Note to GunnLeif Merl II 17^VIII

[All]: Cf. DGB 116 (Reeve and Wright 2007, 153.169-72; cf. Wright 1988, 108, prophecies 35 and 36): ‘“candor lanarum nocuit atque tincturae ipsarum diuersitas; uae periurae genti, quia urbs inclita propter eam ruet. Gaudebunt naues augmentatione tanta, et unum ex duobus fiet”’ ‘“The whiteness of wool and the many colours it has been dyed have done you harm; woe to the treacherous people on whose account a famous city will fall.” The ships will rejoice at this great increment and two will become one’ (Reeve and Wright 2007, 152). Winchester was by Geoffrey’s time the base for a flourishing wool industry (see Leach 1900b, 134-5; Page 1912b, 36-44). For the privileges of cloth makers and their growing unpopularity see Poole (1955, 84-6). Geoffrey seems to single out the commune of the city for suspicion of potential disloyalty, against either the king or the bishop, whose vassals they would have been. Gunnlaugr focuses on the dyeing of wool, to which special privileges attached. The sentences beginning respectively candor and gaudebunt are reversed in the text of Merl as extant, and several other sentences are omitted.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Reeve, Michael D., and Neil Wright. 2007. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum [Historia regum Britanniae]. Woodbridge: Boydell.
3. Wright, Neil, ed. 1988. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth. II. The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
4. Poole, Austin Lane. 1955. From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087-1216. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon.
5. Page, William. 1912b. ‘Winchester: Fairs and Trades’. In Page 1912a, 36-44. <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=42048> [accessed 4 September 2013]
6. Leach, Arthur F., ed. 1900b. ‘The Law of the Fullers & Weavers of Winchester, 1209’. In Leach 1900a, 134-5. Rpt. in Cave and Coulson 1936, 242-3.