The Search for the Elusive Arthur

By Tim Walker

It was never my intention to write a version of the King Arthur story. It is a well-trodden path, and what could I possibly add that would be well received?

But I had read Thompson and Giles’s translation of the parts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 1136 work, The History of the Kings of Britain, that related to events in the fifth century, and found it a fantastical and captivating read. Geoffrey’s work gives us the first full telling of the stories of Uther Pendragon and his son, Arthur. More than that, he gives a timeline of post-Roman kings of Britain, plugging the gap in our empty history between the end of Roman rule and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms – a period of about 200 years. But how reliable is his ‘history’?

The boy Arthur and the sword in the stone

Geoffrey claimed to have been working from a ‘text written in a native tongue’, but no evidence has been found by historians of such a document. Because they can’t verify it, they doubt it ever existed, and have tarnished Geoffrey’s work with the claim that it is a work of fiction – made up to please his Norman sponsor and to appeal to his readership.

More recently, other historians, including Miles Russell (Arthur and the Kings of Britain, 2018), have tried to understand Geoffrey’s approach, and have demonstrated that he did compile and work from a wide range of source material – it’s just that he exercised a certain amount of creativity in plugging gaps in his narrative, and appears to have deliberately moved historical characters and their deeds around in a Middle Ages cut-and-paste job. Russell believes he didn’t invent Uther and Arthur - they are real figures plucked from Welsh chronicles and mentions from literary monks such as Nennius, who credits twelve winning battles to Arthur. Uther Pen-Dragon (‘the head dragon’) is thought to be a king of Gwynedd in North Wales – perhaps a son or relative of the mighty Cunedda who was sent there in the mid-fifth century by King Vortigern to rid Wales of Irish settlers.

Ever since eminent academic, John Morris, in his epic work, The Age of Arthur (1972), announced his belief that Arthur was a real historical figure, the search for evidence has been taken on by others. Morris states: “The personality of Arthur is unknown… But he was as real as Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror; and his impact upon future ages mattered as much, or more so. Enough evidence survives from the hundred years after his death to show that reality was remembered for three generations, before legend engulfed his memory.”

The eminent archaeologist, Leslie Alcock, in Arthur’s Britain (revised,1989) states in the preface: “This book is about the Arthur of history, and about the Britain in which he lived. It will demonstrate that there is acceptable historical evidence that Arthur was a genuine historical figure, not a mere figment of myth or romance.” These two works have given credibility to the search for evidence of Arthur’s existence, and it can only be hoped that more tangible evidence is forthcoming over time.

Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us that a noble prince, Constantine came from Armorica (Brittany in northwest France) and was accepted by a council of tribal kings to be their overlord. He ruled for ten years before being assassinated on the orders of disgruntled noble, Vortigern. Vortigern ruled for perhaps as long as twenty years, covering the middle years of the fifth century, and he is mentioned by a number of sources, including Gildas, who wrote an account of those times around the year 540. He is also named in the Welsh Annales – a record of dates and events.

Depiction of Arthur's 'final battle'

Despite some historians believing that ‘Vortigern’ is a title, meaning ‘high king’, it is widely believed that it relates to one individual. Who was Vortigern and what was his real name? Graham Phillips in The Lost Tomb of King Arthur (2016) has trawled through museums and libraries looking for records of tribal kings in western Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, and has come up with his own theory. He argues that ‘Vortigern’ may have been the chief or king of Powys in mid-Wales, and that his regional rival was Aurelius, who came from a family of former Roman elite nobles who were rulers of the Dobunni tribe based at modern day Gloucester.

Aurelius defeats Vortigern in battle to become high king of the Britons, possibly at the Battle of Gulloph in Hampshire around the year 460, taking the title ‘Ambrosius’ (the divine one). There are enough mentions of both Vortigern and Ambrosius Aurelianus, and mentions of their battles, to cement them as historical figures who straddle mid to late fifth century Britain; therefore, Geoffrey of Monmouth is on safe grounds including them in his ‘history’. Graham Phillips talks about the descendants of Cunedda ruling over the kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys, and therefore Uther, Vortigern and Ambrosius could all be related through marriage as members of the ruling elite of that region. Could an alliance have enabled Aurelius and Uther to defeat Vortigern?

