Heraklia had asked about Antonia Gransden’s review of Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 (1974). The book is out of print, but there may be some merit in reviewing the early historical record of Anglo-Saxon England. Let me begin with De Excidio Britanniae et Conquesto (“The Ruin and Conquest of Britain”) by Gildas, the most authoritative translation of which is edited by Michael Winterbottom Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (1978).

In a nearly contemporary account of the adventus Saxonum, Gildas begins by enumerating the suffering of the British. “I shall do this as well as I can,” he says, “using not so much literary remains from this country (which, such as they were, are not now available, having been burnt by enemies or removed by our countrymen when they went into exile) as foreign tradition” (4.4). Aside from this oral history, he also quotes from written sources, including Latin authors and the Bible. But even then, as Gildas says, “I employ lament rather than analysis” (26.4).

Nostalgic for a Roman past, when obedience and peace were imposed on the world, Gildas berates his fellow Britons for their obstinacy and fickleness. Boudica, “a treacherous lioness,” (6.1) had rebelled against Roman rule, and the inconstant Britons embraced Arian heresy. “The island was still Roman in name, but not by law or custom” (13.1). When Magnus Maximus treacherously withdrew the Roman army to Gaul, leaving the land defenseless, the Britons plaintively called upon the Romans, who drove the marauding Scots and Picts from the country. They were told to build a wall, but it was of turf and useless against the enemy, who “came 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” (16).

The Romans returned, this time building a stone wall that “ran straight from sea to sea,” as well as watchtowers on the southern coast, admonishing the hapless Britons to fend for themselves, and leaving them “manuals on weapon training.” So Gildas, with no recollection that Britain ever had been a Roman province, explains the walls of Antoninus (AD 142) and Hadrian (AD 120), which had been constructed hundreds of years before.

But, as soon as the Romans had left, “there eagerly emerged from the coracles that had carried them across the sea-valleys, the foul hordes of Scots and Picts” (19), who seized all the land north of the Wall. Again, the craven Britons appealed to Rome: “‘To Aëtius, thrice consul: the groans of the British….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” (20.1).

There was famine but then a respite and, with it, the importation of goods and the luxury of their ownership. Then plague, which “laid low so many people, with no sword, that the living could not bury all the dead” (22.2) When that did not turn the people to God, a “proud tyrant” foolishly invited the Saxons to fight as mercenaries (foederati) against the raiders from the north. Arriving in three ships on the eastern shore of Britain, soon to be joined by a larger force, they began to demand greater payment for their services. If it were not forthcoming, the Saxons would break their agreement to defend the Britons and plunder the entire island, themselves. And so they did.

“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. There was no burial to be had except in the ruins of homes or the bellies of beasts and birds” (24.3-4).

“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 descendents in our day have become gratly 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….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; as I know, one month of the forty-fourth year since then already has passed. 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” (25.3-26.2)

All this is important because, for Gildas, the Battle of Mount Badon, “the final victory of our country that has been granted to our times by the will of God” (2), provided a respite from war and introduced a period of comparative stability, “the calm of the present,” when “kings, public and private persons, priests and churchmen, kept to their own stations” (26).

Gildas wrote sometime before AD 547, when Maglocunus (Maelgwn of Gwynedd), the last and most powerful of the five tyrants whom he denounces, is recorded by the Annales Cambriae as having died of the plague. Gildas, himself, says that he then was nearly forty-four years old. He relates this fact because he was born the year in which Mons Badonicus was fought, which provides a date for the battle sometime before AD 503. The Annals, however, date the battle as occurring in AD 516 (and the death of Gildas in AD 570). Because these two literary sources cannot be reconciled, the battle can be said only to have occurred between AD 516 and, depending upon how old Gildas was when he died, approximately AD 490.

“Ever since it was first inhabited, Britain has been ungratefully rebelling, stiff-necked and haughty, now against God, now against its own countrymen, sometimes even against kings from abroad and their subjects” (4). Lamenting the ills that have befallen his country and admonishing its princes for their godlessness, Gildas warns them to be mindful God’s punishments for their previous wickedness and to repent. Nearly two-hundred years later, Bede uses Gildas in his own account of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, as does Alcuin, who, in turn, is quoted by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, in his sermon Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (1014). Ironically, one consequence of Gildas’ tirade against the sins and excesses of the kings of his day is that it colored all later perceptions of early British history. Indeed, it allowed the English, themselves, to justify their excesses against the Britons and to regard their ancestors as the instrument of an avenging God.