Layamon's ''Brut'' (ca. 1190 - 1215), also known as ''The Chronicle of Britain'', is a

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English ...

poem compiled and recast by the English priest

Layamon Layamon or Laghamon (, ; ) – spelled Laȝamon or Laȝamonn in his time, occasionally written Lawman – was an English poet of the late 12th/early 13th century and author of the ''Brut'', a notable work that was the first to present the legend ...

. Layamon's ''Brut'' is 16,096 lines long and narrates the history of Britain. It is the first

historiography Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians ha ...

written in English since the '' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle''. Named for

Britain Britain most often refers to: * The United Kingdom, a sovereign state in Europe comprising the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands * Great Britain, the largest island in the United King ...

's mythical founder,

Brutus of Troy Brutus, also called Brute of Troy, is a legendary descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas, known in medieval British history as the eponymous founder and first king of Britain. This legend first appears in the ''Historia Brittonum'', an anonymous ...

, the poem is largely based on the

Anglo-Norman French Anglo-Norman, also known as Anglo-Norman French ( nrf, Anglo-Normaund) (French: ), was a dialect of Old Norman French that was used in England and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in Great Britain and Ireland during the Anglo-Norman period. When ...

Roman de Brut The ''Brut'' or ''Roman de Brut'' (completed 1155) by the poet Wace is a loose and expanded translation in almost 15,000 lines of Norman-French verse of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin '' History of the Kings of Britain''. It was formerly known ...

'' by

Wace Wace ( 1110 – after 1174), sometimes referred to as Robert Wace, was a Medieval Norman poet, who was born in Jersey and brought up in mainland Normandy (he tells us in the ''Roman de Rou'' that he was taken as a child to Caen), ending his car ...

, which is in turn a version of

Geoffrey of Monmouth Geoffrey of Monmouth ( la, Galfridus Monemutensis, Galfridus Arturus, cy, Gruffudd ap Arthur, Sieffre o Fynwy; 1095 – 1155) was a British cleric from Monmouth, Wales and one of the major figures in the development of British historiography ...

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

Historia Regum Britanniae ''Historia regum Britanniae'' (''The History of the Kings of Britain''), originally called ''De gestis Britonum'' (''On the Deeds of the Britons''), is a pseudohistorical account of British history, written around 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. I ...

''. Layamon's poem, however, is longer than both and includes an enlarged section on the life and exploits of King Arthur. It is written in the

alliterative verse In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of ...

style commonly used in

poetry by

rhyming chroniclers Rhyming Chroniclers, a series of writers who flourished in England in the 13th century, and related histories of the country in rhyme, in which the fabulous occupies a conspicuous place, among which Layamon's ''Brut'' (1205) takes the lead. One of ...

, the two halves of the alliterative lines being often linked by rhyme as well as by alliteration.

Language and style

The versification of the ''Brut'' has proven extremely difficult to characterise. Written in a loose

alliterative Alliteration is the conspicuous repetition of initial consonant sounds of nearby words in a phrase, often used as a literary device. A familiar example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". Alliteration is used poetically in various ...

style, sporadically deploying rhyme as well as a

caesura 300px, An example of a caesura in modern western music notation A caesura (, . caesuras or caesurae; Latin for " cutting"), also written cæsura and cesura, is a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begin ...

l pause between the

hemistich A hemistich (; via Latin from Ancient Greek, Greek , from "half" and "verse") is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Latin verse, Latin and Greek poetry, the hemist ...

s of a line, it is perhaps closer to the rhythmical prose of

Ælfric of Eynsham Ælfric of Eynsham ( ang, Ælfrīc; la, Alfricus, Elphricus; ) was an English abbot and a student of Æthelwold of Winchester, and a consummate, prolific writer in Old English of hagiography, homilies, biblical commentaries, and other genres ...

than to verse, especially in comparison with later alliterative writings such as ''

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ''Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'' is a late 14th-century chivalric romance in Middle English. The author is unknown; the title was given centuries later. It is one of the best-known Arthurian stories, with its plot combining two types of ...

