Layamon or Laghamon (ˈlaɣamon; in American English often modernised as icon; ), occasionally written Lawman, was a poet of the early 13th century and author of the Brut, a notable English poem of the 12th century that was the first English language work to discuss the legends of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Layamon describes himself in his poem as a priest, living at Areley Kings

Areley Kings

Areley Kings is a Worcestershire village on the River Severn 10 miles north of Worcester in the picturesque area of the Wyre Forest. The area is featured in the Domesday Book and many historical places of interest are open to visitors...

 in Worcestershire

Worcestershire

Worcestershire is a non-metropolitan county, established in antiquity, located in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region...

. His poem provided inspiration for numerous later writers, including Sir Thomas Malory

Thomas Malory

Sir Thomas Malory was an English writer, the author or compiler of Le Morte d'Arthur. The antiquary John Leland as well as John Bale believed him to be Welsh, but most modern scholars, beginning with G. L...

 and Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

, and had an impact on medieval history writing in England.

Print-era editors and cataloguers have spelled his name in various ways including "Layamon", "Lazamon", or "Lawman". Brown University suggests that the form "Layamon" is etymologically incorrect, while The Fifth International Conference on Brut at Brown University mentions: "BL MS Cotton Caligula A.ix spells it "" (the third letter is called a "yogh"). BL MS Cotton Otho C.xiii spelled it "Laweman" and "Loweman".

Brut

Brut (ca. 1190) is a Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....

 poem compiled and recast by the English priest Layamon. It is named for Britain

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

's mythical founder, Brutus of Troy

Brutus of Troy

Brutus or Brute of Troy is a legendary descendant of the Trojan hero Æneas, known in mediæval British legend as the eponymous founder and first king of Britain...

. It is contained in the MS. Cotton Caligula A ix, written in the first quarter of the 13th century, and in the Cotton Otho C xiii, about fifty years later (though in this edition it is shorter). Both exist in the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

.

The Brut is 16,095 lines long and narrates the history of Britain. It is largely based on the Anglo-Norman

Anglo-Norman language

Anglo-Norman is the name traditionally given to the kind of Old Norman used in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles during the Anglo-Norman period....

 Roman de Brut

Roman de Brut

Roman de Brut or Brut is a verse literary history of Britain by the poet Wace. Written in the Norman language, it consists of 14,866 lines....

by Wace

Wace

Wace was a Norman poet, who was born in Jersey and brought up in mainland Normandy , ending his career as Canon of Bayeux.-Life:...

, which is in turn inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth was a cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British historiography and the popularity of tales of King Arthur...

's Historia Regum Britanniae

Historia Regum Britanniae

The Historia Regum Britanniae is a pseudohistorical account of British history, written c. 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It chronicles the lives of the kings of the Britons in a chronological narrative spanning a time of two thousand years, beginning with the Trojans founding the British nation...

, though is longer than both and includes an enlarged section on the life and exploits of King Arthur

King Arthur

King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...

. The rhyming style is the alliterative verse

Alliterative verse

In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal structuring device to unify lines of poetry, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of many Germanic...

 line style commonly used in Middle English poetry.

External links

• Brut by Layamon (British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix manuscript
  Manuscript
  A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
  
  version)
• Le Brut de Layamon by Marie-Françoise Alamichel - with translation - with translation - with translation