Detail from tapestry showing Brutus of Troy’s journey - (Wikimedia)
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Our source for today’s story is a far-reaching one. It stretches its wings over Trojans in exile, touches on giants in their time of waning from this world, and tells of kings and queens and their daughters and sons struggling over the crown. It moves from Italy to England and then back for a siege of Rome. It features the coming of Julius Caesar into the story, along with many other familiar figures from Roman history, like Pompey, Vespasian, and Marius. It follows Caesar onto British shores, follows the period of Roman rule there, and then when that tide receded and Danes and then Saxons burst forcefully into the story. It features the legendary King Leir, familiar to us now in his Shakespearean incarnation. His father, an ingenious figure “who taught necromancy in his kingdom,” had died in using wings of his own creation to fly, his body broken on the temple to Apollo where he fell. Leir’s name, Geoffrey tells us, remains with us in the city he founded, known to us as Leicester, the similarities between the names more appreciable in spelling than in pronunciation. It features the appearance of Merlin—yes, that Merlin—who arrives on stage in spectacular fashion.
The king had been told by his wizards that all his castle’s problems would cease if only its walls were sprinkled with the blood of a particular fatherless man, but when Merlin, the man in question, was brought before the king, he challenged those wizards. Did they know what lay beneath those walls, he demanded, that suffered them not to stand. The wizards were unsure before his certainty, and the king was convinced to order excavation in order to find the answer, digging which exposed a pond. Again Merlin challenged the wizards. Did they know then what was to be found beneath that pond? And again the wizards shrank before him, as the king ordered the pond to be drained, and a pair of dragon eggs were revealed.
Over the dragons, one white, one red, which then emerged to rise and struggle in fierce combat, Merlin would prophesize at length. The white dragon, he said, signified the Saxons, the red this land they oppressed. He spoke of valleys of blood and churches in ruin. He spoke of the coming of a quote, “German worm … advanced by a sea-wolf, whom the woods of Africa [would] accompany.” There was talk of the “boar of Cornwall,” of “lion’s whelps … transformed into sea-fishes,” of an “island … wet with night tears,” of “the eagle of the broken covenant,” and of “a lynx, bent on the ruin of his own nation.” He spoke of luxurious debauchery and shattering famines, of a time when “London [would] mourn for the deaths of twenty-thousand, and the river Thames [would] be turned into blood,” of a “detestable bird” that would lay three eggs from which would emerge a fox, a wolf, and a bear.
There was so much of this sort of thing that I cannot hope to capture it all here, and then of course, once you had Merlin, you’d have Uther Pendragon. You’d have King Arthur, beating back the Saxon threat, and you’d have Guinevere, and eventually Mordred as well. But all of that was far in the future from the perspective of our story today. We’ll be going back to the beginning.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, so we’ve established that you’re on the right plane—you have not gone wildly astray. You’re headed for the correct destination, wherever that may be, and while you’re settling back into your seat and melting blissfully into the skies like the childhood memory of marshmallows into an unexpected hot chocolate, you could reach for that touch screen on the back of the seat in front of you and sign up for a little Patreon at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can enjoy early, ad-free, and extra listening, and in the process, keep that plane comfortably aloft. And now that you may or may not have done so, we disembark this aircraft segment of the podcast and return to the story.
This time, we turn to the story of Brutus of Troy.
During that last episode, the one about Macbeth, I talked about some of the origin-story legends found in Shakespeare’s source material, and ours, the Holinshed chronicle. And if you’ve already listened to that episode—and you don’t need to before listening to this one—you heard of how that chronicle featured a marriage of ancient Greek and Egyptian royalty crossing the ocean, their names echoed in those of the Gaels, of Gaelic, and of Scotland itself. And I mentioned Amy Jeffs’ book on the topic of such origin stories, titled Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain.
Today, I wanted to talk about another such story that Jeffs features and one which I also briefly mentioned last time, that of Brutus of Troy, legendary first king of the Britains and something of a far-roaming traveller himself, a figure thus in keeping with our thematic focus. He was said to sail the seas well before our usual time period, but our source for his story sits comfortably within it. For that, we go to the 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain, written by the cleric, historian, or, as some have argued, pseudo-historian, and important Arthur and Merlin popularizer, Geoffrey of Monmouth.
