After all we have seen in the previous section, I do not think there is any question that Gildas' Roman legends and Nennius' Ch.30 do not derive from a common original. We are, however, still quite far from having a clear picture of it, since both authors modified it considerably, Nennius almost to the point of unintelligibility. Dumville has long since put paid to the view of Nennius as a blundering compiler, showing that he did plenty of interpreting of his sources^[1]; therefore we are not surprised to find him doing so with A. And this explains both the common points and the wild deviations in their two versions. Both were trying to make sense of stories that they found troubling and difficult. Both were men of talent - Gildas a man of genius; and therefore they both force us to dig under the surface of their stories for the original shape of A.

So far, we have been able to verify that the legend said that Britain first surrendered to Rome peacefully, then slaughtered the Roman duces or rectores; that Rome dispatched a Host to punish it; and that as a result Romans acquired absolute power over the island, especially on a group of specified substances incarnating wealth and connected with royal and sacred activities. We also know that, at some time when the Romans had already left Britain, the British sent a desperate embassy - the sablonibus embassy - to successfully beg for Roman help. Nennius 30 contradicts Gildas flatly about the reasons why the Romans had to be convinced to help Britain; contradicts him, indeed, quite startlingly, considering the extent to which they are otherwise parallel. Nennius is quite clear: the Romans refuse to return to the island because, every time they are there, their leaders are murdered. On the other hand, it is not clear why Gildas’ Romans should refuse to help, except for Maximus' earlier rebellion. There certainly has been no Massacre. Gildas only describes one massacre of rectores, following the first acceptance of Roman power, though he does not actually say that the events followed each other immediately; it would be possible, though not likely, to read him to mean that the rebellion of the dolosa leaena took place decades after the first arrival of the Romans.

On the other hand, we must take Nennius' group of three Massacres seriously, since it amounts to a difference between ch.30 and Nennius' basic account (the legend of the Seven Emperors, which knows only one massacre) which makes it impossible for him to reconcile them. Nennius' instinct is to reconcile accounts, and this means that anything that makes it harder for him to do so cannot come from his own pen: it must be in his sources, a pre-existent obstacle to harmonizing history. I do not think we need doubt that it was Gildas who innovated here, and that the original story featured three Massacres - another of its growing number of Triads.

We know that the plot of A was based on triads - that is what led us to establish its existence in the first place. Therefore, to reconstruct it, we have to take those triads into account. We are already familiar with them: three Pictish invasions; three invaders of Britain; three massacres of Roman leaders; three Roman expeditions into Britain.

These triads all have a chronological dimension; with the possible exception of two of the invaders of Britain, Picts and Scots, who apparently invade the island together, each triad describes three single events that follow each other in time. Therefore a plot can be built up from them.

It would scarcely be reasonable to expect all the triads to move at the same pace, and in fact they don't. The problem is that in most cases it is difficult to establish their right order, and we will see that there are reasons to believe that Gildas, the more intelligent (no offence to Nennius) and better informed of our witnesses, may have rearranged the sequence even of those he retained, to suit his views. Six points are essential to reconstruct a reasonable outline of the original story.

1) Nennius and Gildas describe one and the same Roman punishment raid on Britain; therefore one of the Roman expeditions must have been devoted to revenge against the British.

2) This cannot have happened until the Romans had something to avenge, to wit their slighted majesty - it is a case of "denial after recognition" - and the massacre of their envoys. Therefore it happened after Britain first submitted to Rome.

3) The seizure-stamping of British wealth which follows the revenge expedition must be dated at the beginning and not at the end of the Roman period, since it represents the effective enactment of Roman power de facto, just as the original, peaceful submission of the British had established it de iure.

4) The sablonibus embassy is the result both of a Pictish invasion (Nennius and Gildas agree) and of one of the Three Massacres (Nennius alone, since Gildas only has one). It is reasonable to suggest that the Massacre took place before the Invasion; in Gildas at least, the absence of the Romans is the pre-condition for the Picts invading.

5) The sablonibus embassy scene may have different motivations in the two authors, but there is no disagreement about what the British are actually trying to do: get the Romans to deliver them from the Picts, even though it entails humiliation and submission. Therefore the Romans have already left Britain once; and as Nennius clearly states that it was the Massacres that made them abandon the island, this means that there has already been at least a second Massacre.

