Saint Gildas

Saint Gildas , d. 570, British historian, possibly a Welsh monk. Shortly before 547 he wrote the De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, a Latin history of Britain dealing with the Roman invasion and the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, the earliest authority for the period. Gildas is said to have gone to Brittany and to have founded the monastery named after him near Vannes. He explained the Germanic invasions as God's punishment for the sins of the Romano-British Christians.

Gildas. Brythonic monk (c.495–c.570), born, according to tradition, near what is today Glasgow, contemporary of Dewi Sant, whose De Excidio Britanniae [On the Ruin of Britain] (c.540–8) is the only early work covering the phase of history to which King Arthur is usually assigned. His description of the battle at Mount Badon is most often cited. Gildas argued that the Brythonic defeat before the Saxons was occasioned by moral failure and that in repentance ‘good men’ should join monasteries; thus he sometimes bears the title ‘saint’, although later medieval writers thought the saint and the historian were two different people. Even though De Excidio is composed in an inventive Latin, Gildas is sometimes cited as a father of Welsh literary tradition; his name is also known in Cornish and Breton traditions; see Joseph Loth, ‘Le Nom de Gildas dans l'Iˆle de Bretagne en Irlande et en Armorique’, Revue Celtique, 46 (1929), 1–15; Pádraig Ó Riain, ‘Gildas: A Solution to His Enigmatic Name’, in Catherine Laurent and Helen Davis (eds.), Irlande et Bretagne (Rennes, 1994), 33–9. See also Michael Winterbottom (ed. and trans.), The Ruin of Britain (Chichester, UK, and Totowa, NJ, 1978); Michael Lapidge and David Dumville (eds.), Gildas: New Approaches (Woodbridge, UK, 1984).

Gildas British historian of the 6th century whose Latin work, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, refers to the British victory over the Saxons at the Battle of Badon Hill (although he does not mention Arthur).