Gildas reports in his homiletic mid-6th century De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) 2 that external wars have stopped but civil war continues as, presumably, the Saxons remain in their territories in the east of the country? However, Gildas refers earlier (c.10) to the “unhappy partition with the barbarians” ( lugubre divortium barbarorum) which deprives his fellow citizens of visiting the shrines of the holy martyrs, namely St Alban of Verulam, Aaron and Julius of Caerleon, and others in different places, all of whom he considered to have suffered during the Diocletian persecution. Gildas delivers a prophetic sermon it seems luxuria has returned to the land and the Britons again live a life of wickedness, greed and sexual excesses thus it seems bad times are destined to return to the island as God will again cleanse his flock. In Gildas' days memories of the Saxon rebellion are all but forgotten now by the generations that succeeded the kings and priests that witnessed the storm, but the cities are still not populated as they once were he claims they are deserted, in ruins and unkempt. The war with the Saxon federates continued up until the siege of Mons Badonicus, some 40 years before Gildas was born thereafter an uneasy peace prevailed into his own time so the story goes. With the foedus (treaty) broken an outbreak of violence ensued that set the island ablaze from coast to coast. But the federates grew in numbers and the Britons failed to supply sufficient provisions. Gildas tells us that following the Roman departure from Britain the superbus tyrannus and a council of Britons employed Saxon federates to defend the Island from the threat from the Picts and Scot in the north and north-west respectively. “The graves where their bodies lie, and the places of their suffering, had they not, very many of them, been taken from us the citizens on account of our numerous crimes, through the disastrous division caused by the barbarians.I speak of Saint Alban of Verulam, Aaron

Gildas the ruin of britain