In the History of … Princess Elizabeth, Camden indicated that he thought it improper to invent speeches “of mine own Head.” Truth was his “onely Scope and Aim,” and truth meant matters of fact: “The bright Lustre of uncorrupt Faithfulness shining forth in … Monuments and Records.” The historical scholar must not invent, then, but what should the historian do with venerable material that was often dismissed as fabulous but more often included in accounts of the history of England? Such was the “British History,” the collections of stories about ancient kings and visits from apostles of Christ, much of which was derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae or History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136). Geoffrey's widely read History was an important authority on the Trojan Brut and King Arthur for at least four hundred years, but from the first there were skeptics: Geoffrey's contemporary William of Newburgh denounced the former's account as “Ridicula jigmenta.” Yet the Galfridian stories also had credible defenders like Caradoc of Lancarvan, and important historians defended and used Geoffrey's account of British antiquity for centuries. However, the sixteenth century is generally represented as the moment when faith in Geoffrey was undermined, and while it was Polydore Vergil who began the “debunking” of Brut and Arthur, Camden is usually named as the historian who definitively discredited Geoffrey's account.

Whoever gets the credit, most historians of English historiography have argued that “reputable” scholars “had decided against Geoffrey” by the beginning of the seventeenth century.