This chapter examines elements of French-language culture in Britain between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries which reveal the cross-Channel ties fostered by a shared language. It focuses on the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (ANPB), part of a medieval historiographical tradition charting British history from its origins to the contemporary era, considering it alongside related texts such as Wace’s Brut and the Roman des Franceis of André de Coutances. Surviving in over fifty manuscripts, along with more than 200 copies in English translation, the ANPB influenced the development of English historical consciousness up to and beyond the time of John Milton. The shifting of borders throughout the Middle Ages means that the terms ’England’ and ’France’ need to be understood as more mobile than the modern nation states they designate. From the Norman Conquest in particular, the Channel became as much a conduit as a barrier to cultural and political cohesion. Through the French-language Brut tradition, the chapter considers how Britain’s history was contextualized for literate English society within the wider cross-Channel environment of Anglo-French cultural and political entanglements.

From Geoffrey of Monmouth’s hugely popular History of the kings of Britain, which influenced a great deal of medieval literature in various languages, are taken two excerpts. The first records a meeting, supposedly in the fifth century, between the Celtic leader Vortigern and the Saxon leader Hengist with his daughter Renwein (Rowen) who offers Vortigern a drink using the English greeting Wassail. The second is an account of king Arthur’s battle against the Saxons at Badon Hill.

The letter from king Edward I to Pope Boniface VIII, dated 1301, is preserved among the Close Rolls in the National Archives. In it Edward gives his version of the history of relations between England and Scotland during a period when this was a thorny issue. Edward believed that the king of England had rights over Scotland while the Pope thought he had jurisdiction over Scotland and repudiated English involvement. The letter gives an account of the early history of Britain reminiscent of that found in Geoffrey of Monmouth.

It is not known who the author of the Historia Britonum was. It is a text probably composed around 830,that occurs in various versions, of which the earliest is found in BL MS Harley 6859, dating from the twelfth century. It contains an account of many of the Roman emperors from a British perspective, and an early mention of king Arthur and his battles against the Saxons.

The story of the medieval Romance on the Iberian Peninsula is a bit more complicated than that we read in traditional histories of Spanish or Catalan literature. Hebrew and Arabic authors also wrote texts that could be classified as romances some years before the Castilian Grail and Amadís. These authors adapted the motifs of Arthurian or chivalric romance, combining them with the literary tropes and conventions familiar to them from Hebrew and Arabic traditions. Others, such as the anonymous author of Cavallero Zifar (Castilian, anonymous, ca. 1300) and Ramon Llull in his ecclesisastical Romance, Blaquerna (Catalan), transform the conventions of romance to suit their own ecclesiastical and spiritual purposes. In this way, if we imagine romance in Iberia less as a stable genre with a canon and more as a set of conventions and tropes that authors recombined in novel ways, we see it as a literary practice that crosses languages and religious groups, but that in some ways shares chivalric and literary values across these differences.

This chapter demonstrates the seriousness and the versatility of the romance genre in the hands of two important late medieval English writers. Examples from the writings of fourteenth-century poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, and fifteenth-century translator and editor, Thomas Malory, reveal romance to be a fictionalizing genre capable of probing serious matters of broad political, social, ethical, or aesthetic concern. The range and versatility of the genre, moreover, offered these writers crucial opportunities for creative and editorial experimentation.

The Tudors’ Welsh ancestry and doubtful claim to the English throne rendered them conscious successors of King Arthur, and the mythology surrounding Arthur and Merlin became central to the construction of Tudor power from 1485 onwards. Accusations and rumours of magic were rife at the court of Henry VIII and played a key role in the downfall of Anne Boleyn as queen, but allegations of magic also swirled around Cardinal Wolsey in Henry’s early reign. However, it was not until the reign of Elizabeth that a Tudor monarch embraced her ‘Arthurian’ identity to the extent of seeking the advice of a latter-day Merlin, a role eagerly fulfilled by John Dee. At the high point of Dee’s influence a magically inspired idea of a British empire briefly influenced official policy under a queen so fascinated by the occult arts that she personally practised alchemy. At the same time, the Italian religious exile (and possible spy) Giordano Bruno saw himself as an ‘occult missionary’, bringing his particular brand of Hermetic magic to England.

This chapter contends that forgery should be considered a form of historical writing. It presents evidence to show that, in the Middle Ages, forgeries not only frequently constituted significant parts of archives and other resources for the writing of history, but that forgeries themselves were often the products of historical research on the part of their authors. If forgeries are considered one end of a spectrum of historical writing (rather than the binary opposite of the true historical document) then a nuanced understanding of the relationships between forgeries and genres such as hagiography and the medieval chronicle becomes possible. After discussion of these relationships, the chapter concludes with an examination of the criticism of forgeries during the Middle Ages. Forgeries were often denounced; yet they could also survive denunciation, not because of a lack of critical sense on the part of medieval audiences, but because of the importance of their function as historical writing.