In the previous chapter I described the confidence Anglo-Norman prose chroniclers displayed in their works through their prologues. Such confidence could enable them to present their histories in an authoritative manner. At the same time, it allowed these authors to make changes to their sources in order to create a narrative of the past which was more congenial to themselves and their imagined audience. In the next three chapters I will analyse a number of these transformations, focusing on some of the historical periods and events which occupy key positions within their accounts of the history of Britain and England.

In this chapter, I will look at the way that the early history of the British Isles was continually rewritten and redeployed in these chronicles. Echoing the title of J. S. P. Tatlock's foundational study, I will refer to this material as the legendary history of Britain, since although these chronicles' accounts were indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannie, they nevertheless encompass a great variety of different narratives about the British past. Three episodes in this legendary history were particularly significant within the interpretations of the British past circulating in late medieval England: the reign of the first British king, Brutus; the reign of King Arthur; and the ‘passage of dominion’ over the land from the British to the Anglo-Saxons. Despite Brutus's importance in the use made of the legendary history, his part in the narrative was subject to fewer alterations in Anglo-Norman prose chronicles, and I will here focus mainly on Arthur's reign and the ‘passage of dominion’.