Early English Text Society

"This version of Brut is a rendering into modern English, in verse format, of the Middle English story of Britain, from its founding by the legendary Brutus, a supposed descendant of the Trojans, to the final loss of land and prestige when the Saxons took over Britain. Lawman, a priest in the Welsh Marches in the diocese of Worcester, was translating from the twelfth-century French octosyllabic couplets of Wace, who came from Jersey and was himself translating Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin prose. Lawman's narrative poem, probably written in the first quarter of the thirteenth-century, is a compound of chronicle, romance, saint's life and sermon." -- Book jacket flap.

"This is the first critical edition of the earliest and most important English translation of Mandeville's Travels. Its title, the 'Defective Version' derives from the loss of the second quire in the Anglo-French 'Insular' manuscript, or its antecedent, from which it was translated, containing part of the description of Egypt. Despite this loss of text, the Defective Version established itself as the dominant form of the work in England, and was perpetuated in the printed editions of the text until 1725." "The new edition is based on examination of all the extant manuscripts of the Middle English text and its French source, and so makes possible a more informed assessment of all other English versions. The textual commentary is based on a fresh investigation of the sources, and offers details for the first time of the author's indirect reliance on Marco Polo for much of his Asian relation."--BOOK JACKET.

Layamon's Brut (ca. 1190-1215), also known as The Chronicle of Britain, is a Middle English poem compiled and recast by the English priest Layamon.