Looking for Arthur in Short Histories and Genealogies of England’s Kings

In this article, I explore representations of King Arthur’s reign in a group of genealogical chronicles and rolls written in Anglo-Norman prose which flourished in England in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and early decades of the fourteenth. These short histories began as accounts of Anglo-Saxon and later English kings, but many copies soon acquired a prologue recounting the history of selected mythical British rulers ultimately derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae. Shockingly in the face of Galfridian tradition, this prologue omits King Arthur. However, close examination of individual manuscripts reveals that scribes nevertheless made space for Arthur in the compressed historical narrative. I analyse the different approaches these scribes took to fitting Arthur into the genealogical text, and consider the implications of Arthur’s inclusion for the shaping of English history and (imagined) royal lineage. I argue that these texts present Arthur as ‘English’, as the eminent ruler of Engletere and ancestor of contemporary English kings, through an imagined and geographical lineage that unites rulers of different ethnicities. King Arthur is found in these royal genealogies long before he appears in those produced in fifteenth-century England, which have benefitted from more scholarly attention. My study sheds light on the development of royal genealogical rolls in England, in terms of their increasing inclusion of Galfridian kings. Finally, I show that accounts of Arthur’s reign in these rolls are bound up in larger questions about chronology, which were central to the writing of history in late medieval England.