Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136) changed the course of history writing for centuries. It newly provided the Britons with a substantial role in the insular past and inspired the writing and copying of several Brut chronicles. This chapter surveys the development of Brut chronicles in England, in terms of the incorporation of legendary British history into accounts of Anglo-Saxon and later English rulers. It then focuses on one Brut history, the Prose Brut – the most popular secular, vernacular text written in late medieval England – looking at this chronicle’s reshaping of Geoffrey’s Historia at the transfer from British to English power. An exploration of the role of Cadwallader in the Prose Brut provides a case study to consider some of the ways in which the chronicle reshaped this period in the past in its original Anglo-Norman version (the Oldest Version) and then in later versions, written in English. The Oldest Version reimagined the British, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman conquests, providing a distinctive account of Brutus’s foundation of Britain and describing William’s reign in positive terms. But most strikingly, the Oldest Version omitted Cadwallader – Geoffrey of Monmouth’s last British king – from its narrative of the past. However, many English Prose Bruts added the famous ruler back into the historical record. Their distinctive account of Cadwallader’s reign shows some of the ways in which medieval writers reflected on moments of conquest and on the transitions between peoples in this history. Brut texts and manuscripts are ripe for further critical study.

IN THE FINAL CHAPTER OF HER MOST RE CENT BOOK, Manuscript and Print in London, c.1475–1530, Julia Boffey writes of the chronicler Robert Fabyan that he ‘resided in London for over fifty years and wrote in different contexts and forms about his city's constitution and history’. Like Fabyan, Julia's own writing crosses different contexts and forms, both material and literary. This border-crossing is not only a hallmark of her own scholarship but has also made new forms of inquiry possible for scholars of all kinds. From her earliest work on Middle English lyrics to her most recent publications about the print reception of medieval authors, Julia's writing is typified by a mode of expression that is subtly understated, guiding the reader through arguments that are always searching, frequently groundbreaking and very often inspirational. We mention these qualities at the outset of this introduction because it is impossible to write about Julia's scholarship without simultaneously acknowledging her collegiality. Her generosity and kindness as a scholar are evident in her numerous collaborative endeavours, from co-authored journal articles to co-edited collections of essays and to indispensable works of reference such as The New Index of Middle English Verse.

For Julia, excellent scholarship is a conversation. It is work that engages, listens and responds to other endeavours in the field. This commitment to the health of the wider scholarly community is of course visible in other areas of her curriculum vitae. The many awards and fellowships she has been granted are a reflection of her service to the profession, and while too numerous to list here in full, they are a testament to her substantial contributions to the field. She has held visiting professorships at the University of Colorado (1998), University of Connecticut (2012) and Keio University (2018), and in 2005 she was an instructor on the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. She has been the recipient of many fellowships from the Huntington Library, San Marino (2011 and 2016) to the Houghton Library, Harvard (2011), and has been a British Academy Research Reader (1995–97) and a British Academy/ Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow (2011).

CAMBRIDGE, Corpus Christi College, MS 546 (hereafter Corpus 546) is one of four royal genealogical rolls currently held in the Parker Library's collection. It was written in 1527, in English and on paper, by a certain Ambrose Middelton of Inner Temple in London, we learn from a Latin colophon at the end of the roll. The roll begins with the Creation (a prologue describes the seven days in which God created the world) and, like several royal genealogies produced in fifteenth-century England, the illustrated tree diagram in Corpus 546 opens with a roundel for Adam and Eve, from whom all proceeding figures are shown to descend. The diagram progresses through selected Old Testament figures and Trojan kings until it reaches Aeneas, Silvius and Brutus. It continues through a host of legendary British rulers, ultimately derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136), and then through Anglo-Saxon kings. Lines of popes and emperors run down the left and right sides of the roll, as is common in many genealogical rolls produced in late medieval England. However, while these other rolls bring the diagrammatic history up to date with contemporary English rulers, Corpus 546 ends with the Anglo-Saxon king Harold, son of Godwine. Little is known about this roll, and it has not yet benefitted from critical study. However, as I aim to demonstrate here, it will be of great interest to scholars interested in royal genealogies and, especially, in the Prose Brut.

I argue in this essay that Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 546 presents a hitherto unidentified text of the English Prose Brut chronicle, albeit a highly abbreviated version of it. To demonstrate this, I examine two episodes and one narrative feature that are characteristic of the Prose Brut but are not necessarily found in other histories of England's rulers: the story of Albina; the tale of King Curan, known to readers of medieval romance as Havelok the Dane; and the Prose Brut's sequence of early Anglo-Saxon kings. I suggest that Corpus 546 belongs in Lister Matheson's group of ‘Very Short Texts Based on the Brut’, in his ‘Peculiar Texts and Versions’ category, and I also contend that it is unique in the Prose Brut tradition.

London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 84, the first folio of which appears on the cover of this book, was a manuscript very close to Lister Matheson's heart. Although he described the manuscript with a critical eye as having a ‘poorly drawn half-page frontpiece’, Matheson had been working with great diligence and affection on Lambeth 84 for nearly three decades: he mentioned it many times in his classroom lectures on the Prose Brut and the History of the Book, and had even managed to use it as an example in his course on Chaucer and occasionally in his famed class on Medieval Drama. Indeed, he had been planning to write a monograph about it; thus far he had presented four papers and published an essay on the Arthurian stories in the chronicle. He was particularly struck by the physical composition of the chronicle itself: the amount of supplementary material written in the margins was ‘unparalleled’ and there was a noticeably large number of small slips of vellum interspersed in the manuscript. In the classroom, his attention to detail, combined with a thorough knowledge of medieval historical and literary texts and his skill as a thrilling storyteller, made him a fascinating and entertaining teacher: we knew that everything in his lecture would sooner or later connect with everything else, with the clarity and intellectual satisfaction of a Venn diagram. (Matheson drew such diagrams on the board when teaching complex ideas and theories, and used the overlapping circles to illustrate relationships between characters in medieval texts.) We understood that to be proper medievalists, we must grasp the content of a text as well as the material circumstances in which that text was created. One of the most difficult skills Matheson taught his students was how to glean a solid conclusion from what first appeared to be a complete lack of information. No detail was ever insignificant: he showed us how to extrapolate seminal discoveries from the smallest elements.

An exploration of the late Professor Lister M. Matheson's influence as a scholar and a teacher lies at the heart of this collection.