UCLA Historical Journal

Around the twelfth century there was a change in the English concept of their territory, which explains where the legal formulation of England and Britain's inalienability—at the turn of the thirteenth century—came from. The shift of the territorial conceptualization was due to the structural changes of the proto-state during Henry I's reign, the transformation of social identity, from being ethnic-based to territorially-politically-based, and the construction of a proto-national historic corpus that, among others, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon elaborated. But the key element was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, especially King Arthur’s story. He translated the Arthurian Myth from a mythological Breton frame in order to introduce it into the Catholic world of Medieval England. Within this pagan context, the island was thought as a sacred being and because of this, man had no right to modify it, except for those whose right was granted by the numen. Arthur was the only one who had this right to rule and protect the island, a bond that was sealed in his sword Caliburn. The aftermath of this endeavor turned out to be that the sacred bond between Arthur and the island was adopted by the English royalty and nobility and translated to form a juridical bond between the Crown and the British Island, which in turn became an ideological basis for the legal formulation of the inalienability of the British territory.