There in Geoffrey’s text, we find the story starting first with his since-strongly-contested claim to be drawing this information from a “very ancient book” given to him by a certain archdeacon, a vague show of modesty and also an evocation of some unknown earlier authority, a literary conceit that was not unique to Geoffrey. It also starts with a dedication to the Earl of Gloucester, and with a celebration of, quote, “Britain, best of islands” in all its incredible abundance of abundances, of metals, fields, hillsides, and fruitful soils, its “noble rivers” which abounded with fish, “misty mountains” which shaded pleasant meadows, and, quote, “sparkling wellsprings clear and bright, flowing forth with a gentle whispering ripple in shining streams that sing sweet lullaby unto them that lie upon their banks.” Its many varieties of flowers for the bees and verdant pastures for the cattle. Its cities “twice ten … and twice four,” some churched and towered, fair and high, some now fallen, shattered and decayed, signs remaining of the conflicts that had come before.
To this place, Geoffrey wrote, five peoples had come, namely the Normans, Picts, Saxons, Scots, and Britons. Our story today concerns the last of these five and the very first of those “kings of Britain.” For his story, we travel all the way back to ancient Troy.
That city had only just fallen, Geoffrey tells us, after a decade of warfare which I will not recount here, and from its desolation had fled Aeneas, 2nd cousin to Troy’s King Priam in the Iliad, titular protagonist and Roman ancestor in Virgil’s Aeneid. Geoffrey follows that Virgilian Aeneas in his flight to Italy, to Latium in the region of what would be Rome, and to war there with one king and to marriage with the daughter of another. He follows Aeneas’s successor and then that successor’s son. He follows Aeneas’s great grandson, our Brutus.
Like all good nation-founding heroes, Brutus was born to a magicians’ prophecy that he would kill both his parents but that after banishment and many travels and travails, would also win for himself the highest of honours and glories. And so the first part would immediately prove to be true, his mother dead in child-brith, and his father, fifteen years later, from bow-shot in a hunting accident, Brutus’s arrow, intended for a deer, striking him in the chest and killing him. For this latter terrible deed, he was cast out into exile.
From Italy, Brutus went to Greece. It does not say exactly where, but Geoffrey does tell us that Brutus found his place among Trojan descendants, ones brought back in chains from the fall of their city, including those of Priam’s son himself. There in their midst, Brutus quickly gained renown and respect, for establishing himself as wise among the wise and valiant among the bravest of warriors, and for his generosity with the wealth which he won in combat, though what combat and against whom, we do not know.
We do know that those Trojan descendants gathered to him, that they asked him to take up their cause against the Greek oppressors, and that he agreed to do so. The Trojans withdrew to the towns and fortifications of a sympathetic noble, descended, on his mother’s side, from Troy. Brutus himself took the woods and hills, and he sent a message to the Greek ruler. “Brutus, general of the remainder of the Trojans, to Pandrasus, king of the Greeks, sends greetings,” he began, asking for the return of the Trojans’ lost liberty and dignity there in Greece, or if not that, then permission to freely depart from those shores. That king would grant them neither.
King Pandrasus was shocked at what he perceived as a gross display of disobedience. He took counsel, and then he took up arms, heading out in force to find and crush the Trojans. But instead, they found him. Brutus and his forces learned of the Greeks’ coming and caught them on the march, the violence of their ambush sending Pandrasus’ men into flight, seeing many killed at the banks of river and the king’s own brother, who turned to put up a fight, captured along with his close companion.
They had won the day, but Brutus and his Trojans could not win the larger contest by force of numbers, so it would have to be trickery. It would have to be then using their captives to lure the enemy camp’s watch into venturing out and leaving their king exposed. It would have to be slipping through that camp, slaughtering men without mercy as they slept or stumbled to their feet, and seizing Pandrasus himself in order to make the Trojan demands. But what should those demands be?
Of this, there was much discussion, much back and forth as to what they should ask and accept, until the point was made that they even if they were granted a portion of the Greek lands for their own kingdom, as some of them desired, they could never truly be free there, could never rest safely knowing that the sons and grandsons of the men they had butchered that day were among their neighbours. Their only option for lasting freedom was to leave, and to obtain the best possible conditions in doing so, and this they did, securing from Pandrasus, under threat of torture, “gold, silver, ships, corn, wine, and oil,” along with his daughter in marriage to Brutus, whom Pandrasus praised at length, “for who less than he,” he asked, “could have released from their chains the banished Trojans … or with so small a body of men vanquished so numerous and powerful an army, and taken their king prisoner in the engagement?”
