ever, was lacking for a time to the complete success of
the Arthurian epic: the stamp of authenticity, the Latin starting-point.
An Anglo-Norman clerk furnished it, and bestowed upon this literature
the Dares it needed. Professional historians were silent, or nearly so,
respecting Arthur; Gildas, in the sixth century, never mentions him;
Nennius, in the tenth, only devotes a few lines to him.[180] Geoffrey of
Monmouth makes up for this deficiency.[181]

His predecessors knew nothing, he knows everything; his British
genealogies are precise, his narratives are detailed, his enumerations
complete. The mist had lifted, and the series of these kings about whom
so many charming legends were afloat now appeared as clear as the
succession of the Roman emperors. In their turn they present themselves
with the authority conferred at that time in the world by great Latin
books. They ceased to be the unacknowledged children of anybody's fancy;
they had to own them, not some stray minstrel, but a personage of
importance, known to the king of the land, who was to become bishop of
St. Asaph, and be a witness at the peace of 1153, between Stephen of
Blois and the future Henry II. In 1139, the "Historia Regum Britanniae"
had appeared, and copies began to circulate. Henry of Huntingdon,
passing at the Abbey of Bec, in Normandy, in the month of January of
that year, finds one, and is filled with astonishment. "Never," writes
he to one of his friends, "had I been able to obtain any information,
oral or written, on the kings from Brutus to Caesar.... But to my
amazement I have just discovered--stupens inveni--a narrative of these
times."[182] It was Geoffrey's book.

The better to establish his authority, Geoffrey himself had been careful
to appeal to a mysterious source, a certain book of which no trace has
ever been found, and which he pretends was given him by his friend
Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Armed with this proof of authenticity,
which no one could contest, he ends his history by a half-serious,
half-joking challenge to the professional chroniclers of his time. "I
forbid William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon to speak of the
British kings, seeing that they have never had in their hands the book
Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought me from Brittany." Cervantes never
spoke with more gravity of Cid Hamet-ben-Engeli.

Such a book could not fail of success; it had a prodigious fame. Some
historians lodged protests; they mig