Sir John Prise (1501/02–1555) was a prominent Welsh-born lawyer and Crown servant during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. He was also a skilled linguist and philologist of humanist inclinations, well aware of the scholarship being practiced on the Continent. Among those entrusted with the dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys of England and Wales, he came, like his contemporary John Leland, into contact with the significant wealth in medieval manuscripts held by the religious houses. His own most significant scholarly achievement was a manuscript defending the legitimacy of “the British history,” that is, the accounts of the foundation of Britain, its early pre-Roman past, and its late Romano-British history, especially the historicity of King Arthur. The Defensio remained unpublished until Prise’s son, Richard, had it printed in 1573, an edition with many errors. Composed in Latin, it has been somewhat neglected in accounts of early Tudor historiography, and especially of the reaction against Polydore Vergil’s contemporary doubts about pre-Anglo-Saxon British history and its putative sources.

Ceri Davies, like Prise both a capable Latinist and a Welsh speaker, has now filled this gap with his admirable edition and translation of the Defensio. Following a substantial introduction to Prise’s life and work, Davies offers a critical edition of the 1573 Latin text, corrected from two surviving manuscripts. The work includes dedicatory epistles by both Prises, father and son, and the Defensio itself, with the edited Latin on the verso of each leaf with Davies’s lively translation on the facing recto. Notes on editorial emendations appear at the bottom and there are extensive bibliographical and historical notes (including the tracking down of Prise’s own sources) at the end of the volume. If I have a minor complaint it is that these latter annotations are consigned to the back pages, obliging a fair bit of leafing backward and forward; this is more than made up for by three useful indexes.

Though he was by no means the last serious interlocutor on his subject, Prise’s book was already a little out of date by the time it appeared in 1573 — his son’s familiarity with newer French scholarship (including Jean Bodin’s classic work on the reading and reliability of historians, the Methodus) is a harbinger that the weight of opinion in defense of the sources of British history (principally Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, and the earlier ninth-century Historia Brittonum, traditionally attributed to one Nennius) was already beginning to shift toward the measured skepticism that characterized late Tudor and early Stuart authors such as Camden. Yet Prise’s work is important on at least two levels. First, it is an excellent example of mid-Tudor humanism at work, and especially of the philological techniques elsewhere associated with the better-known Leland. Second, the book provides support for the point made by F. J. Levy that, while the Italian émigré Vergil may ultimately have been correct in harboring doubts about murky figures such as Brutus and Arthur, he was right for not especially good reasons. Prise and his colleagues (Leland, and later Humfrey Llwyd, their junior by a generation) were, in contrast, wrong, but nonetheless practiced sounder historical criticism. Vergil doubted the authenticity of the medieval accounts but based a good part of his argument on the lack of reference to Britain or its eponymous founder, Brutus the Trojan (allegedly a descendant of Aeneas) in Greek or Roman historians. But, as Prise was at pains to argue, there were legitimate reasons foreign geographers and historians, even an invader such as Caesar, might not have been knowledgeable about British history or cared even to mention it. Moreover, Prise adduced linguistic evidence to show that certain figures mentioned in both British and classical texts might simply be alternative spellings of the same names. He employed similar tactics to establish the historicity of the much later, and (to a point) more defensible, King Arthur and his achievements.

There is no space here to summarize the subtleties of Prise’s argument or the frequent logical bootstrapping and rhetorical special pleading that he inevitably undertook, but Davies has done both us and his author a service. Sir John himself would have approved both the topic and the level of scholarship evident in the result.