Chapter IV - Popularisation in the Anglo-Latin Histories and the English Brut Tradition

Summary

DURING THE MIDDLE AGES, new legendary Helenas had been constructed in Francia and Wales with two biographical elements in common: her alleged royal origins and local birth. Her actual status as Augusta in later life and the documented or alleged associations between members of her family and these regions must have made narrative developments like these credible. Within this context of legendary accretion, she was successfully appropriated by both Altmann and the Welsh genealogists and refashioned to reflect local tastes and individual rhetorical needs within both the hagiographical and historiographical traditions. This fluid regional association continued to characterise the depiction of Helena throughout the early Middle Ages, though one decisive connection was to be wrought which firmly situated her in Britain: her supposed kinship with the legendary King Cole of Colchester.

Helena at Colchester

At about the same time that the tenth-century Welsh genealogies were claiming Helena as an ancestor of one of the nation's royal lines, another initially unrelated change occurred which was to have a lasting effect on the British Helena legend: the town of Cair Colun (or Colne-cester, named after the River Colne, perhaps from the Roman term colonia) in Essex came to be known as Colchester. Although the change probably exemplifies the common linguistic development of the simplification of consonant clusters (-lnch- to -lch-) in the middle of a word, by the early twelfth century a new folk etymology had been constructed around this name, based on the belief that it denoted ‘fortress of Cole’.