Geoffrey tells us that Ambrosius’s brother was Uther Pendragon, and that he succeeded Ambrosius following his poisoning by a Saxon spy. Could the Briton noble, Uther, have been related to the Roman-named Aurelius through a family marriage alliance, and therefore become his ‘brother’? Uther’s story is one of a powerful warrior king who fights the advancing Saxons, and falls for the charms of the beautiful wife of one of his nobles, the lady Ygerne. Uther is so besotted with her that he instructs his adviser/healer/sorcerer Merlin to find a way for him to have her. Merlin arranges it, but asks that if their union results in the birth of a boy, that he must have the child. And so, the deed is done, and Uther marries Ygerne after her husband is killed in the ensuing civil war. Merlin takes the child – Arthur – and places him with a foster family to raise in secret. When Arthur comes of age, he accidentally pulls the sword from the stone (following Uther’s death), and is then exposed by Merlin as the one true son of Uther and rightful heir.

Much of this narrative, including Graham Phillip’s connections with West England and Mid-Wales, and the possible locations of Nennius’s twelve battles of Arthur, have been incorporated into my storytelling, as I have attempted to breathe life into these fascinating and only dimly-glimpsed characters in my book series.

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Tim Walker is an independent author living near Windsor in the UK. He worked in the newspaper publishing industry for ten years before relocating to Zambia where, following a period of voluntary work with VSO, he set up his own marketing and publishing business.

His new book, published in June 2020, is Arthur, Rex Brittonum, a re-imagining of the story of King Arthur (book five in the series). It follows on from 2019’s Arthur Dux Bellorum, the story of young Arthur (book four in the series), that received recognition from two sources in 2019 - One Stop Fiction Book of the Month in April, and an honourable mention in the Coffee Pot Book Club Book of the Year (Historical Fiction) Awards. The series starts with Abandoned; followed by Ambrosius: Last of the Romans (2017); and book three, Uther's Destiny (2018). 

Find out more about the author at - http://www.timwalkerwrites.co.uk 

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/timwalker1666 

Amazon Author Page: http://Author.to/TimWalkerWrites

Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/TimWalkerWrites

Twitter: http://twitter.com/timwalker1666

King Arthur: Surviving into Modern Times?

By Richard Denham

Who was King Arthur? What stories and legends about him have survived into the modern day and where, in fact, did these stories come from?

Treatment of the king and his story has become a cottage industry in the twenty-first century, with serious historical research, novels, art, music, film and television, all vying to hijack the king who still sleeps, unperturbed by it all, under his hill.

A number of works with supposed Arthurian connections are spurious, however, particularly in the realms of science fiction. There are those who see the original Star Trek series (1966-69) as an Arthurian adventure. For Arthur, see Captain James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner; for Merlin, the ‘sage’ Spock (Leonard Nimoy); for Camelot, the Starship Enterprise. Its mission, a la the Grail, is to seek out new worlds in space – ‘the final frontier’. The point about Star Trek – and the various much older Arthurian stories – is that it represents action, adventure, excitement. The poets who wrote The Mabinogion; Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, not to mention Thomas Malory, knew the elements that made up a good story; so did Gene Roddenberry, who created Star Trek. These elements are universal – the Bible has them too.

Theatre
For whatever reason, relatively few dramatists found inspiration in the legends for their plays. One who did was J.C. Carr, who wrote King Arthur for the stage in 1895. The heart-throb of the day was Johnston Forbes Robertson, who played Lancelot. In publicity photographs, he looks every inch the worthy knight, even if his mail does leave rather a lot to be desired. The costumes and sets, working from his own earlier paintings and sketches, were designed by Edward Burne-Jones of the pre-Raphaelites. Fast forward to 1923 and we find the ex-war poet Laurence Binyon writing King Arthur. In true heroic mould, a musical score for the play was written by Edward Elgar, the musician’s answer to the flag-waving Rudyard Kipling.

Perhaps because dramatists could not take the Arthurian legends seriously (and, practically, because both shape-shifting magic and pitched battles are difficult to pull off on stage) the more recent Arthurian treadings of the boards are musicals. Camelot, by Lerner and Loewe, famous for their double-act creations, was based on White’s The Sword in the Stone and was made into a film in 1967. Merlin was the creation of the illusionist (a magus of our time!) Doug Heming, with music by Elmer Bernstein. Spamalot, itself a spin-off from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, starred Tim Curry as Arthur and Hank Azaria as Lancelot (and, as usual with Azaria ‘other characters’).

