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Updated: June 18, 2025
The large variety of magical possessions assigned to Arthur is also a notable indication of the great emphasis that Welsh legend laid upon his mythological attributes and his character as otherworld adventurer. See also the notes on the lines cited from Layamon in Sir Frederic Madden's edition of the Brut.
Wace, the professional author, the scrupulous antiquarian and naïve poet, carefully refined the material of Geoffrey, and dressed it in the French costume of courtly life. Layamon, the intense and imaginative English priest, transformed it by the Saxon spirit, and divesting it of its courtly elegance, filled it with greater simplicity and force.
"Layamon laid down these books and turned the leaves; he beheld them lovingly; may the Lord be gracious to him! Pen he took with finger and wrote a book-skin, and the true words set together, and compressed the three books into one." Layamon's church is now that of Areley, near Bewdley in Worcestershire; his poem was in fact an expansion of Wace's "Brut" with insertions from Bæda.
About 1155 a Frenchman named Wace translated into his own language Geoffrey of Monmouth's works. This translation fell into the hands of Layamon, a priest living in Worcestershire, who proceeded to render the poem, with additions of his own, into the Southern English dialect. Wace's Brut has 15,300 lines; Layamon's, 32,250.
The corresponding Old English terms were forgotten during the age of illiteracy, and when, generations later, the speaker of English came again to deal with such subjects, he had to do like Layamon, when he knew no longer tungol-croeft, and could refer to it only as 'the craft ihote astronomie in other kunnes speche. Also Medulla Grammaticae, or usually Grammatice.
In later sources it assumes several phases, the most common of which is that recorded by Layamon that Arthur had been taken by fays from his final battle-field to Avalon, the Celtic otherworld, whence after the healing of his mortal wound he would return to earth.
This book proves how little hold the French language had upon the English people, for although our land had been ruled by Frenchmen for a hundred and fifty years, there are very few words in Layamon that are French or that are even made from French. But although Layamon wrote his book in English, it was not the English that we speak to-day.
If you will compare this poetry with that of Layamon, you will see that there is something in it quite different from his. This no longer rests, as that does, upon accent and alliteration, but upon rhyme. The English, too, in which it is written, is much more like the English of to-day. For Havelok was written perhaps a hundred years after Layamon's Brut.
His pronoun hit antedates English itself, being the Anglo-Saxon neuter of he. Ey God, a favorite expletive, is the original of egad, and goes back of Chaucer. Ax for ask and kag for keg were the primitive and legitimate forms, which we trace as far as the time of Layamon.
It seemed to draw all the beauty and wonder of the time to itself, and many stories which at first had been told apart from it came to be joined to it. We have seen how it has been told in Welsh, in Latin, and in French, and, last of all, we have it in English. The first great English writer of the stories of Arthur was named Layamon. He, too, was a priest, and, like Wace, he wrote in verse.
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