Gildas in the mid-sixth century writes a stinging attack on his fellow Britons for their pathetic behaviour after the withdrawal of the Romans and the coming of the Saxons, and for their sinfulness which he sees as responsible for their dramatic decline. His Latin is robust and complex, with references to the Bible and to earlier Latin literature, with neologisms and the occasional word drawn from English.

Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Four focuses on intermarriage and incest, first tracing medieval understanding of these concepts in biblical tradition before examining contemporary evidence for intermarriage and incest in early medieval legal and historical texts. Origin legends expanded further to envision what might have happened after a foundational ancestor who emigrated alone or with a small band of followers arrived to the insular region. Women were necessary in order to preserve the population, and there were really only two solutions to the problem: intermarriage or incest. This chapter examines each of these motifs in turn, studying how they were introduced into insular origin legends and expanded to create different narrative possibilities for political commentary as the corpus grew.

A key argument of this book is that it is impossible to separate the growth of any insular origin narrative from that of the larger corpus of historical writing which contained them. Chapter One presents the evidence for the textual connections between these works, while the chapters to follow analyse the implications of these connections. This chapter outlines the sources and later reuses of each major work under consideration. Specialists on individual texts and manuscripts will already be aware of many of these connections, yet broader scholarship on the early medieval period still treats so-called ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Scottish’ literary and historical traditions as disparate. This chapter thus provides the ‘hard evidence’ for the extent to which the corpus of texts containing origin narratives influenced one another during the early medieval period. Early medieval authors were interested not solely in writing the story of their own people, but rather, in collecting the histories of the peoples of Britain and Ireland together. Chapter One overturns the common perception that the authors of these texts were working in proto-national isolation, instead revealing the textual connections that shaped the intellectual landscape of the early medieval insular region.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Three focuses on kin-slaying, first tracing the influence of the biblical legend of Cain and the classical legend of Romulus and Remus on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for kin-slaying in early medieval legal and historical texts. As insular origin narratives expanded, their authors recognised the narrative need to explain ancestral exile. The idea that a foundational ancestor had committed the crime of kin-slaying was introduced via the Brutus story in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum and proved subsequently popular, as exile was theoretically the legal sentence for this crime. As a narrative motif, kin-slaying allowed a people to retain the prestige of ties to ancient dynasties while embracing political independence in the present moment.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Two focuses on exile, first tracing the influence of the biblical myth of Exodus and the classical legend of the Aeneid on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for exile in early medieval legal and historical texts. The chapter argues that as the corpus of insular works containing origin narratives grew and developed over time, the concept of exile took on central importance. Arising from Gildas’s foundational description of Britain as an island on the outermost fringes of the known world, the centrality of exile to insular origin stories grew after the ninth-century Historia Brittonum introduced the influential legend that Britain’s founding ancestor was Brutus, an exile from Troy. From there, the concept of exile gained increasing thematic importance within insular origin narratives.

When writing their own histories and those of their neighbours, early medieval insular peoples sought to provide answers to some obvious questions. Who were their ancestors? Where did they come from? And why did they leave their homelands? Over the course of the early medieval period, a discourse of origin narratives developed within the insular region. By the time of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, an expansive origin legend had become attached to each of the four peoples who inhabited Britain and Ireland. This book explores the development of these stories in the early medieval period from (roughly) the departure of the Romans to the arrival of the Normans before turning to an examination of how they were treated by early modern chroniclers writing histories with a more nationalist bent. In the early medieval period, the corpus of insular origin legends evolved together to flesh out the history of the region. Individual origin narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other works. Together, these legends were constructed not to form four distinct ‘national’ histories but rather to fill in the blanks of prehistory for the region as a whole.

Between 919 and 936, Viking attacks caused a sustained crisis in Breton politics: much of the ruling elite fled to Francia or England. By the time a new duke of Brittany was installed with the help of the English king Æthelstan, Frankish aristocrats had encroached on Breton territory, introducing the French language and social norms. However, the new ruling class embraced a Breton political identity. This involved, for the first time, the promotion of a British secular founding figure for Brittany as a whole, a certain Riwal, for whom a genealogy (a very Insular kind of ‘charter’ to rule) was constructed using materials that seem to have originated in south-west Britain. The relics and Lives of Breton saints had been exported to many parts of France and England, and as a result a number of centres outside Brittany produced Lives of Breton saints, or hagiography apparently influenced by Breton motifs, during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Within Brittany, eleventh-century writings produced at Rhuys (the Life of St Gildas) and at Landévennec (the cartulary) show renewed contact and input from Wales, Ireland and perhaps northern Britain.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.

After 410 A. D., no written account gives direct evidence of the events in the British Islands. Gildas was the first to break the silence and testify to a world that had lost many of its points of reference. Cut off from the continent, the insular scholars kept their knowledge of the Latin language and of the writings of the Fathers of the Church. Around 500, Gildas relied on the Bible to interpret the wars between Britons and Saxons, and depicted the misfortunes of the Britons on the model of the Hebrews, as a new Chosen People chastened by God for its sins.

But the mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great led to the rediscovery of the continental chronology of events, and eventually to British reintegration into the Providential History of Roman Christendom. From Bede onward, two fundamental elements for recording history in the British Isles during the Middle Ages were thus established: the need for a chronological framework to be constructed at all costs, and the coexistence of contradictory versions of the past illustrating rival claims to be the Chosen People by the Scots, the Britons, the English and the Saxons.

This chapter looks at the belief, expressed in Wulfstan’s work Geþyncđu, that the public obligations inherent in the right order of society were closely connected with landholding. His concern that holding five hides should underpin the standing of those active in public life was part of a moral order in which for young nobles and peasant boys alike, acquiring land was the gateway to marriage and the establishment of a family . These should mark the beginning of a man’s life as a responsible and armed member of society. At the root of this concern is the lesson of the past expressed, and still read in Wulstan’s time, of Gildas’ narrative of the ‘Downfall of Britain’: England was vulnerable to invasion.

Chapter 3 argues that a particularly powerful ‘legitimising notion’ was that people’s rights, status, and even their ownership of property, derive from the remote past, even if this was often an imagined past. Anglo-Saxon conquest narratives played a very important part in forming an ‘imagined community’, a people’s sense of their common identity, invoked particularly when the country was under threat. The narrative of Gildas’ ‘Downfall of Britain’ recurs throughout the book as legitimising the association of freedom, land, and public obligation.