles makes it clear in his own preface that both Geoffrey and his first translator should be treated with considerable suspicion. Of Geoffrey, he writes, ‘We do not insert the BRITISH HISTORY in our series of Early English Records as a work containing an authentic narrative, nor do we wish to compare Geoffrey of Monmouth with Bede in point of veracity’. Describing Thompson's preface to the 1718 translation, Giles is blunt with respect to the former's credulity: ‘Prefixed to the work is a long introduction in which the translator endeavours to defend his author from the charge of having inserted the narrative which he professes to have translated from the Old British Tongue. It is now, of course, universally admitted that the whole series of British Kings, from Brutus downwards, is a tissue of fables’.