The ghosts of Britain future: The trauma of 1066 in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'History of the Kings of Britain'

This dissertation explores the uses of ethnic identity in a medieval pseudo-history of the ancient Britons, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (completed ca. 1138). Modern scholarship, under the influences of nationalist and racist discourses, has long seen in it primarily a mendacious and ethnically partisan text meant to boost the prestige of the Welsh, Cornish, or Bretons. However, this reading does not account fully for the contemporary cultural work that ethnic identity performed in the History. More recent interpretations focus on the ideological value of the King Arthur legend, which forms the dramatic core of the text. However, these do not address the import of ethnic identity with respect to the text's cultural work. It appears to have been written primarily for an Anglo-Norman audience whose parents would have witnessed and participated in the traumatic events of 1066, in which between one half and three quarters of the male native English aristocracy were killed. William the Conqueror styled himself the legitimate heir to the English throne and, over the generation after the Conquest, brutally displaced the remaining English barony, replacing them with men from the continent---men who, it was said, were "learning to be English." Indeed, the meaning of English identity underwent a significant change in the period of Anglo-Norman assimilation. Few have delved into the functions of the History's uses of ethnicity within the context of the crisis of ethnic boundaries that the Norman Conquest precipitated.;My thesis about Geoffrey's History is that its ancient Britons function, on one level, as the ghosts of the defunct Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Two recurrent issues around the essential identity of Geoffrey's Britons bear this out: marrying outside the gens, and performing as the other across gens boundaries. Both phenomena were also played out frequently in post-conquest England. The History, then, addresses boundary changes such as the children of the English and insular Normans were experiencing, in the course of a narrative that naturalizes and at the same time mourns the passing of gentes through degeneration and conquest.