For a long time the struggle went on between the two races, and nowhere mere fiercely than in the south-west, where the invaders set up the Kingdom of Wessex; but at last there arose among the Britons a great chieftain called Arthur.  The old histories speak of him as “Emperor,” and he seems to have been obeyed by all the Britons; perhaps, therefore, he had succeeded to the position of the Roman official known as the Comes Britanniae, whose duty it was to hasten to the aid of the local governors in defending any part of Britain where danger threatened.  At all events, under his leadership, the oppressed people defeated the Saxons in a desperate fight at Mons Badonicus, perhaps the little place in Dorsetshire known as Badbury, or, it may be, Bath itself, which is still called Badon by the Welsh.  After that victory, history has little to say about Arthur.  The stories tell that he was killed in a great battle in the west; but, nowadays, the wisest historians think it more probable that he met his death in a conflict near the River Forth.

And so, in history, Arthur, the hero of such a mass of romantic story, is little more than a name, and it is hardly possible to explain how he attained to such renown as the hero of marvellous and, sometimes, magical feats, unless on the supposition that he became confused with some legendary hero, half god, half man, whose fame he added to his own.  Perhaps not the least marvel about him is that he who was the hero of the Britons, should have become the national hero of the English race that he spent his life in fighting.  Yet that is what did happen, though not till long afterwards, when the victorious English, in their turn, bent before their conquering kinsmen, the Normans.

Now in the reign of the third Norman king, Henry I., there lived a certain Welsh priest known as Geoffrey of Monmouth.  Geoffrey seems to have been much about the Court, and perhaps it was the Norman love of stories that first made him think of writing his History of the British Kings.  A wonderful tale he told of all the British kings from the time that Brut the Trojan settled in the country and called it, after himself, Britain!  For Geoffrey’s book was history only in name.  What he tells us is that he was given an ancient chronicle found in Brittany, and was asked to translate it from Welsh into the better known language, Latin.  It is hardly likely, however, that Geoffrey himself expected his statement to be taken quite seriously.  Even in his own day, not every one believed in him, for a certain Yorkshire monk declared that the historian had “lied saucily and shamelessly”; and some years later, Gerald the Welshman tells of a man who had intercourse with devils, from whose sway, however, he could be freed if a Bible were placed upon his breast, whereas he was completely under their control if Geoffrey’s History were laid upon him, just because the book was so full of lies.

It is quite certain that Geoffrey did not write history, but he did make a capital story, partly by collecting legends about British heroes, partly by inventing stories of his own; so that though he is not entitled to fame as an historian, he may claim to rank high as a romantic story-teller who set a fashion destined to last for some three centuries.