Nevertheless, having used Asser to show that Britannia could sometimes mean Wales in an early tenth-century text, Blake and Lloyd propose that insula Britannia in Geoffrey of Monmouth is a translation for a Welsh Ynys Pridein. They use the modern meaning of Welsh ynys (piece of land surrounded on all or most sides by water) to suggest that Ynys Pridein means ‘Peninsula of Britannia (Wales)’ and that Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Brittaniae is a History of the Kings of Wales.
In fact, Blake and Lloyd fail to give an example of a Middle Welsh usage of Ynys Pridein to refer to the Welsh Peninsula. The closest they get is a fifteenth-century reference by the poet Gutun Owain to Ynys Gwenwynwyn, ‘the realm of (Powys) Gwenwynwyn’ and contemporary usage of ynys in the Brenhinedd y Saesson. These are late medieval figurative uses, and more evidence should be provided for the context of ynys in earlier texts.
How accurate is Blake and Lloyd’s assessment of the meaning of Ynys Pridein? Gregory’s Historia Regum Brittanie begins (i.1) with the statement that ‘Britain, the best of islands… stretches for eight hundred miles in length and for two hundred in breadth’. This derives directly from the Historia Brittonum, an anonymous Welsh tract of 829, quarried by Geoffrey for materials for his work. Chapter 7 states that brittannia insula… dccc in longitudine milium, cc in latitudine spatium habet. This in turn derives from Gildas, a British cleric of the late fifth or early sixth century; chapter 3 of his de Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae states that brittannia insula… octingentorum in longo milium, ducentorum in latio spatium. Gildas in turn took his statement from Paulus Orosius (i.2, 77), writing c 415, who stated britannia… insula habet in longo milia pasuum dccc, in lato milia cc.
For these authors, then, Britannia is an insula (which, in Latin, can only mean ‘island’) eight hundred miles in length and two hundred in breadth, not a peninsula. Nor is Geoffrey simply mistranslating a Welsh original: his Latin words can be traced directly back to a late Roman author. Moreover, he takes details about the population of Britain from Bede, adapting it to the political situation of his own day. Whereas Bede has five languages spoken in Britain, he has five peoples inhabiting the island : Normans, British, Saxons, Picts and Scots (although the mention of Picts in the twelfth century is anachronistic, to say the least). Geoffrey’s usage, right at the start of his book, in the context of describing insula Britannia, is taken from Roman usage, which refers not to Wales, but to the whole of Great Britain.If we argue that Geoffrey’s ‘geographical preface’ was added by him on the assumption that he had misunderstood his source to be dealing with the whole island, why is it in the Brut and why does Geoffrey elswhere continue to use Britannia in contexts that can only refer to the southeastern corner of the island ? The clearest example of this is his account of the invasion of Julius Caesar at the start of Book IV. We have Caesar’s own account of the invasion, and we know that he overran only a small part of southeastern Britain, yet Geoffrey refers to it as Britannia and the Brut as Ynys Pridein. The same can be said for the Claudian invasion, where not only do we have the literary accounts of Roman authors, but also archaeology to back up the inclusion of southeastern England in Britannia/Ynys Pridein.