During six centuries the Saxons and the Normans combined to banish from the public mind the history of the Britons: it was lost; it did not exist even among the Britons in Wales. In the reign of Henry the First, an Archdeacon of Oxford, who was that king's justiciary, being curious in ancient histories, opportunely brought out of "Britain in France," "a very ancient book in the British tongue." This book, which still forms the gordian knot of the antiquary, he confided to the safe custody and fertile genius of Geoffry, the Monk of Monmouth. It contained a regular story of the British kings, opening with Brute, the great grandson of Priam in this airy generation; kings who, Geoffry "had often wondered, were wholly unnoticed by Gildas and Bede." "Yet," adds our historian, "their deeds were celebrated by many people in a _pleasant manner_, and _by heart, as if they had been written_." This remarkable sentence aptly describes that species of national songs which the early poets have always provided for the people, traditions which float before history is written. Whether this very ancient British book, almost five centuries old, was a volume of these poetical legends, which our historian might have arranged into that "regular history" which is furnished by his Latin prose version, we are left without the means of ascertaining, since it proved to be the only copy ever found, and was never seen after the day of the translation. The Monk of Monmouth does not arrogate to himself any other merit than that of a faithful translator, and with honest simplicity warns of certain additions, which, even in a history of two thousand years contained in a small volume, were found necessary.