If historians since Geoffrey have been as happy to see his implication as the Normans themselves must have been, they have not considered the import of its status as an insinuation rather than a forthright claim. Elsewhere Monmouth emphasizes ambiguity as an important factor both for his own writing and for Merlin’s activity: in his self-conscious distancing from his text’s pleasures; in the ambiguity of the Merlin Prophecies; in the diversity of his dedications. In fact Geoffrey himself repeatedly notes that the ambiguity of Merlin’s prophecies were the source of Merlin’s popularity. All were “filled with amazement by the equivocal [ambiguitate] meaning of [Merlin’s] words” (Thorpe 170). “Ambiguitate” glossed as “inclined to both sides; hybrid” and “wavering, hesitating, uncertain, doubtful, obscure.” The OED notes the early English meanings taken from Medieval Latin pertain to the second of these connotations, “a wavering of opinion, hesitation, doubt, uncertainty as to one’s course.” The diversity of manuscript redactions points further to “a wavering of opinion” in the contradictory interests of Geoffrey’s multiple and diverse dedicatees. But it also points far beyond Anglo-Norman partisan concerns. The politics of “ambiguitate” explain the Historia’s diverse and complicated reception. Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s text will be important to Welsh nationalist politics at various times throughout the Middle Ages. In that context it is unsurprising that some redactions of Geoffrey’s text identify (in prophecies known as the “Breton Hope”) British recovery of the totius insulae with Welsh claims to the island kingdom while others call such interpretations explicitly into question. The Bern and Harlech manuscripts of the Historia, for example, end with a disclaimer that denies any hope for a future Welsh rule: “The Welsh, once they had degenerated from the noble state enjoyed by the Britons, never afterwards recovered the overlordship of the island” (Thorpe 284).
This disclaimer explicitly contests Welsh “oppositional texts” and precludes Welsh hopes that they are the Britons who will return to rule the land. Disclaimers like this one, combined with Geoffrey’s equivocation, helped consolidate the power of Geoffrey’s patrons. Yet Geoffrey’s “ambiguitate” also means that his text will prove useful to Welsh resisters of Anglo-Norman conquest. J. S. P. Tatlock notes the early popularity of the Historia in Wales, a fact corroborated by Brynley Roberts’s important account of the significance of the Brut ϒ Brenhinedd (the earliest Middle Welsh translation of Geoffrey’s text) for Welsh intellectuals in the twelfth century and beyond when it became “a potent element in Welsh national consciousness until the end of the eighteenth century” (“Historia and Brut ϒ Brenhinedd,” 113).41 The ambiguity of Geoffrey’s Historia—read especially in the final ambiguous implication of British return—meant that subversive “oppositional” Welsh material could gain influence even at court.
Such is a powerful (and effective) display of creative makyng in the face of constraint. By some accounts Geoffrey’s history gained political prestige for the Welsh Britons into the next generation of Anglo-Norman affairs, a time when the direct conquest of Wales seemed a likely corollary of a Norman colonizing program. According to Welsh historian R. R. Davies, Wales was initially “peripheral” to Norman conquerors concerned with the security of their position in England and Normandy. Yet during the late eleventh and into the twelfth century (and in partial response to Welsh aid to Saxon dissidents) the conquerors turned their attentions westward. A struggle for supremacy over Wales ensued with the map of Norman control of Welsh regions constantly changing. During the period of Geoffrey’s initial popularity, Norman control of the area had weakened enough that, according to Welsh chroniclers of the 1160s, “all the Welsh united to throw off the rule of the French” conquerors who desired “to carry into bondage and to destroy all the Britons” (Brut y Tywysogyon, 1165, 1167, as cited by Davies, Conquest 52–53). Henry II’s 1165 campaign to crush Welsh resistance proved a failure; that fact apparently inspired a change in Henry’s policy. By 1171, again according to Davies, Henry’s policies “toward native Welsh princes … had changed radically” and “no English king would again invade Wales for almost forty years” (53–54). If Henry II’s failed military campaign inspired in him a desire to change his policy toward Wales, such a desire could find an ideological justification in Geoffrey’s book. Furthermore, there is evidence that Henry was well acquainted with Geoffrey’s text: interested in literature and history himself, Henry II had been educated at the Bristol residence of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chief patron.42 LaƷamon’s Middle English Brut, a verse rendering of Wace’s French verse rendering of Geoffrey’s Historia, links this insular chronicle tradition with Henry II, mentioning a dedication to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s queen.43 The links between Henry II’s policies and his role as patron of legendary histories has been noted by Patterson, who remarks that “much of the court literature of the period shows patterns of interest that are consistent with Henry’s political needs” (“Historiography,” 3).44
Geoffrey’s Historia, and later versions of its story, could encourage Henry II to appreciate the value of the Welsh as peers and allies rather than as conquered subjects. Representing the once glorious Welsh now debased by their own weaknesses and disgraced by aggressive Saxon conquerors implicitly identify the Saxons as the real Norman enemy. Joined by common enmity toward the Saxons, Norman and Briton become allies rather than rivals. Tatlock retorts that “those who profited most from Geoffrey’s work were the Britons; one of [Geoffrey’s] motives may well have been to heighten respect for them among his Norman superiors” (428). Modern histories of medieval Wales emphasize the Welsh, in contrast to the Saxons, as successful resisters of Norman invasion. In those accounts, Welsh resistance in the Anglo-Norman period produced Welsh independence from the English until Edwardian days.45 This image of a Welsh remnant resistant to conquest, maintaining an intact community amid loss, resonates with the image of the Britons from the end of the Historia, poised on the western edge of the island. The fantasy of a native British survival in Wales, as I will argue in Chapter 2, grants fifteenth-century sovereigns access to insular native roots resistant to continental aggressions, a resistance through which, by the second half of the fifteenth century, Edward IV will claim himself heir to a continuous native line of kings.
In the decades following Norman Conquest the meaning of such an image remains paradoxically ambiguous.46 Its popularity with the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and with Welsh resisters alike suggests both contestations over the identity of Brutus’s heirs, and the text’s ambivalent political uses in that debate. This ambivalence, moreover, links intercultural insular unity to what I am calling a national fantasy. Homi Bhabha’s account of “nation and narration” emphasizes both the fantasmatic nature of national narratives and the ways in which such texts always gesture, despite themselves, to the contestations and disunities they earnestly seek to avoid. Bhabha describes “the Janus-faced discourse of the nation,” one liable to “subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding” (Nation 3–4). Bhabha’s formulation seems uncannily pertinent to the twelfth century scene we have been examining—despite the fact that Bhabha, like many, identifies national narratives as modern inventions. Thus I turn finally to consider how we might understand this medieval oppositional history as, nonetheless, the history of a national fantasy.
Bhabha describes national narrations as ambivalent texts situated in crisis. This is because the