About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called Historia Britonum, in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of AEneas, came to Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city of New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later London.  An air of historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he said, by a certain Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford.  Here appeared that line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Tennyson:  Lear and his three daughters; Cymbeline; Gorboduc, the subject of the earliest regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in 1562; Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen and his daughter Sabrina, who gave her name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite song in Milton’s Comus and became the heroine of the tragedy of Locrine, once attributed to Shakspere; and above all, Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round.  In 1155 Wace, the author of the Roman de Rou, turned Geoffrey’s work into a French poem entitled Brut d’Angleterre, “brut” being a Welsh word meaning chronicle.  About the year 1200 Wace’s poem was Englished by Layamon, a priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn.  Layamon’s Brut is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words.  The style is rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative.  Wace had amplified Geoffrey’s chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much larger additions, derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh border.  In particular, the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like fullness.  He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; of the unfaithfulness of Arthur’s queen, Guenever, and the treachery of his nephew, Modred.  His narration of the last great battle between Arthur and Modred; of the wounding of the king—­“fifteen fiendly wounds he had, one might in the least three gloves thrust”—­; and of the little boat with “two women therein, wonderly dight,” which came to bear him away to Avalun and the Queen Argante, “sheenest of all elves,” whence he shall come again, according to Merlin’s prophecy, to rule the Britons; all this left little, in essentials, for Tennyson to add in his Passing of Arthur.