The British Tongue

Brutus named the island of Britain after himself and called his followers Britons. He wanted to be remembered for ever for giving them his name.

For this reason the language of his people, previously known as Trojan or

“crooked Greek”, was henceforth called British.28

So Geoffrey describes the origins of the British tongue. It has been pointed out that his designation of British as curuum Graecum, “crooked Greek”, relies on an etymology of Cymraeg (the Welsh word for the Welsh language) that could only arise from direct knowledge of Welsh.29 Cymraeg has here been etymolo-gized as Welsh cam Roeg, literally “crooked Greek”. The loss of the G in Roeg (from Welsh Groeg) is not a liberty on Geoffrey’s part; it is a grammatically reg-ular change in the second element of a compound in Welsh, showing that the person responsible for the etymology had more than a superficial knowledge

28  DGB, i.21.459–62: “Denique Brutus de nomine suo insulam Britanniam appellat sociosque suos Britones. Volebat enim ex diriuatione nominis memoriam habere perpetuam. Vnde postmodum loquela gentis, quae prius Troiana siue curuum Graecum nuncupabatur, dicta fuit Britannica.”

29  Harris, Linguistic Past, p. 93; Crawford, “On the Linguistic Competence of Geoffrey”, pp. 155–57; Roberts, “Sylwadau”, p. 137, n. 45; Tatlock, LHB, p. 445, n. 39.

of the language. Unfortunately, one cannot now know whether Geoffrey in-vented the etymology or was informed about it by another Welsh speaker.

Various attempts have been made to determine Geoffrey’s linguistic ability, and in particular his competence in one or more of the Brittonic languages.30 This has been deemed important for establishing the veracity of his claim that the DGB was translated from a “very old book in the British tongue”, and for judging the likelihood that he could have employed other vernacular sources with success. However, the value of framing the problem in this way is highly questionable. It has already been noted that Geoffrey’s alleged source-book is a rhetorical device, rendering somewhat futile the attempt to establish whether he could feasibly have translated it. Secondly, it is always hazardous to claim that Geoffrey “misunderstood native material” and extrapolate from that that his command of Welsh (or Breton) was less than firm.31 Geoffrey had no inter-est in reproducing his source material exactly. At every stage in his works, he crafted the accounts that he found in his sources so that they blended seam-lessly with the majestic progression of his imagined history. One underesti-mates the intimacy between Geoffrey and his sources at great peril.

Geoffrey’s self-proclaimed epithet, Monemutensis, “of Monmouth”, seems to imply that he was brought up in or around Monmouth on the southern border between Wales and England, presumably in the late 11th or early 12th century.32 This is significant because, by 1075, the lord of Monmouth was Wihenoc of La Boussac, one of the many Breton followers of William the Conqueror.33 Such a state of affairs might provide a plausible context for Geoffrey’s posi-tive portrayal of the Bretons. It is indeed quite possible that Geoffrey’s own family arrived in Wales in the wake of the establishment of Wihenoc as lord of Monmouth. As Sir Rees Davies astutely observed, “Geoffrey’s father may well have been a first- or second-generation Breton settler in Monmouth, an area

30  Tatlock, LHB, p. 445; Crawford, “On the Linguistic Competence of Geoffrey”.

31  B.F. Roberts, “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Welsh Historical Tradition”, Nottingham Medieval Studies 20 (1976), 29–40, at p. 36; cf. id., “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, and Brut y Brenhinedd”, in Bromwich et al. (eds.), The Arthur of the Welsh, pp. 97–116, at pp. 109–10; Piggott, “Sources”, p. 282.

32  For a good overview of Geoffrey’s life, see J.C. Crick, “Monmouth, Geoffrey of (d. 1154/5)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, <http://

www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10530> (accessed 27 June 2018).

33  H. Guillotel, “Une famille bretonne au service du Conquérant: Les Baderon”, in Droit privé et institutions régionals: Etudes historiques offertes à Jean Yver, Paris, 1976, pp. 361–66;

K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, “The Bretons and Normans of England 1066–1154: the Family, the Fief and the Feudal Monarchy”, Nottingham Medieval Studies 36 (1992), 42–78, at p. 49; ead., Domesday People: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents, 1066–1166.

I. Domesday Book, Woodbridge, 1999, pp. 54–55.

rich in opportunities, formal and informal, for contacts between settlers and natives.”34

What would such a scenario imply about Geoffrey’s linguistic abilities? It might be instructive to indulge in a little speculation, if only to realize the plurality and complexity of the possibilities. If Geoffrey’s father were indeed a first- or second-generation Breton settler in Monmouth, it is very likely that T.D. Crawford was correct to assert that Geoffrey’s first language would probably have been Anglo-Norman French.35 Fluency in French would have been an essential tool for enabling Geoffrey to interact with friends and pa-trons in Monmouth and in his later home in Oxford. It is indeed entirely pos-sible that Geoffrey’s hypothetical “Breton” ancestors were French- rather than Breton-speaking before they came to Britain.36

On the other hand, it is equally possible that Geoffrey’s family was Breton-speaking, and that Breton remained the private language of the family for a few generations after they had settled in Monmouth, even though French would have dominated their interactions in the public sphere. One suspects that Geoffrey’s perceived competence in Breton is implied in his claim to have translated the “very old book in the British tongue”. Although, as discussed above, the claim is unlikely to have been literally true, its rhetorical impact was presumably predicated on its assumed plausibility to contemporaries. The claim was read by those who knew Geoffrey and whom Geoffrey wanted to judge him favorably. Whatever he claimed about the contents of Walter’s al-leged Breton book, it is difficult to believe that Geoffrey would have professed himself to his associates as the translator of a long Breton narrative had he no observable familiarity with the language.

Whatever his family’s origins, it cannot be doubted that Geoffrey, growing up in Monmouth, would have had a long acquaintance with Welsh. If Geoffrey were a Breton-speaker of any competence, one would imagine that Welsh would not have been unduly challenging for him, and that he could have rap-idly become comfortable reading the written language, especially since the spelling systems of Old Breton and Old Welsh (and indeed Old Cornish) were so similar. Even if Geoffrey knew nothing of Breton, Welsh would not have been inaccessible to him. No more evidence of Geoffrey’s linguistic adept-ness is required than the substantial Latin compositions that flowed from his

34  R.R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford, 2000, p. 106.

35  Crawford, “On the Linguistic Competence of Geoffrey”, pp. 152–53. Tatlock similarly com-mented that “no doubt one of his vernaculars was Norman-French”: Tatlock, LHB, p. 445.

36  Cf. Roberts, “Sylwadau”, p. 128, n. 9; Crawford, “On the Linguistic Competence of Geoffrey”, p. 157.

pen, which afford ample testimony to his confident Latinity. Had he applied the same ability to Welsh in support of his academic interests, he might have acquired considerable facility with at least the written language, if not also the spoken. It is likely that Geoffrey received his early education in one of the churches of south-east Wales, and we have other evidence (such as the ver-nacular description of Llandaff’s privileges, known as Braint Teilo) for the cul-tivation of written Welsh in scholarly circles in the south-eastern churches of Geoffrey’s day.37

Though most of the comments above are ultimately speculative, they should hopefully make the point that Geoffrey was, at the least, multilingual and proficient at linguistic study. Modern scholars will never be in a position to judge Geoffrey’s exact knowledge of Welsh or Breton. The only safe assump-tion is that language would not have been an insurmountable barrier between Geoffrey and the sources that he wished to access. With this in mind, we may venture forth, with Geoffrey, into Gualia.