HomePage

This is the text which appears in St. Dunstan's Classbook with the alphabet which Nennius is said to have drawn and named. After much consideration it became clear to me that Nennius must have drawn this alphabet to show that Britons had been done down by association with the English peoples because that is the only way Latin scholars of his time could have understood the situation. They must have known that runes were introduced to Britain by the English and that they were designed to be used for carving into wood. Nennius went on to write his Historia Britonum to show how the Britons had a great history of their own. It seems that he also drew on the tradition of the peoples of English type to some extent in developing the idea of a heroic king, Arturius. Belief in descent from the fugitives of Troy was also acquired from the English according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Nemniuus istas reperit uteras uituperante quidam scolastico saxonni gendas qui ~ brittoner non heberint rudimentum at ime subito ex machinatione mentirruae germare(?) eas ut uituperationem et habitudinem deieceret gentis suae :. de figurir et de nominito chartis(?)

A few letters were unclear and a couple of words differ in spelling from standard Latin.

Translation:

Nennius has discovered the censorius usage(?) of that scholar of the Saxon peoples that ~ Britons did not have the rudiments of scholarship (,) but he suddenly from a false machination put it forth how censure and conditioning had done down his people :. he gave the figures and gave the names of the chart(?)

HomePage