The book’s main theme is the struggle of the Celtic-Roman Britons and the Anglo-Saxons for control of Britain, and it does its best to paint the Anglo-Saxons as treacherous cutthroat barbarian riff-raff, while extolling the ancient and glorious history of the Britons. Nevertheless, as one of the very few sources on the era in British history otherwise known as the Dark Ages, it developed a huge impact over time specifically, it is the first known work that offers a coherent description of King Arthur's career, and thus can be considered the first work of what would later become Arthurian Legend.
However, modern researchers regard the preface as a forgery of later centuries to lend greater credibility to the work.ĭespite its self-designation as a chronicle, the book is pseudohistory rather than history and clearly serves up ample helpings of legend.
The preface, which is included in most but not all manuscripts, claims that this editor was Nennius, a 9th-century Welsh monk. It was compiled around 830 from several older texts of different provenance, loosely connected by an unknown editor. Historia Brittonum ("History of the Britons") is a short Latin-language Welsh chronicle.
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