Devil is more often mentioned in local association than Arthur.”[66] The precise significance of such association is perhaps, in both cases, equally indeterminable. Investigators of Arthurian origins talk a good deal about Brittany. Unfortunately, there is no early Breton, any more than Cornish, literature to draw upon for any further information about a pre-historic, or a pre-romantic, Arthur. The _lais_ of Marie of France are supposed to embody matter borrowed from Breton minstrels who sang before the flourishing of romance; but only one of her poems, ‘Lanval’--and that but remotely--has any connection with early Arthurian lore. It may be that “the Bretons” whom Wace mentions as “telling many a fable of the Table Round”[67] were Armorican Britons. We know for certain, at any rate, that a legend of Arthur, which included a belief in his “return,” had taken firm root in Brittany by the twelfth century.[68] There is, therefore, no difficulty about assuming that it was from the Bretons, rather than from the Welsh, that the Normans derived their first knowledge of Arthur, and so came to construct out of the stories connected with him the romantic cycle known as the _matière de Bretagne_. The controversy waged about the relative shares of Great and of Little Britain in supplying matter for the French romantic writers[69] is of no real consequence--everybody is agreed that that matter is to be ultimately traced to a Celtic, and a British, source. What is of more importance is the fact that before any “matter of Britain” is heard of as a great romantic theme, a writer appeared who, by means of an orderly narrative embodied in an apparently sober chronicle, aroused an interest in Arthur’s life and deeds such as no mere romance could ever have succeeded in doing. He was Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it is in his _History_ that we get our first full-length portrait of Arthur as a great, and actual, “king of Britain.” CHAPTER III GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH AND THE CHRONICLERS Chaucer, in his _Hous of Fame_, gives a station of conspicuous honour to a group of writers whose claim to distinction is that they are all “besy for to bere up Troye.” Homer, inevitably, heads the list, standing “Ful wonder hye on a pilere Of yren.”