The meagreness of the pre-Norman Arthurian records which have been here reviewed stands in significant contrast to the amplitude and the range of the Arthurian matter which we find in the romantic productions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The contrast is so startling as to suggest at once that the coming of the Normans to Britain had much to do with what may be called the aggrandisation of Arthur. It was Geoffrey of Monmouth, as we shall see, writing under the direct auspices of a cultured Norman potentate, who did more than any other man to spread the renown of Arthur as a presumably historical character, and to give him for centuries an assured place in the chronicle literature of Britain. But Geoffrey could not have written “to order” such a book as his _History_ had he not a large stock of popular traditions to draw upon. All the evidence seems to point to the period extending from the tenth to the twelfth centuries as that of the popular growth of an Arthurian legend, on a large scale, among “the Celtic fringe.” By the beginning of the twelfth century Arthurian stories were circulating freely in Brittany, Cornwall and Wales. It is only on this supposition that one can account, for example, for a tumult caused at Bodmin in the year 1113, by a certain monk from Laon who had the temerity to deny that Arthur still lived.[40] Later on in the same century, as Alanus de Insulis records,[41] belief in Arthur’s “return” was so firmly held in the country districts of Brittany that a denial of it might have cost a man his life. Moreover, two chroniclers of repute who wrote before Geoffrey bear clear testimony to the widespread currency of Arthurian traditions in their day, and to the curiosity aroused in serious historians concerning the deeds of the British king. None of the Anglo-Norman chroniclers ranks higher as a trustworthy historical authority than William of Malmesbury,--the first great successor of Bede, whom he calls his master and exemplar. In the first chapter of his _History of the Kings of England_--the first version of which was completed in 1125--we find the following passage referring to the Saxon invasions in the sixth century:-- “When he (Vortimer) died, the British strength decayed, and all hope fled from them; and they would soon have perished altogether, had not Ambrosius, the sole survivor of the Romans, who became monarch after Vortigern, quelled the presumptuous barbarians by the powerful aid of the warlike Arthur. This is the Arthur of whom the idle tales of the Britons rave even unto this day; a man worthy to be celebrated not in the foolish dreams of deceitful fables, but in truthful histories. For he long sustained the declining fortunes of his native land, and roused the uncrushed spirit of the people to war.”