Gildas

In 1014, Wulfstan, archbishop of York, delivered a homily to his English brethren, admonishing them for their sins. There were renewed Viking raids by the Danes and, just the year before, king Æthelred had been forced to flee to Normandy. How else to explain these depredations except that an omnipotent God was deservedly chastising an unworthy people. As Wulfstan writes in the "Sermo Lupi ad Anglos" (Lupus, "the Wolf," is a literary alias),

"Here there are manslayers and slayers of their kinsmen, and slayers of priests and persecutors of monasteries, and here there are perjurers and murderers, and here there are harlots and infanticides and many foul adulterous fornicators, and here there are wizards and sorceresses, and here there are plunderers and robbers and spoliators, and, in short, a countless number of all crimes and misdeeds."

Wulfstan compares the plight of the English to that of the Celtic Britons, whom they had defeated more than five hundred years before.

"There was a historian in the times of the Britons, called Gildas, who wrote about their misdeeds, how with their sins they angered God so excessively that finally he allowed the army of the English to conquer their land and to destroy the host of the Britons entirely. And that came about, according to what he said, through robbery by the powerful, and through the coveting of ill-gotten gains, through the lawlessness of the people and through unjust judgments, through the sloth of the bishops and the wicked cowardice of God's messengers, who mumbled with their jaws where they should have cried aloud; also through the foul wantonness of the people and through gluttony and manifold sins they destroyed their country and themselves they perished."

Gildas wrote "De Excidio Britonum" (The Ruin of Britain) about AD 540, some forty-four years, he says, after he was born, a time that, itself, was only fifty years after the advent of the Saxons. It is a primary and near contemporary source for the history of fifth-century Britain, and a poignant account of the struggle of the hapless Britons to defend themselves against the Scots and Picts and, finally, the relentless Saxons.

He writes of those evil days and inveighs against the kings and clergy who had brought them to pass. Despite what Bede and Wulfstan say, Gildas was not an historian but a monk; his work, not history but a homily. The only fifth-century name that he mentions is Ambrosius Aurelianus; the only place, "Mons Badonicus"; the only date, the consulate of Aetius. But, in enumerating the sins of the Britons, Gildas is obliged "to say a little about the situation in Britain." In this way, he demonstrates how the past provides a moral lesson for the present.

His discussion of late Roman Britain begins with the usurper Maximus, who, in AD 383, removed his legions to Gaul. "After that Britain was despoiled of her whole army, her military resources, her governors, brutal as they were, and her sturdy youth, who had followed in the tyrant's footsteps, never to return home." Weakened and vulnerable, the Britons suffered from raids by the Scots and Picts, who came by sea to pillage, "relying on their oars as wings, on the arms of their oarsmen, and on the winds swelling their sails. They broke through the frontiers, spreading destruction everywhere. They went trampling over everything that stood in their path, cutting it down like ripe corn."

The Britons called upon Rome for protection and were told to build a wall across the island, from sea to sea. But it was "made of turf rather than stone: so it did no good." Again, says Gildas, the Britons beseeched the Romans for help, who, themselves, "built a wall quite different from the first. This one ran straight from sea to sea, linking towns that happened to have been sited there, out of fear of the enemy." And so Gildas seeks to provide an explanation for the mysterious walls of Antoninus and Hadrian that had been constructed in the second century AD.

As soon as the Romans had left for the final time, "hordes of Scots and Picts," says Gildas, "seized the whole of the extreme north of the island from its inhabitants, right up to the wall." It, and the towns that it joined, were abandoned and "...there were enemy assaults and massacres more cruel. The pitiable citizens were torn apart by their foe like lambs by the butcher; their life became like that of beasts of the field."

There was famine and civil war; again, the miserable Britons appealed for relief, "this time to the Roman commander Aëtius, in the following terms: 'To Aëtius, thrice consul: the groans of the British'. Further on came this complaint: 'The barbarians push us back to the sea, the sea pushes us back to the barbarians; between these two kinds of death, we are either drowned or slaughtered.' But they got no help in return."
This reference to Aetius, "magister militum" in Gaul who became consul for the third time in AD 446, provides the only event that can be dated in "De Excidio." But Gildas did not know the date, himself, or where to place it in his narrative, and the chronology is too late. By the middle of the fifth century, the invaders were the Anglo-Saxons, invited there by a "superbus tyrannus," whom Bede later identifies by the title of Vortigern or "superior ruler," and Nennius says acceded to power in AD 425.

"Then all the members of the council, together with the proud tyrant, were struck blind; the guard--or rather the method of destruction--they devised for our land was that the ferocious Saxons (name not to be spoken!), hated by man and God, should be let into the island like wolves into the fold, to beat back the peoples of the north. Nothing more destructive, nothing more bitter has ever befallen the land. How utter the blindness of their minds! How desperate and crass the stupidity! Of their own free will they invited under the same roof a people whom they feared worse than death even in their absence..."

Plagued by the Scots and Picts, the Britons invited the Anglo-Saxons to defend the east coast of their island (the Saxon Shore) from further invasion. Three ships arrived and more federates came later, the mercenaries making increased demands of their British hosts and threatening to "break their agreement and plunder the whole island unless more lavish payment were heaped upon them." In time, they did rebel. A contemporary Gallic chronicle records that Britain fell under Saxon control in AD 441/442. In the east, the invaders were victorious. Gildas writes of the devastation.

"All the major towns were laid low by the repeated battering of enemy rams; laid low, too, all the inhabitants--church leaders, priests and people alike, as the swords glinted all around and the flames crackled. It was a sad sight. In the middle of the squares the foundation-stones of high walls and towers that had been torn from their lofty base, holy altars, fragments of corpses, covered (as it were) with a purple crust of congealed blood, looked as though they had been mixed up in some dreadful wine-press."

Some of those who survived the onslaught migrated to Gaul, causing Gildas to complain that records, "such as they were, are not now available, having been burnt by enemies or removed by our countrymen when they went into exile..." Others, driven westward, stayed behind, "trusting their lives with constant foreboding to the high hills, steep, menacing and fortified, to the densest forests, and to the cliffs of the sea coast." Eventually, the Britons rallied and fought back.

"Their leader was Ambrosius Aurelianus, a gentleman who, perhaps alone of the Romans, had survived the shock of this notable storm: certainly his parents, who had worn the purple, were slain in it. His descendants in our day have become greatly inferior to their grandfather's excellence. Under him our people regained their strength, and challenged the victors to battle. The Lord assented, and the battle went their way. From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies: so that in this people the Lord could make trial (as he tends to) of his latter-day Israel to see whether it loves him or not. This lasted right up till the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least. That was the year of my birth..."

The battle of "Mons Badonicus," which can be calculated to have been fought sometime in the decade of AD 490, brought about a respite from war that lasted almost half a century, until Gildas' own time. "But the cities of our land are not populated even now as they once were; right to the present they are deserted, in ruins and unkempt. External wars may have stopped, but not civil ones." There were five British kingdoms, ruled by wicked "tyrants" who oppressed the people. Eventually, too, the Saxons would return and marvel at the ruins of the Roman world now lost to them.



This material has been taken from the following: Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (1978) translated by Michael Winterbottom; English Historical Documents c. 500-1042 (1968) edited by Dorothy Whitelock: The Earliest English Poems (1966) translated by Michael Alexander (Penguin Classics).