Opera
In the world of music, the Arthur stories have not found the conventional outlets. There have been a number of Arthurian titles and characters in very recent albums but the latest full-blown opera was Gawain, written by Harrison Birtwhistle in 1991. Before that, the only truly famous composer to tackle the theme was Richard Wagner, drawing on the rich legacy of the German Medieval romances. Forever associated with Bayreuth and tainted by the adulation of his works by Hitler, Wagner wrote Lohengrin in 1848, the year of revolutions throughout Europe. Tristan und Isolde followed in 1865 and the last creation was Parsifal seventeen years later.

Screens Great and Small
At least one movie has survived from the silent era, pre 1927, but there may have been more, cheaply made and quickly told, which ended up corroding in a reel tin somewhere. The first version of A Connecticut Yankee appeared in 1931 at a time when Hollywood was already dominating the world of cinema. As we have seen, Bing Crosby took over the Will Rogers role in 1949 when he and Cedric Hardwicke were ‘busy doing nothing, working the whole day through, trying to find lots of things not to do’. It was a subconscious throwback to the ‘roi faineant’, the do-nothing king of the French Medieval romances.

What made every little boy’s heart leap for joy in 1953 was Knights of the Round Table, filmed in Technicolor and perpetual Hollywood sunshine. Robert Taylor was stoic as Lancelot; Ava Gardner beguiling as Guinevere; and who could look more noble and put upon, than Mel Ferrer as Arthur? What was particularly pleasing to the little boys who paid their threepence to watch the movie at ‘the pictures’ was the fact that Messrs Brittan, the toy company, produced authentic copies of the mounted knights made of metal. Collect the set!

The next year, Alan Ladd was the black knight in the film of the same name. The story bore little relationship to Arthur, but at least some of it was filmed at Castell Coch, a real-life (if nineteenth century!) castle in South Wales, home of the Silures tribe and a possible haunt of Arthur 1,500 years earlier.

Two years later, television, which had already got America in its thrall, was fast hooking the younger generation in Britain. William Russell, good-looking and clean-cut, with a 1950s ‘short back and sides’ haircut, was the star of The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. It was the first British television production to be filmed in colour, but during its run, British audiences could only watch it in black and white. And because it was shown during Children’s Hour, there was absolutely no hanky-panky between Lancelot and Guinevere.

Animation revolutionised Arthur. Today there are a large number of animé adaptations of the legends, but it was Walt Disney’s The Sword in the Stone in 1963 that captured everybody’s heart. Merlin’s owl Archimedes was pure Disney and the silly old duffer tripping over his beard was the perfect foil for the cute kid who grabbed said sword, utterly unaware of his future destiny.

Four years later, the Lerner and Lowe musical Camelot hit the big screen, complete with big names. Richard Harris as Arthur had no clue ‘how to handle a woman’ and no clue how to sing either. Franco Nero as Lancelot, all silver armour and piercing blue eyes, had a much better grasp of things female, in this case, a willowy Vanessa Redgrave as Guinevere; as so often, life imitated art and they became a couple, marrying many years later and after a long separation, in 2006.

Julie Andrews and Richard Burton in Camelot

Then came the riotous Monty Python vehicle, The Holy Grail, played entirely for laughs. There wasn’t a single horse in the film – all ‘mounted’ characters simply miming a horse and pulling on non-existent reins – but the thirteenth century armour was quite authentic and the various quests into the Otherworld were no sillier than they are in Malory or the Mabinogion.

Two gloomy movies followed, trying to re-establish some sort of gravitas. The first was Excalibur in 1981. Directed by John Boorman, it is regarded as a classic today, but at the time the violence was found excessive. Nigel Terry was an ambivalent Arthur, not the hero we expected, and both Nicol Williamson as Merlin and Helen Mirren as Morgan Le Fay, unleashed their dark sides. The armour had now slid forward to the fifteenth century, the only real nod to Malory.

Battle between Arthur and Mordred by William Hatherall

In 2004, King Arthur, accompanied by a documentary made for television, purported to be historically accurate fifth century stuff. It wasn’t. Clive Owen, never off the big screen in those days, mumbled his incomprehensible way through the role of Arthur, Ioan Gruffudd (a Welshman at last) was the Frenchman Lancelot and newcomer Keira Knightley, who, of course, can handle a bow better than any man, was Guinevere. Everybody was trying just a bit too hard and what most people remember of the film now is that Knightley’s upper half was enhanced somewhat by CGI for the posters!

