Note 44 — GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH.

Nennius lived in the ninth century, and is said to have left behind him several treatises, of which all that has been published is the history, which was printed for the first time in Dr. Gale’s Collection of British Historians, published at Oxford in 1687 and 1691, in 2 vols. folio. Leland mentions an ancient copy of Nennius’s history, which he says he borrowed from Thomas Solme, Secretary for the French language to king Henry the eighth, in the margin of which were the additions of Sam. Beaulanius, or Britannus. He has transcribed several of these marginal annotations, which as it appears, were afterwards inserted in the body of the history, and were printed in that manner by Dr. Gale. The Doctor in his notes, mentions Beaulanius as the Scholiast on the copy which he used, but Leland has a great many other things, as extracts out of Beaulanius, which Dr. Gale does not mention to be only in the Scholion. There is also in the Bodleian Library a manuscript of Nennius apparently nearly 600 years old, in which the prefaces and all the interpolations, which Leland says are by Beaulanius, are wanting.

Professor Bertram, of Copenhagen, published in the year 1757, “Britannicarum gentium Historiæ Antiquæ Scriptores tres; Ricardus Corinensis, Gildas Badonicus, Nennius Banchorensis: recensuit, notisque et indice auxit Carolus Bertramus, S. A. Lond. Soc. &c. Havniæ, 1757.” 8vo. The Professor followed Dr. Gale’s edition of Gildas and Nennius, but in the latter he has distinguished the interpolations of Beaulanius from the genuine text. Mr. Gough, (Brit. Topogr. vol. 1. p. 15.) mentions Mr. Evan Evans having been long preparing a new edition of Nennius, from the Bodleian and other manuscripts.