Gildas (fl. 5th or 6th Century)

Gildas's De excidio Britanniae or The Ruin of Britain, dating from the late fifth to the mid-sixth century and written in Latin, is a powerful critique of contemporary British kings and clerics styled in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. Its short historical section, briefly detailing the history of the Britons from the arrival of the Romans and Christianity to an immediate political and spiritual crisis, is the only remotely contemporary account of the devastating impact on British territorial hegemony created by the belligerent arrival of the Germanic peoples subsequently known as the English. Because Gildas relates this crisis to the faults of the Britons, his text is often read retrospectively as an affirmation of this loss in sovereignty. Arguably, however, Gildas's immediate intention was to lament loss in order to exhort success.