GILDAS, Saint, ed. VERGIL, Polydore (with) TWINE, John

An interesting sammelband of two related critical works on ancient English history: the first edition of the first published work by Gildas, C6th monk and historian, being his chronicle of Britain from the Roman Conquest to his own time, and the first and only edition of John Twine’s (c.1501-81) commentary on ancient British history, from the arrival of Brutus after the Trojan War. Both these works expressed scepticism about the mythical origins of Britian claimed by medieval chroniclers. Gildas was edited by the Italian Tudor historian Polydore Vergil (d. 1555) and is, according to Denys Hay, ‘the first critical edition of an English historical text’ (Polydore Vergil (Oxford: 1952), p. 30). The dedication dated 1525 is to Cuthbert Tunstall (1474-1559), then Bishop of London and later Bishop of Durham, who supplied one of the source manuscripts. Vergil used this publication of Gildas ‘to prepare for the anti-Arthurian position he was to take up in the Anglica Historia,’ his chronicle of England published in 1534 (Hay, p. 30).

Gildas’s work is in the form of a sermon in three parts, the first an account of the Roman conquest and post-Roman Britain, the remainder a virulent attack on the failure of the British monarchs and clergy in the face of Saxon incursions. It is noted for containing the earliest account of the Battle of Badon, the British victory against the Saxons, in which King Arthur was supposed to have fought, though Gildas deliberately omits him; supposedly this was because Arthur had killed Gildas’s brother, the Pictish raider Hueil mab Caw. Gildas was therefore a useful source for the humanist Vergil, who rejected any historical truth in the Arthurian legends and claimed that Geoffrey of Monmouth had told lies (see below). Vergil outraged more traditional English historians, who saw the Arthurian legend as integral to Tudor identity.  

John Twine was a schoolmaster and MP who wrote this historical work for his son Thomas, then a student at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and later a physician, who published it and dedicated it to his friend and patron Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, later Thomas Sackville, 1^st Earl of Dorset, and his son Robert Sackville, later 2^nd Earl. Like Vergil, Twine debunks myths about the ancient origins of Britain, including those presented by poets such as Horace and Virgil and by medieval chroniclers, especially Geoffrey of Monmouth. He refers frequently – and anecdotally, as they were never published – to the sceptical opinions of Nicholas Wotton (c.1497-1567), who rejected Monmouth, as well as to humanist commentators like Juan Luis Vives (1493-1540), Pomponius Laetus (1428-98) and Polydore Vergil himself. The second part, a rambling discussion of English place names, geography, botany, etc., contains an examination of the fictional King Arthur and Merlin, with a discussion of the real historical genealogies of the English royal and noble houses.