A similar ‘authentic’ series, this time made for television, was Arthur of the Britons in which a suitably smouldering Oliver Tobias played the Romano-British warlord; no castles, no plate armour, no round table. There were none of these things either in Merlin (2008-12) which told the story of the teenaged Arthur and his equally teenaged sage (!) There wasn’t the remotest attempt to create period through costume or set, the actors often dressed in almost unaltered tees and jeans, but the kids loved it.

Gawaine and the Green Knight, with Murray Head and Nigel Greene respectively, was good back in 1973. First Knight starring Richard Gere as Lancelot and (everybody’s idea of a king) Sean Connery as Arthur, was not. And don’t get me – or anyone else interested in finding Arthur – started on the Last Knight in 2017 – that was part of the Transformers cycle!

Warhammer board games, role-playing games, video games (Wikipedia lists 24 which is probably not even close to a definitive number) – it goes on and on because Arthur goes on. His character, his stories, are timeless and capable of endless adaptability. In 2018, the name Arthur was the twenty-third most popular boys’ name, up eight from the previous year.

Yet somehow, in all the magnificent creations barely touched upon in this chapter, we have lost sight of him. But even so, I believe we will never really believe the words we sometimes hear in darkness; Arthur is gone …

[all above images are in the Public Domain]

~~~~~~~~~~

Richard Denham is the co-author of the best-selling 'Britannia' series. These books follow a group of soldiers and their descendants through a chain of events which will eventually lead to the fall of Roman Britain and the descent into the Dark Ages. His other titles include 'Weird War Two', a collection of strange facts and unsolved mysteries from the Second World War. When not working, reading or writing, Richard enjoys dogs, real ale, music and is, unsuccessfully, trying to make pipe smoking cool again. In a previous role, Richard worked in local government where he helped expose deep-rooted corruption and sexual misconduct within Hampshire Constabulary. He's done with that now, preferring to spend his evenings watching Netflix and drinking tea with his loved ones.

Buy Richard's latest release, Arthur: Shadow of a God, HERE

So, Who is Ambrosius Aurelianus?

by Tim Walker

Ambrosius Aurelianus, to give him his full name, was a high king of the Britons in the early Dark Ages, some time after the exit of the Romans in the year 410. The exact dates of his reign, chronological details and physical evidence remain scant, and we must rely on the written accounts of three monks – Gildas (c. 650), Nennius (c.750) and Bede (c. 790), as well as the more fantastical History of the Kings of Briton by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1140). The Britons shared a culture and language with similar Celtic tribes across northern Europe, a language similar to modern day Welsh.

The closest in time of the surviving accounts of events in the fifth century come from the gloomy On the Ruin of Britain by Welsh monk Gildas, written around the year 550. Here is what he said about Ambrosius:

The poor remnants of our nation… that they might not be brought to utter destruction, took arms under the conduct of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a modest man, who of all the Roman nation was then alone in the confusion of this troubled period by chance left alive.

The Roman legions marched away between 409-410 never to return, and the Britons were left to defend themselves from various ‘barbarian’ raiders – the Angles, Saxons and Jutes from modern day Denmark and northern Germany, are not deemed to be invaders because they were employed to fight by an early high king named Vortigern (quite possibly a continuation of a tactic employed previously by the Romans). They clearly developed ambitions to settle having seen how green and pleasant England’s countryside was in comparison to their own salty marshes. They were also under pressure in their lands from other barbarian tribes pushing westwards.

Geoffrey of Monmouth is responsible for popularizing the legend of King Arthur and his knights, although there are earlier mentions of Arthur in the writings of Nennius in the eighth century. He more or less has a fifth century line-up of kings of Britain, starting with Constantine, who ‘wore the purple’, presumably as a provincial governor, and who was quickly murdered by ‘cruel and sly’ Vortigern. Vortigern is then defeated by Ambrosius Aurelianus and his brother Uther Pendragon. Uther then succeeds Aurelius, and is in turn succeeded by his son Arthur, with much sorcery from Merlin thrown into the mix. All of this is unproven in terms of hard archaeological facts. What happened where and when and who were the key players remain unanswered questions.

Taking up the story of Ambrosius from Geoffrey of Monmouth, we find the sons of Constantine, Ambrosius and Uther arriving in Britain from Gaul with an army to confront Vortigern. He was already unpopular with the people for his brutal acts, constant wars and for employing Saxons to fight in his mercenary army:

