Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is Episode 94, from British legend to English king.

In this episode, we're going to complete our look at Leia Mons early Middle English

text called Brute. We'll examine the second half of the poem, which is the story of King Arthur,

and it's the first version of the Arthurian legend composed in the English language.

As we go through the poem, we'll take a closer look at the language used by Leia Mons,

and we'll see how it reflects certain changes that were taking place in the early 1200s.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is history of English podcast.com,

and you can sign up to support the podcast at patreon.com slash history of English.

And as always, you can reach me by email at kevinathistoryofenglishpodcast.com.

One other quick note before we begin. Many of you may be familiar with Zach Twamley's podcast

called When Diplomacy Fails. While Zach is celebrating the fifth anniversary of the podcast,

and he's put together a remarkable series of episodes to celebrate the achievement.

He's releasing at least two new episodes each day for five weeks, and one of the first episodes in

the series is a discussion that he and I had a few weeks ago about podcasting and about certain

English terms associated with diplomacy. The first part of that interview has been posted for

everyone to listen to at the When Diplomacy Fails podcast. That part focuses on podcasting and some

behind the scenes stuff associated with this particular podcast. So check that out if you're

interested and check out Zach's podcast if you haven't listened before. So with that, let's turn

to this episode, and this time we're going to complete our look at layman's brute.

As we saw last time, this particular text was probably composed in the early 1200s,

perhaps around the year 1205 or 1206, but nobody really knows for sure.

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