Note 74 — Chapter III · GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH AND THE CHRONICLERS

William of Newburgh, the severest of all Geoffrey’s critics, writing about 1190, suggests that either this, or his own “love of lying,” was the motive of the work. “It is manifest that everything which this person wrote about Arthur and his successors, and his predecessors after Vortigern, was made up partly by himself and partly by others, whether from an inordinate love of lying or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.” William also held that Geoffrey’s account of events before the time of Julius Cæsar was either invented by himself, or “adopted after it had been invented by others.”