With the royal daughter and the promised fleet full of treasure and provisions, Brutus and the rest of the Trojans began a voyage that took them first to a desolate island, abandoned, having suffered the violence of pirates. At its centre, where they hunted in the groves, was a ruined city, and it was there that the Trojans found a temple dedicated to Mercury, Jupiter, and Diana. To that temple they went, Brutus, a priest, and 12 elders. They garlanded the shrines, laid three fires for the three deities, and they made their sacrifices. Before the altar of Diana, Brutus himself presented a vessel of wine and deer blood, and he spoke these words:
“Goddess of woods, tremendous in the chase
To mountain boars, and all the wild race!
Wide over the ethereal walks extends thy sway,
And over the infernal mansions void of day!
Look upon us on earth! Unfold our fate,
And say what region is our destined seat?
Where shall we next, your lasting temples raise?
And choirs of maidens celebrate your praise?”
Nine times, he spoke this way. Four times, he passed around her altar. He poured the wine and blood into the fire, and he lay before the statue to sleep on the skin of the sacrificed deer. In the middle of the night, Diana appeared to him and gave her answer.
“Brutus! There lies beyond the Gallic bounds
An island which the western sea surrounds,
By giants once possessed, now few remain
To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.
To reach that happy shore thy sails employ
There fate decrees to rise a second Troy
And found an empire in the royal line,
Which time shall never destroy, nor bounds confine.”
The Trojans had their answer, and with its somewhat vague directions in mind, they were going to set sail again. After this quick break, we’ll go with them.
…
Brutus and the others came to Africa, for as the text says, “they were ignorant as yet whither to steer.” They came to a Sicilian port, to the rocks off of Carthage, to the coast of Algeria. They contended with pirates, and they did so successfully, leaving the encounter richer than they arrived. According to the source, they certainly had the numbers to do so, not sufficient to stay in Greece by virtue of numerical force, but enough that they were given a literally incredible 324 ships on which to leave it, enough that they were able to go merrily raiding along the Moroccan coastline.
Through the “Pillars of Hercules” they went, the narrowing of the Strait of Gibraltar, where they were waylaid by sirens. There is no mention of any enchanting singing voices there, more like “sea monsters” who swarmed the ships and all but overturned them before Brutus and the rest made their escape.
Heading north, they encountered more scattered Trojans. These ones living in exile along the south of the French coast, they were descended from those who had escaped the city’s fall with Antenor, a royal advisor in the Homeric version, an outright traitor in others, he and his family spared for his service to the invaders. The exiles joined with Brutus’s group, adding their strength to his, and adding the very considerable courage and strength of their leader Corineus, enough to overthrow anyone, no matter how giant their stature, a capacity which was soon proven in their battles with the local Aquetanians, where Geoffrey gives him a starring role.
“For where do you flee, you cowards,” he shouted, driving among them with an axe that he’d seized, having lost his sword in the melee. “For where do you fly, base wretches. Stand your ground, that you may encounter Corineus. For shame that so many thousand flee one man, but take comfort that you are pursued by one from whom the Thyrennian giants could not stand their ground, but fell down slain in heaps together.”
Brutus and Corineus fought, and pillaged, and burned throughout Aquitaine. One of their men, named Turonus, displayed valour and skill enough to leave his name to the city that would be built where he fell, the city of Tours, for this was a story with plenty of such namings to go round. The Trojans fought, but they found that they struggled against such numbers that they could not hope to win, not in the end, and back to their ships they went with the spoils of their French adventures, ready to search once more for Diana’s promised island, and to find it.
They found themselves on the coast of Totnes, in Devon. They found an island that was then called Albion. It was pleasantly wooded with rivers “abounding with fish,” and inhabited only by a few giants who fled at the coming of Brutus and Corineus into their mountain caves, and it seemed all very agreeable to the Trojan exiles who settled down to farm the soil, to build houses, and to divide the land among them, to enjoy their new home.
But the giants who had lived there before them, and whom Diana had spoken of to Brutus in that abandoned temple, had not entirely gone away or surrendered their home to human habitation. They had taken to their caves, but not for good. They had waited until a time when Brutus and the others celebrated a festival in the port of their arrival, maybe a festival dedicated to Diana herself, and then the giants had stormed forth, more than twenty of them, and caused a great slaughter, killing many before the Trojans were able to gather themselves together and fight back.
The giants would not win that day. They were not the protagonists of this story, and they would not have another chance. The new arrivals on their shores would rally to defeat them. All of them would fall, representatives of something that was now passing from the world, until just one remained: Goëmagot, a, quote, “detestable monster” strong enough to pluck an oak from the ground but now only preserved at Brutus’s order so that Corineus might with with him atop the cliffs. Corineus, who “took great pleasure in such encounters,” threw his weapons aside and challenged Goëmagot to grapple with him.
