King Arthur

by Christopher Hibbert

Gildas was the son of a minor British chieftain whose small domain in Scotland was overrun by Picts. He and several of his several brothers abandoned their homeland and fled to Wales, where they were given the protection of King Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd. Gildas married in Wales, but his wife soon passed away, and he turned to a religious life. At times, he seems to have resided in Ireland, on a remote island in the Bristol Channel, where he lived as a hermit and subsisted on fish and gulls’ eggs; in Brittany; and at Glastonbury in Somerset. On his death, he was deemed worthy of canonization. He wrote his most significant work, the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, circa 540 and refers to it as a book of complaints. In it, he castigates his contemporaries for their lack of foresight and their blindness to the lessons of the past and attacks the local kings of Britain for immorality and tyranny. “They have many wives and all of them adulteresses and prostitutes. They often take oaths and always break them. They wage wars, and the wars are unjust on their own countrymen. They hunt down thieves in the countryside, but they have thieves at their own tables, whom they love and load with gifts.”