For students of literature and history alike, the rise in popularity of the Matter of Britain following the publication in 1135–8 of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannie is an important and far-reaching phenomenon. Geoffrey's work, which had initially met with some scepticism in scholarly circles (as may be seen from William of Newburgh's virulent attack on its reliability), had by the end of the twelfth century attained academic respectability, an acceptance reflected in the fortunes of Wace's translation into French verse of the Historia Regum Britannie, the Roman de Brut, completed in 1155. Nowadays, the Roman de Brut is studied mainly by literary scholars but, to a great extent, current perceptions of the poem are anachronistic. In the twelfth century, the term ‘roman’ referred to any text (particularly adaptations from the Latin) in a vernacular language, and did not necessarily indicate ‘literariness’, while verse was a medium used in a range of twelfth-century French vernacular works, including medical textbooks. Wace's Roman de Brut presents itself from the outset as a truth-bearing, historical narrative, based on an original which required translating (i.e. from Latin):