Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of
Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, strangely enough, the favorite
hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh
legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach
invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The language and
literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on their
Anglo-Saxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh borrowings in the English
speech, such as _bard_ and _druid_; but in the old Anglo-Saxon
literature there are no more traces of British song and story than if
the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers
for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own national
traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the
isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into
the general literature of Europe. The French came into contact with the
old British literature in two places: in the Welsh marches in England
and in the province of Brittany in France, where the population is of
Cymric race, and spoke, and still to some extent speaks, a Cymric
dialect akin to the Welsh.

About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh
descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward
bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called _Historia Britonum_,
in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of Æneas, came to
Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city of
New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later London. An air of
historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact
chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author
referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he
said, by a certain Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Here appeared that line
of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern