The History of the Britons I

Nennius felt that teachers were not giving their students an accurate understanding of the history of Britain, so he set about writing one from the records of the Britons, the Romans, the Scots, the Saxons and the Holy Fathers at the beginning of the 9th century AD.

He starts with a retelling of the Brutus story accentuating the dual heritage of the Romans and the Britons, before giving an alternative family tree tracing Brutus to Japhet, the son of Noah. After that we get confirmation of the Britons defeating Julius Caesar twice before finally succumbing to suzerainty to the empire.

Once Britain was a tributary of Rome, there were nine emperors in Britain according to the Roman records but only seven according to the British ones. This may be because two of the emperors were actually British and were therefore included in the British records as British kings rather than as Roman emperors.



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