Extant in two quite different late thirteenth-century manuscripts, Laȝamon's Brut is a lengthy Middle English alliterative verse chronicle probably composed nearer the beginning of that century and adapted, ultimately, from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138). In spite of being the earliest vernacular English account of the life of the Briton King Arthur, a warrior who famously drove Germanic invaders out of Britain, the poem has also been commonly regarded in critical literature as distinctly “Saxon” in its form and themes, a sort of last atavistic gasp of resistance against the encroaching Continental cultural shift already well underway in England by the early 1200s. Haruko Momma has demonstrated that this foundational strand of scholarship emerged from the poem's earliest modern critics in the mid-1800s, many of whom studied the text primarily for its philological value. Frederic Madden, for example, influentially identified the poem as having been written in “Semi-Saxon,” a term, according to Momma, “first applied to the transitional vernacular of post-Conquest England by George Hickes and adopted by subsequent generations of scholars until at least the 1870s when Henry Sweet introduced the three-part division of Old, Middle, and Modern English.” These nineteenth-century philologists thus conceptualized Laȝamon and his national epic of “Englene londe” (England) as belonging to an era before the emergence of what they strictly considered “English.” The Brut, therefore, constituted some kind of semi-articulate grasping at the still abstract idea of a post- Hastings English state and people. There amid the sprawling 16,000 lines of a thirteenth-century English priest's national epic, scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perceived a reflection of their own splintering empires: a defiant antiquarianism scaffolded by the language and social structures of an old world undergoing rapid and inexorable cultural change.

But this reading was not strictly accurate. Laȝamon's poem, for all its seeming originality, is at its core a translation and adaptation of the twelfth-century Old French Roman de Brut by the Jèrriais poet Wace. Madden acknowledges this fact, classifying the Brut as a “paraphrase,” but the tools of philology at the height of the British Empire were not perhaps as finely attuned to questions of cultural difference as their practitioners may have imagined.