6) The Pictish menace dominates events.

Here, then, is a partial first reconstruction:

• 1: The British submit to the Romans peacefully. The Romans leave a set of representatives, duces or rectores.
• 2: Roman ius/iugum proves unbearable; the British rebel against the Romans, murdering their representatives (First Massacre)
• 3: The Romans come in wrath, destroy the British with hardly a battle, and "enslave" the remnants. They impose their power over British wealth.
• 4: After some time, the British revolt against ius/iugum again, committing the Second Massacre.
• 5: The Picts invade
• 6: The British send the sablonibus embassy.
• 7: Roman expedition and rescue of Britain.

At this point, we have two Massacres, two Roman expeditions, and one Pictish invasion: three incomplete triads. We also have not arrived at what is, in Gildas, the conclusive British victory over the Picts; a matter in which, since Nennius has clearly jumbled the end of the saga - by placing the Roman revenge expedition last, where it has no business to be - we have to trust Gildas. The obvious answer is that there was a third Massacre, that the Romans left never to return, and that the Picts then invaded again. Therefore:

• 1: The British submit to the Romans peacefully. The Romans leave a set of representatives, duces or rectores.
• 2: Roman ius/iugum proves unbearable; the British rebel against the Romans, murdering their representatives (First Massacre)
• 3: The Romans come in wrath, destroy the British with hardly a battle, and "enslave" the remnants. They impose their power over British wealth.
• 4: After some time, the British revolt against ius/iugum again, committing the Second Massacre.
• 5: The Picts invade
• 6: The British send the sablonibus embassy.
• 7: Roman expedition and rescue of Britain.
• 8: For the third and final time, the British find Roman ius/iugum intolerable, and commit the Third Massacre.
• 9: The Picts invade again. The Romans will not come.

Here we run into a difficulty. After the Romans leave Britain, Gildas' account has two Pictish invasions, and two Roman rescue expeditions; and explains that not with a massacre of Romans, but with the revolt of Maximus. While this allows us to complete two triads - three Roman expeditions, three Pictish invasions - it leaves us with no particular reason for one of Gildas' two concluding Roman expeditions. And if the Third Massacre is not the reason for the end of Roman interventions in Britain, then we have no reason for it Gildas explains it by the feebleness of unmilitary native Britons, deprived of their fighting classes by Maximus; but Nennius ch.30 does not mention Maximus at all^[2]. So did Gildas add a Pictish invasion and a Roman expedition here? I think so. We have already seen that it was as at this point that Gildas placed a certain amount of non-triadic material, in particular the two Walls. This suggests that his reason to believe in two Roman expeditions at the end of Roman rule was very strong, that he thought B, the source that mentioned them, credible enough to overrule A.

Now, I already suggested that Gildas' B material included historical echoes of the Roman expeditions of Theodosius and Stilicho. The element I diagnosed as irregular and intrusive was the first of the two Roman rescue missions: now it turns out that my reconstruction of A has space for one such expedition, not for two. And if triads are the backbone of A, why should we write off Nennius' three massacres? We must accept that Gildas innovated by eliminating the two massacres at the end. Magnus Maximus is there in their place, to bring about the separation from Rome. Maximus was Gildas’ way to dispose of a narrative difficulty: once he had been brought in, there was no need for any massacre of Roman duces or rectores. Roman rectores go away with Maximus, on whose guilt Gildas lays heavy emphasis, and never come back.

Gildas was coherent about it: even after the first of their two last expeditions, the Romans left behind no rectores - when the British built the useless turf wall, they had no Roman rector to guide them - uulgo irrationabili absque rectore. (This confirms once again what I suggested earlier, that the account of the building of the two Walls was - as we say - "flour from his own sack".) Therefore no final massacre could have taken place; there were no rectores to massacre. Then the Romans returned temporarily to have the stone Wall built and leave the British military manuals to teach them to defend themselves. The legend of the Wall is a Gildasian innovation, and the notice of the army instruction manuals depends on the presence in Britain of genuine such Roman manuals - in other words, not on A. There is no evidence whatever that any of the detail of Gildas' two last Roman expeditions were based in any way on A; it is all built out of misunderstood historical sources - B. The only native part is the account of the sablonibus embassy, and even that, I have argued, is coloured - by the genius of Gildas himself - with the an idea of the "loss of the Roman name" derived not from native sources but from a Roman historical notice.

