On the Ruin of Britain

Notes

1. Ad annum obsessionis Badonici montis. Since the publication of Dr. Guest’s papers (“Origines Celticae,” 1883), the conclusions at which he arrives respecting the location of Badonicus mons have been very generally accepted. Treating of “The early English Settlements in South Britain,” he maintains that Mount Badon or Badon Hill is not Bath, but Badbury, in Dorset. “Its elevated site, its great strength and evident importance, and its name, all alike favour the hypothesis” (vol. ii, p. 189). His hypothesis was accepted by Freeman and Green. But it is one extremely difficult to fall in with, and must, one feels, be put aside for the older view. There was no need of a very elevated site to build a fortress, while the neighbourhood of Bath would supply hills for such a purpose. Moreover, the very similarity of sound in Bad-bury and Bad-on-icus is itself something to rouse suspicion rather than to suggest Dr. Guest’s inference. The name Mons Badonis is found in Nennius’s Historia Britonum as the place where the “twelfth battle” was fought under Arthur. The Annales Cambriae place Bellum Badonis opposite a doubtful date (A.D. 516); a fragment published in the Brut of Llyfr Coch o Hergest speaks of the “battle of Badwn” (giveith Badwn) p. 404, while other parts of the Brut mention Kaer Vadon, and once there is mention of esgob Bad. In all these places there can be no doubt that the meaning is Bath, as in “capitulum LXVIII” of the Historia Britonum (p. 130 Mommsen’s edn.); De stagno calido, in quo balnea sunt Badonis (baths of Badon) secundum uniuscuiusque voti desiderium. Cf. Camden’s Britannia, Somersetshire, p. 70 (edn. of 1645).
2. Quique quadragesimus quartus.....There has been much controversy as to the meaning of these words. Beda took them to mean, forty-four years after the coming of the Saxons to Britain: quadragesimo circiter et quarto anno adventus eorum in Britanniam. M. de la Borderie, in an article in Revue Celtique, vi, 1-13, holds that Beda’s rendering is the true one, and in this way arrives at the conclusion that the date assigned to the siege of Badon Hill by the Annales Cambriae is incorrect. Certainly A.D. 516 cannot be the date of that battle for several reasons; the entry in the Annales Cambriae has all the appearance of an erroneous borrowing from Nennius, c. 56, of matter not found in the Irish translation, and extremely legendary in character. Dismissing the date 516, M. de la Borderie arrives at 493 as the date of the battle, which, he holds, Beda deduced from Gildas, rightly understanding his words to convey the meaning of forty-four years after the settlement of the Saxons. But the French scholar inserts the words adventus eorum in Britanniam before ut novi. In the note on Ambrosius Aurelian we have had an instance of the way in which Beda mixes literal quotations from Gildas with his own words, interpreting the latter’s meaning in better words or phrases. As no MS. authority exists for this insertion of M. de la Borderie’s, it seems far better to regard the words adventus eorum in Britanniam as Beda’s own interpretation of Gildas. Ussher (vol. v, p. 544) holds that Beda has misunderstood Gildas’s words, and gives himself the following paraphrase of the passage: “perinde ac si dixisset, a clade Badonica quadragesimum quartum tunc (tempore quo scripta ab eo ista sunt) numerari cepisse annum; unico quippe anni illius mense adhuc elapso; idque ex sua ipsius aetate se novisse.” “As if he had said that from the loss inflicted at Badon, the forty-fourth year-had then (at the time he wrote) begun to be counted; one month in fact of that year was gone, and this he knew from his own age.” Mommsen feels that the passage can hardly give a good meaning, and, though reluctantly, proposes-an emendation of it. The difficulty, he feels, lies in the strange ut novi, but if the sentence be read: quique quadragesimus quartus [est ab eo qui] orditur annus mense iam uno emenso, qui et meae nativitatis est, then the meaning is perfectly clear. (Man. Germ. Hist., iii, p. 8.) When we think of the many involved scraggy sentences which Gildas writes elsewhere, we do not wonder at the ut novi, which the recollection of his own age forced to an undue prominence before his mind: by inserting it in brackets the sentence is tolerably easier, and can only give the meaning deduced by Ussher, and favoured by Mommsen.
3. The description given here of the atrocities perpetrated in this invasion is so definite in details that it must have come to Gildas from eye-witnesses. He himself saw the ruined cities, desertae dirutaeque hactenus squalent (chapter 26).
4. A very new and, to many, startling explanation of these words is given by Mr. A. Anscombe in Academy, September 8th, 1895. “The phrase insulae excidii (mentio) has been assumed to refer to the loss of the island of Britain by the Britons: it, of course, refers to the occupation of Mon, or Anglesey, by Edwin of Deira (617-633).” This way of explaining the phrase seems to me to be completely set aside by the last words of chapter 23. “They (the Saxons) declare that they would break the treaty and lay waste all parts of the island (Britain).” Insula must have the same meaning in that passage and this.
5. This passage mentions two generations. First, there were the men who had witnessed the disasters suffered from the Saxons and had survived them to enjoy a time of quiet in lives void of reproach. Secondly, after they had passed away, there came a generation of men who, like Gildas himself, had experience only of the period of non-molestation by outside enemies. It is the deterioration of these that he laments in the present work. But there are also the few select ones, so few that even the venerable mother, the church, hardly knows them as her only real sons. Who are they? To answer this question fully we must consult cc. 65, 69, 92; yet in the main it would be right to say that he has the monks in his thoughts. We find a reference to this passage in c. 65, and therein also, it may be mentioned in passing, strong evidence that this work of Gildas never really consisted of two different parts—Historia and Epistola—much less that they were written at different times. “I ask pardon of these men, as I have said in a previous part,” so writes Gildas in the chapter named, “whose life I not only praise, but also esteem above all the wealth of the world, and of which, if possible, I long for a share, sometime, before I die.” For Gildas, and, apparently, for his contemporaries also, in both the Irish and British churches, the original idea of monasticism had undergone a great change. It had ceased to be a purely contemplative life, or one of secluded discipline of the individual soul unto holiness, as Eucher’s beautiful De Contemptu Mundi describes it. Gildas, though a monk, is mixing in the battle of public life, and the present work is part of the task which he fearlessly carried out. “There was a prophet of the people in the time of the Britons called Gildas. He wrote about their misdeeds: how they so angered God, that at last He caused the army of the English to conquer their land, and utterly destroy the strength of the Britons. And that came about through the irregularity of the clergy, and the lawlessness of the laity” (Wulfstan, Anglo-Saxon Homilies). Notwithstanding the position in which Gildas finds himself, the place of honour in his mind belongs to those who lived in the cloisters: they are the saints, the only real sons of mother church: sancti Dei, id est, monachi, as said by Salvian. would express his idea also. The Welsh language itself still bears evidence how such words as sanctus (sant), religiosi (crefyddwyr), took a special meaning, at first no doubt a fuller meaning than hitherto, when men regarded their adoption of the cloistered life as their “conversion.” But it is very significant that Gildas nowhere presses this life upon anyone, cleric or layman, as a cure for the excesses which he denounces. Wherefore we find him, in this, to be out of the fashion of his age, though we may see in it also the keen moderation that is so evident in the “Fragments,” and which the correspondence of such men as Finnan, a sanctorum Hiberniac magister, shows to have been valued in distant places (Columb., Kp. I, in M. Germ. H., iii, 159). His words, however, imply—strange though it seems—that monasticism had not spread largely in Britain by c. 540. See Introduction.
6. Mater ecclesia is of constant occurrence in ecclesiastical Latin as early as Cyprian; matris sinus also in the same connection.