'' and '' Piers Plowman''. Layamon's alliterating verse is difficult to analyse, seemingly avoiding the more formalised styles of the later poets. Layamon's Middle English is notably "native" in its vocabulary, i.e. devoid words borrowed from Norman French; the scholar B.S. Monroe counted a mere 150 words derived from French in the poem's 16,000 lines. It is remarkable for its abundant Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; deliberately archaic Saxon forms that were quaint even by Anglo-Saxon standards. Imitations in the ''Brut'' of certain stylistic and prosodic features of

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

alliterative verse show a knowledge and interest in preserving its conventions. Layamon's ''Brut'' remains one of the best extant examples of early Middle English. Solopova, Elizabeth, and

Stuart D. Lee Stuart Dermot Lee (born 3 February 1966) is a British specialist in information technology at Oxford University Computing Services and a Reader (academic rank), Reader in E-learning at Oxford University, but is best known for his scholarly books on ...

. Key Concepts in Medieval Literature. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. During an era in English history when most prose and poetry were composed in French, Layamon wrote to his illiterate, impoverished religious audience in

Worcestershire Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified Kingdom of England in 927, at which time it was constituted as a county (see H ...

.Everett, Dorothy. (1978) "Layamon and the Earliest Middle English Alliterative Verse." Essays on Middle English Literature. Ed. Patricia Kean. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,. In 1216, around the time Layamon wrote, King

Henry III of England Henry III (1 October 1207 – 16 November 1272), also known as Henry of Winchester, was King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Aquitaine from 1216 until his death in 1272. The son of King John and Isabella of Angoulême, Henry a ...

came to the throne. Henry regarded himself as an Englishman above any other nationality, unlike many of his recent predecessors, and moved his kingdom away from the

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intellig ...

dialects that had ruled the country's cultural endeavors.Ackerman, Robert W. (1966) '' Backgrounds to Medieval English Literature''. 1st. New York: Random House, Inc. Several original passages in the poem — at least in accordance with the present knowledge of extant texts from the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

— suggest Layamon was interested in carving out the history of the

Britons British people or Britons, also known colloquially as Brits, are the citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown dependencies.: British nationality law governs mod ...

as the people 'who first possessed the land of the English'.

Manuscripts, editions and translations

Two copies of the manuscript are known; one in the MS.

Cotton Caligula This is an incomplete list of some of the manuscripts from the Cotton library that today form the Cotton collection of the British Library. Some manuscripts were destroyed or damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, and a few are kept in othe ...

A ix, dating from the third quarter of the 13th century, and in the

Cotton Otho This is an incomplete list of some of the manuscripts from the Cotton library that today form the Cotton collection of the British Library. Some manuscripts were destroyed or damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, and a few are kept in othe ...

C xiii, copied about fifty years later (though the extant, damaged, text is shorter). Both manuscripts are in the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

References

Bibliography

* Brook, G. L. and R. F. Leslie (ed.), ''Laȝamon: Brut, Edited from British Museum MS. Cotton Caligula A. ix and British Museum MS. Cotton Otho C. xiii'', Early English Text Society, 250, 277, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1963–78), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;idno=LayCal. The standard edition. * W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg (ed. and trans.), ''Laȝamon's Arthur: The Arthurian Section of Laȝamon's ‘Brut’ (Lines 9229-14297)'' (Harlow: Longman, 1989). Facing text and translation, based on the Caligula MS. * Allen, Rosamund (trans.), ''Laȝamon: Brut'' (London, 1992) * Wace and Layamon, ''Arthurian chronicles'', trans. by Eugene Mason (London: Dent, 1962) * * * {{Authority control 12th-century poems 13th-century poems Arthurian literature in Middle English Epic poems in English Middle English poems Translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth