Page:Somerset Historical Essays.djvu/34

 names can no longer be traced, go back to the first half of the fifth century: St Patrick was the first, and St Benignus his pupil was the second. We may question this to-day, if we will, as Ralph Higden questioned it in the fourteenth century, and suppose that there has been some confusion with a later Patrick. But if we had lived in William of Malmesbury's time, and seen St Patrick's tomb with the Irish pilgrims kneeling round it, and had copied the epitaph of St Benignus at Meare, and visited St Bridget's chapel at Beokery, or Little Ireland, and seen her wallet and her distaff, we should have been sceptical indeed had we accused the historian of excessive credulity.

It was left to a later age to take over St Phagan and St Deruvian from Geoffrey of Monmouth or Giraldus Cambrensis, and to invent the Charter of St Patrick which brought them to Glastonbury and made them not only restore the Old Church of St Mary, but also build the chapel of St Michael on the Tor. It was left to a later age still to appropriate the story of Joseph of Arimathea and the legend of the Holy Grail.

Our conclusion is that the whole of the opening portion of the De Antiquitate as William of Malmesbury wrote it, down to the point at which he begins to treat of the English abbots and the evidence of early charters, is substantially preserved for us in the first and longest insertion which we find in the third edition of the Gesta Regum. Guided by the context and the style, we have no hesitation in adding to this what we have called a rhetorical patch in which he compares the generous action of K. Lucius with that of K. Ethelbert in later days. It is just possible that he may have omitted for the sake of brevity another sentence here or there, and that the order of the narrative may have been changed: but I do not think that this is so. I venture to submit that in this great insertion into the Gesta Regum, when we have replaced a single passage, we have the genuine form of the first part of the De Antiquitate. And I would ask any scholar who inclines to question this verdict to set himself the task of translating into English the first few sections of the book as it stands. He will find that his pen runs easily enough as he renders the dull and unidiomatic Latin of the later writers, but that he will have to pause and think before he can do justice to the cultivated and ambitious style of the great historian. It was in fact an attempt to translate the book, which so far as I know has never been presented to English readers, that awoke my own suspicions in regard to several sections which I had been prepared to leave unchallenged. It is dangerous to argue from style alone, and