BRUTUS OF TROY AND THE QUEST FOR THE ANCESTRY OF THE BRITISH

"And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green?" William Blake's "Jerusalem" is a popular national song, performed at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and the opening of the 2012 Olympics. Blake imagines that England is a new Jerusalem visited by characters from the Christian story, and the author of this fascinating book shows how Blake's vision is one of many attempts to provide the majesty of Britain and its empire with a mythical ancestry from ancient times. Brutus of Troy, a survivor of the Trojan War described in Homer's Iliad, was the mythical great-grandson of Aeneas, though the author shows he may also have had his origins in historical figures of the late Roman empire. In the 4th century the historian Eusebius commented that the British were claiming that the biblical Apostles reached British shores, and in the middle ages the myth was used as a charter for English kings to extend their rule across the whole of Britain. In 12th century Britain the myth of Brutus was extremely popular, propagated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of England, itself derived from the older historian Nennius and what we now know to be the pseudo-histories of Dares and Dictys. In his wanderings after the sack of Troy, Brutus and his followers arrived in England, landing at Totnes where the Brutus Stone is said to be the location of his first footfall on British soil. This classical story became linked with the myth of the wandering tribes of Israel, some of whom ended up in England, providing Queen Victoria with a speculative pedigree tracing her ancestry back to the House of David. The author suggests that a modern newspaper might report the arrival of Brutus as "Italian-born Turk leads Albanian asylum-seekers to Britain". Well researched and fascinating. 237pp, timeline, photos.