Brut

the long version

"This version of Brut is a rendering into modern English, in verse format, of the Middle English story of Britain, from its founding by the legendary Brutus, a supposed descendant of the Trojans, to the final loss of land and prestige when the Saxons took over Britain. Lawman, a priest in the Welsh Marches in the diocese of Worcester, was translating from the twelfth-century French octosyllabic couplets of Wace, who came from Jersey and was himself translating Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin prose. Lawman's narrative poem, probably written in the first quarter of the thirteenth-century, is a compound of chronicle, romance, saint's life and sermon." -- Book jacket flap.