Conclusions

Summary

Historia Brittonum, the Life of King Alfred, and Armes Prydein are all, in their own ways, texts about gentes. Historia Brittonum might justifiably be catalogued under the genre of origo gentis, beginning as it does with the origins of the Britons. But this origin legend does not come to an end with the arrival of the Britons in Britain; their subsequent interaction with other gentes shapes their contemporary situation. It is the future that concerns the poet of Armes Prydein, but a future that is only explicable with reference to a particular version of the past. This was the past as related in Historia Brittonum, and it was clearly to the poet's liking. Here too the inhabitants of Britain are divided into gentes, the two juxtaposed gentes of most importance being the Britons and the English. To all intents and purposes, Asser's interest lies not in gentes and their origins but in a single individual. Nevertheless, the resulting text is also much more than a biography; Asser reimagines the political landscape of Britain and the identities of its occupants.

Common across all three texts is the ordering of the world into gentes, defined by a variety of ‘strategies of distinction’, including names, language, and origin legends. None of this is unusual. Many early medieval writers turned their attention to the construction of ethnic identities, and in some ways these texts simply blend into the crowd. The origin legend furnished for the Britons in Historia Brittonum, discussed in Chapter 3, is an illustrative example. Of the elements found in some combination in most origin legends of western Christian peoples in the middle ages (descent from Mannus/Alannus; descent from Japheth son of Noah; Trojan origins), Historia Brittonum includes all three. Similarly, in seeking the origins of the Britons in Troy, Nennius embarked along a well-trodden path, following in the footsteps of the compilers of the Fredegar Chronicle and the Liber historiae Francorum.

This is not to say that there was nothing original about the strategies of distinction used in these texts. Sticking with the origin legend in Historia Brittonum, the tale is not simply a patchwork of common motifs: it has been tailored to construct a specific identity for the Britons.