Even if Gildas had no overriding reason to prefer B to A - such as for instance Continental origin^[3] - he would have preferred the account he reconstructed from B simply on grounds of verisimilitude, not to mention morality. He would hate the use of three treacherous massacres as a founding myth for independent Britain, finding it not only unrealistic, but unwholesome, another instance of that British fondness for treachery and cruelty which he detested. Having to choose between a source that made the British gain their independence by successful treachery, and one which described the lords of the world as deliberately abandoning Britain after two major efforts to keep it defended, he would surely pick the second, which also agreed with the Rescript of Honorius. Drawing up tables of what the plot of A would look like without and with Gildas' version of the two last Roman expeditions will let us see the difficulties more clearly.

To my mind, the first version simply makes more sense as a story. Repetition is unnecessary; there is no need for the tragedy of Britain to be held back twice by Roman expeditions, when the fact that there are two rather than one changes nothing - the Picts do charge through in the end, and the Romans refuse to help. Really, the only thing the two separate expeditions achieve, is to have two successive Walls built, one of turf, one of stone; and the two Walls cannot be placed in any triadic context (nobody heard about a third Wall until Bede). They are, however, central to Gildas' narration, upholding what I described as a mistaken but brilliant piece of historical deduction from evidence, based, I suspect, partly on a certain amount of genuine historical Roman material ("B"); the ideological aspect of the story of their building, with the British being both unmilitary and leaderless, is quite in keeping with his views. This is reason enough to suspect Gildas' two walls and two expeditions. Furthermore, Gildas' second expedition, the one which leads to the British building the turf Wall, is visibly a pale doublet of the last, which built the stone Wall of Hadrian. It is only for this third and final mission that Gildas rolls out all the jewels of his rhetoric in a near-battle-song, consciously heightening the language still further, and probably drawing on native heroic poetry; and this supports my suggestion that there was in fact only one Roman rescue mission in the legend of A.

There almost certainly is one Roman expedition which Gildas does not reckon. To judge by the little Nennius tells us, each of the three Massacres strikes the same kind of figure, the Roman duces; there is no reason to imagine a difference between the groups of people massacred. From this it follows that there must have been a Roman expedition to Britain before the First Massacre, leaving behind a first group of duces - if an army had not come to take possession of the island, where would these have come from? Gildas probably ignores this expedition because it does not seem to have involved a fight - the British surrendered peacefully. Also, to discount this particular expedition as one of the Three Roman Expeditions allows him to insert a second Roman invasion after the end of Roman power, and still have a Triad. (This, in turn, argues that the idea of Three Roman Expeditions to Britain was standard in his time, and that if he wanted to modify it in the light of other information - such as that there had been two major rescue expeditions in the later fourth century, not only one - he had to do it within its framework.)

But if that is the case, what about the three Pictish invasions? Gildas, not Nennius, has a triad of Pictish invasions, the first two repelled by the Romans and the third not only repelled but annihilated by the British. If we accept that such a triad was part of A's governing elements, we must see that A has only space for two where Gildas places all three - at the end of the Roman period: there is only one Roman rescue mission, and, what is more, if we keep on regarding this legend's framework as triadic, it is impossible there should be more. So were there only two Pictish invasions in the original - one to be defeated by the Roman rescuers, the other to be destroyed by the British? We are left with only two; so where is the third?

