famous--asserts
that he used a Breton book which told him all manner of facts otherwise
unknown. The statement is by no means improbable. But, for all that, the
pages of Geoffrey contain no new fact about the first five centuries
which is also true.[2] From first to last, the Celtic tradition
preserves no real remnant of recollections dating from the
Romano-British age. Those who might have handed down such memories had
either perished in wars with the English or sunk back into the native
environment of the west.[3]

[Footnote 1: The story of Vortigern and Hengist now first occurs and is
obvious tradition or legend. A prince with a Celtic name may have ruled
Kent in 450. There were, indeed, plenty of rulers with barbaric names in
the fourth and fifth centuries of the Empire. But the tale cannot be
called certain history.]

[Footnote 2: Thus, he refers to Silchester, and so good a judge as
Stubbs once suggested that for this he had some authority now lost to
us. Yet the mere fact that Geoffrey knows only the English name
Silchester disproves this idea. Had he used a genuinely ancient
authority, he would have (as elsewhere) employed the Roman name. Another
explanation may be given. Geoffrey wrote in an antiquarian age, when the
ruins of Roman towns were being noted. Both he and Henry of Huntingdon
seem to have heard of the Silchester ruins, and both accordingly
inserted the place into their pages.]

[Footnote 3: The English mediaeval chronicles have sometimes been
supposed to preserve facts otherwise forgotten about Roman times. So far
as I can judge, this is not the case, even with Henry of Huntingdon.
Henry, in the later editions of his work, borrowed a few facts from
Geoffrey of Monmouth, which are wanting in his first edition (see the
All Souls MS.; the truth is obscured in the Rolls Series text). He also
preserves one local tradition from Colchester: otherwise he contains
nothing which need puzzle any inquirer. Giraldus Cambrensis, when at
Rome, saw some manuscript which contained a list of the five provinces
of fourth-century Britain--otherwise unknown throughout the Middle Ages
(_Archaeol. Oxoniensis_, 1894, p. 224).]

But we are moving in a dim land of doubts and shadows. He who wanders
here, wanders at his peril, for certainties are few, and that which at
one moment seems a fact, is only too likely, as the quest advances, to
prove a phantom. It is, too, a borderland, and its explorers need to
know something