The Arthur of the Britons: a comparative study of the Arthurian legend across Medieval Brittany, Cornwall, and Wales

Shales, Jessica 2025. The Arthur of the Britons: a comparative study of the Arthurian legend across Medieval Brittany, Cornwall, and Wales. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

What did the medieval Brittonic-speaking peoples — the Bretons, the Cornish, and the Welsh — make of Arthur, and do their respective ideas about him differ? These are the questions that this thesis attempts to answer, in the first study of Arthuriana across the Brittonic areas that compares the medieval Breton and Cornish evidence with that from Wales. Given the Brittonic peoples’ shared origins — they were originally a single group, ‘the British’, who shared a common language and a common stock of folk narratives — scholarship has tended to draw conclusions about the Arthurian legend in medieval Brittany, Cornwall, and Wales based largely on the Welsh evidence, with only cursory reference to Breton and Cornish sources, which are sparser and less accessible in modern editions and translations. Underlying this approach is the common assumption that the Brittonic peoples were culturally homogeneous. Indeed, that impression has been relayed, since at least the twelfth century, by medieval writers external to the Brittonic areas — to whom any differences between the Bretons, the Cornish, and the Welsh were so insignificant that they often made no terminological distinction between these groups. This thesis dismantles presuppositions of Brittonic cultural uniformity. Drawing on a broad range of Arthurian sources — many of which have as yet received very little (if any) scholarly analysis — my discussion reveals that there are discernible differences in attitudes towards Arthur across the medieval Brittonic regions, differences that cast new light on Brittonic history and the medieval Arthurian legend more broadly. While literary Welsh Arthurian evidence has generally been taken as characteristic of broader Brittonic attitudes to Arthur, I show that the Welsh corpus is in fact atypical in iii this regard. We have no evidence at any stage in the medieval period that Welsh writers ever attributed to Arthur any significance on a national level. Instead, presenting the hero neither as a returning redeemer, nor even as Welsh, literary Welsh depictions of Arthur were often playful, even satirical. This is in stark contrast with portrayals of the hero from Cornwall and Brittany. Cornish writers — from the twelfth-century John of Cornwall to the late-medieval playwright of Bewnans Ke (‘The Life of Saint Ke’) — not only revered Arthur, but also claimed him proudly as a thoroughly Cornish product. Meanwhile Breton hagiographers, poets, and romancers from the eleventh century until the fourteenth verged on veneration of the hero, viewing him nostalgically as a symbol of their insular British past. While this rosy view sours in the late sixteenth century, as Breton-British relations deteriorate, Arthur nevertheless remains implicated in Breton affairs in a manner never paralleled in Wales. Through thus highlighting the nuances between Arthurian perceptions across Brittany, Cornwall, and Wales, this thesis reveals the importance of examining each region on its own terms — and of recognising that the legends of each medieval Brittonic area has its own cultural valence.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Welsh
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PB Modern European Languages > PB1001 Celtic languages and literature
Funders:	AHRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 April 2026
Last Modified:	14 Apr 2026 14:39
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/186365

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