As soon as news of his [Ambrosius’s] coming was divulged, the Britons, who had been dispersed by their great calamities, met together from all parts… having assembled together the clergy, they anointed Ambrosius king, and paid him the customary homage.

The brothers defeat Vortigern in battle and pursue him to his fortress, called Genoreu, where their attempt to burn him out results in his death. Ambrosius is then the unchallenged high king of the Britons, and ready to form resistance to the spread of the Saxon, Angle and Jute colonists, under brothers Hengist and Horsa.

Therefore, the Saxons, in fear of him, retired beyond the Humber, and in those parts did fortify the cities and towns… this was good news to Ambrosius, who augmented his army and made an expeditious march towards the north.

Geoffrey goes on to describe the two armies meeting in battle on a field called Maisbeli, though to be somewhere in South Yorkshire. Again, a date and exact location of this battle is unknown. Another major battle in the late fifth century between the Britons and the Saxons often mentioned is Badon Hill, but again where this is and on what date it happened, and who commanded the Briton army – Ambrosius, Uther or Arthur – remains unknown.

It is widely thought that Geoffrey of Monmouth had supplemented the written sources of information he could muster with a fanciful imagination, perhaps also setting down folk legends that had been passed by word of mouth for generations. It is a masterful work, and all the more tantalising for the sparseness of other historical evidence of those misty days after the Romans departed and before Saxon kingdoms were established.

In my historical fiction series, I have woven a family saga – the Pendragons - taken from the writings of Gildas, Nennius and Geoffrey, surmising that if King Arthur was a real military leader who may have died around the year 537 at the Battle of Camlann (as mentioned in two sources), then there is 127 years of mayhem leading up to this point from the date of the Roman’s departure. My guesswork is that Vortigern ruled some time from 410-440, followed by Ambrosius, perhaps 440-470, then Uther from 470-500 and Arthur from 500-537. This is a conjectural framework for my storytelling in my three-part series, A Light in the Dark Ages.

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Tim Walker is an indie author based near Windsor in the UK.

His latest book is an historical fiction novel, Ambrosius: Last of the Romans, set in Britain in the fifth century. This is book two in a series - A Light in the Dark Ages - and follows on from book one, Abandoned! Part three of the series is a work in progress, which will be entitled, Uther's Destiny

He lives in Datchet Village, near Windsor, beside the River Thames, the inspiration for his book of short stories, Thames Valley Tales. His thriller novel, Devil Gate Dawn, was exposed on the Kindle Scout programme in March/April 2016, and is doing well due to its predictions of a post-Brexit Britain beset by political turmoil.

Download the e-book, Ambrosius: Last of the Romans from Amazon here:-
http://amazon.com/dp/B06X9S7XQ7
http://amazon.co.uk/dp/B06X9S7XQ7

Find Tim on his Website

Manufacturing a Mythology: Brutus, the Legendary Founder of Britain

by Rosanne E. Lortz

If you’re an ancient Greek, you have wrathful Achilles, the “swift-footed son of Peleus” who defeats Priam’s mighty son Hector and paves the way for the eventual destruction of Troy. Or if guile is more your style, you have Odysseus, the resourceful hero who wanders the world for ten years on his homeward voyage, braving Cyclops, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, before slaying the scores of suitors ensconced in his own halls.

If you’re an imperial Roman, you have Aeneas, striding proudly out of the flames of Troy, escaping the wiles of Dido of Carthage and carving out a new home in Italy.

Aeneas' Flight from Troy, by Federico Barocci (1598)

But if you’re British and living in the ninth century A.D., you have…nothing. And frankly, it’s kind of embarrassing. Or, at least, it was to the historian Nennius.

How could a country have a proper pedigree if it could not trace its ancestors back to the siege of Troy?

The answer? It couldn’t. And so Nennius began his Historia Brittonum with this story of the legendary “founder” of Britain, a story that seems, almost certainly, concocted from his own fertile imagination since no other versions of the tale precede it.

Aeneas, after the Trojan war, arrived with his son [Ascanius] in Italy; and having vanquished Turnus, married Lavinia, the daughter of king Latinus….  

But Ascanius married a wife, who conceived and became pregnant. And Aeneas, having been informed that his daughter-in-law was pregnant, ordered his son to send his magician to examine his wife, whether the child conceived were male or female. The magician came and examined the wife and pronounced it to be a son, who should become the most valiant among the Italians, and the most beloved of all men.  