Facing each other, the two would strive like Greco-Roman wrestlers. Goëmagot would wrap his arms around Corineus and, squeezing, would crack his ribs, but Corineus, enraged, would hoist the giant up on his shoulders. He would bundle his foe to the cliff edge and hurl him down, tearing him apart on the rocks below.
The time of the giants was ending, and Corineus and his people would take lands where the giants had once walked, lands which he would give his own name. Corinea, as the text has it, comes down to us in the more familiar term of Cornwall.
The time of “Albion” was also ending, at least by that name, for Brutus would name it after himself as Britain. Brutus and his now-named Britons would build a city, a New Troy or Troi Nova which Geoffrey says would come to be called, through the word’s corruption, Trinovantum, its grounds eventually home to the present-day city of London. Like I said, it was a story with many names to give.
It was also a story that would really stick. It would last and find a relatively extensive readership, particularly in its Norman French form as Wace’s Roman de Brut, sometimes known as the Deeds of the Britons, which survives in many Anglo-Norman and continental manuscripts and is considered to have had some popularity between the 12th and 14th centuries.
As you have gathered from this portion of it, Geoffrey’s history was a legendary one and was apparently treated as such by some chroniclers, who drew from it only sparingly. It was noted for not fitting easily alongside other historical accounts. There were issues such as the lack of support from earlier records for Arthur’s European conquests. Why, asked a later medieval historian, if Arthur had “acquired thirty kingdoms, if he subjugated the king of the French, if he killed Lucius the procurator of the republic in Italy, why all histories of the Romans, French, and Saxons … have omitted to mention such extraordinary things about so great a man, histories that tell so many smaller things about lesser men.”
It was a fair question, and there was, besides Higden’s complaints, talk of the “wild tales” surrounding that king in this text and elsewhere, and suggestions that Geoffrey’s work as a whole was little more than lies and propaganda. 12th-century historian William of Newburgh was particularly fierce in his criticism, but that has sometimes been interpreted as having been fuelled by a trend toward taking Geoffrey’s writings seriously that William was responding to.
Certainly they would come to be taken seriously, and some writers would find them very useful indeed, massaging his stories here and there to suit certain aims or agendas. Historian John Spence has written of how this was done “to support Edward I’s territorial ambitions in Wales and Scotland,” and David Armitage of how it was taken up to bolster the English side in the 16th-century Anglo-Scottish wars. As for the figure of Arthur in Geoffrey’s work, efforts to attach him to one place or another are not a recent development, the stuff of Tintagel gift shops or similar. You find late-12th-century claims of finding his grave at Glastonbury, but it was the absence of a grave along with ambiguity as to Arthur’s death that others found more compelling, helping to fuel the hope of his messianic return to reconquer what had been lost in his absence, and leaving the door open to manipulation and reinterpretation, a helpful prop in whatever narrative one wanted to craft of one’s claims or kingship.
The closing section of Geoffrey’s work left that door pretty far ajar, with its final king of the Britons, Cadwallader, being informed by an angelic voice that “God was not willing that the Britons should reign any longer in the island,” but also promised that “by merit of their faith, [they] should again recover the island, when the time decreed for it [had] come.”
You could see how there was something there to look forward to, depending on your place and position in all of this, but this promise for the future was in the context of a terrible fall into disarray, a “degeneration” from the Britons’ nobility into barbarism and “an inveterate spirit of faction.”
Geoffrey’s actual intent in the text has been the subject of various different interpretations over
the years. Some have seen a clear message as to the dangers of discord, the need for unity and peace. Some have seen his work in service to an Anglo-Norman elite, to whom he provided a history of rulers “older and more distinguished than that of the Frankish rulers descended from Charlemagne.” Some have seen his project positioned in defence of “the Britons” but then wondered exactly which these were, the Bretons, Cornish, or Welsh, perhaps strongly for one and in opposition to another. Some have read his aims as not being political at all, but rather purely literary, a magnificent performance and chance to show off his skills. Others have looked and seen parody, and bundled up in it a biting challenge to the authority of literate monks and a celebration of the non-monastic.
Geoffrey’s writing was so much more than it seemed, perhaps, or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was exactly the myth-making blend of legend, invention, and history-adjacent narrative that it appeared to be, with Julius Caesars merrily mingling with giants, Merlins, and Homeric exiles.
We’ll leave Geoffrey of Monmouth and Brutus of Troy there. If you are listening on the Patreon, then you’ll hear me soon with some bonus listening. If not, you’ll hear me everywhere else with the next full episode, and I’ll talk to you then.