In consequence of this prediction, the magician was put to death by Ascanius [who presumably thought that he was the most valiant and most beloved?]; but it happened that the mother of the child dying at its birth, he was named Brutus; and after a certain interval agreeably to what the magician had foretold, whilst he was playing with some others he shot his father with an arrow, not intentionally but by accident.  

He was, for this cause, expelled from Italy, and came to the islands of the Tyrrhene sea, when he was exiled on account of the death of Turnus, slain by Aeneas. He then went among the Gauls, and built the city of Turones, called Turnis. At length he came to this island, named from him Britannia, dwelt there, and filled it with his own descendants, and it has been inhabited from that time to the present period.

This story, spun by Nennius, was taken by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his twelfth century Historia Regum Britanniae and embellished even further. He expanded the simple tale into a chapter that numbers twenty-one pages in my edition of the work.

The "Brutus Stone" in Totnes in Devon,
where Geoffrey of Monmouth
says Brutus landed.

Brutus, now the great-grandson (not the grandson) of Aeneas, shows his cunning and prowess as he assembles an army of exiled Trojans, wins victories in Gaul, and crosses the channel into Britain where he must defeat a fierce band of giants. He even builds a capital city on the banks of the Thames, calling it Troia Nova—“New Troy.”

After Geoffrey of Monmouth, the legend of Brutus became widely known and promulgated. The anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight commences his story thus:

When the last assault had been delivered, and the siege of Troy was over, and the city was destroyed by fire and lay in ashes, Prince Aeneas sailed away with his noble kindred, and they conquered new realms…. And far over the French flood [i.e. the English Channel] Felix Brutus, with joy in his heart, founded a broad realm on the hills of Britain….

And in a charming inclusio, once the story of Sir Gawain has been fully told, the author brings us back to Brutus to conclude his tale:

This adventure happened in the days of King Arthur, and the books about Britain, that Brutus founded, record it. And many other adventures like it have befallen since the siege and assault ceased at Troy and the bold knight Brutus first made his way to this land. 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is just one example among many of how the story of the legendary Brutus became commonplace over the next several centuries. Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which was published in the sixteenth century during the life of Shakespeare, gives more than a nod to the story and treats it as proper history:

After…came Brutus the son of Sylvius with a great train of the posterity of the dispersed Trojans in 324 ships…. [He] brought them also wholly under his rule and governance, and dispossessing the peers & inferior owners of their lands and possessions, he divided the country among such princes and captains as he in his arrival here had led out of Greece with him.

A pic of Brutus of Troy
from 1553

Although Shakespeare, to my knowledge, did not mention Brutus (or, at least, this Brutus), he did use Holinshed’s Chronicles as a source for some of the works in his corpus. His plays King Lear and Cymbeline, both about semi-mythical kings of Britain, show that he was fascinated by the early, legendary days of England. His play Troilus and Cressida (which is set during the fall of Troy) shows that he was also fascinated by the “matter of Rome”—as they called classical mythology.

Geoffrey of Monmouth took Nennius’ few short paragraphs and penned an adventure-filled saga of twenty-one pages. What literary brilliance could Shakespeare have achieved if he had taken Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history and plotted a play about Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain? That is a play I would have enjoyed reading....
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Rosanne E. Lortz is the author of two books: I Serve: A Novel of the Black Prince, a historical adventure/romance set during the Hundred Years' War, and Road from the West: Book I of the Chronicles of Tancred, the beginning of a trilogy which takes place during the First Crusade.

You can learn more about Rosanne's books at her Official Author Website where she also blogs about writing, mothering, and things historical.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin Books, 1966.

Holinsheds Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 1587 Edition. Found at The Holinshed Project. http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/toc.php?edition=1587

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Translated by M.R. Ridley. Found in Medieval Romances, edited by Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Hibbard Loomis. USA: Random House, 1957.