Well, there is one natural place to imagine a Pictish invasion, or at least a Pictish threat: at the very start of the action, before the British submit to the Romans. That is, the British would submit to the Romans out of fear of the Picts: a suggestion that not only makes excellent sense, but also has a certain amount of support in Nennius' text. Badly timed and confused though it is, chapter 30 clearly starts with Brittones... dum anxiebantur a barbarorum gentibus, id est Scottorum et Pictorum, flagitabant auxilium Romanorum: "as the British were anxious about the tribes of barbarians, that is Picts and Scots, they made a formal request of Roman help" - the verb flagitare stands for a formal, and possibly repeated, request. The word anxiebantur implies a threat hanging over Britain - not the achieved and almost-consumed catastrophe of the sablonibus embassy, whose verbal and physical vocabulary of terror and grief is very distant from that of anxiety and formal entreaty. I suggest that the story said that Britain, threatened, and perhaps more than threatened, by its transmarine neighbours, sent to Rome for help and had to agree to submit; the Romans then came and, having warded off the Picts, installed their rectores and left - the leaena dolosa then instigated the First massacre. We have observed that, in the later stages of A, the Pictish threat is the motor of everything that happens; this hypothesis simplifies facts, making it the motor of events right from the beginning, and attributing to the Romans, from the start, their later role of defenders from the barbarians.

To sum up: I believe Gildas modified A's account of three Roman expeditions to Britain to incorporate a memory of the historical missions of Theodosius the elder and Stilicho. He did so by ignoring A's first Roman expedition as not being a war, and making the Romans install their first duces or rectores in Britain without the aid of an army. It is likely enough, I would add, that the Continental historical material he received knew nothing whatsoever of Massacres at the end of Roman rule; which would give him yet another incentive to deny that these things ever happened. But Gildas innovated not only by adding actual historical memories, but also by making historical interpretations of his own, dramatized according to his powerful literary talent. Had he been a less intelligent historian, he would have preserved more historical material.

We begin to have the impression that Gildas wrote his masterpiece in a sort of constant confrontation with his culture’s classics. He opened with an apology for not being able to match those who, in the past, wrote of "the dangers of heroic soldiers in grim war", that is for not being able to deliver the kind of panegyric of heroic warriors that his age expected, and which a predecessor seems to have delivered with great success: his age, he feels, demands such heroes from him, but does not supply them to him. In the case of A, he goes further, exploiting reliable continental information - B - to deny that the Second and Third Massacre ever happened. He accepts that the British rebelled against Roman power, but places the guilt of that on a historical figure of Roman usurper whose details he has had from Sulpicius Severus, but to whom he applies, quite arbitrarily, the least appealing features of the British tyrannus or teyrn^[4]. The point is that if Maximus took all the Romans, the true lords, away from Britain, there is no place for any of the two later Massacres.

Gildas' reaction to A does not end there. To judge from Nennius, the central point of A is that ius Romanum is a iugum too durum to be obeyed, so that the British are driven no less than three times to revolt against it; each time, they have to go back to Rome with their tail between their legs, mauled and broken by Pictish (and Scottish) invasions; and the vicious circle is only broken when the British themselves finally manage their great and decisive victory against the Third Pictish Invasion - obtained by the help of One Whose "yoke is easy", and Whose help the desperate islanders seek "instead of human help" - human meaning Roman. God, in fact, has freed them of the dreadful choice of having to either be devoured by the Picts or having to swear to obey Roman law "however hard it might be", licet durum fuisset.

Now there is a reminiscence of vocabulary, idea and formulation in Gildas' statement that, with Maximus' mad adventure, Britain lost her rectores licet immanes, her rulers, however awesome; and not even so much a verbal reminiscence, as a coincidence in mood. Gildas is speaking of the human embodiments of the thing the British of A had found simply too hard - the rectores, clearly the representatives of that same ius/iugum Romanum; and, using the very same concessive, licet; Gildas admits that the rectores were indeed immanes, dreadful, overwhelming, hard to bear. But then he outlines a post-Roman history so grim and horrendous that even the hardest Roman rule must be much the lesser of two evils. He not only acknowledges the heaviness of Roman rule, but faces the issue that the intolerable ius was administered by individuals, by identifiable people. He is looking square in the face of the fact that the reaction against the abstract ius took the form of revolt against concrete duces or rectores; and it is the terrible personal qualities of these rectores - no doubt influenced by what he had heard, at whatever remove, of the horrors of Justinian - that he admits, so as to implicitly show sympathy with the impulse to get rid of them. But he does not admit that any such riddance took place; he simply takes the rectores and the "great youth" away from Britain. He acknowledges all the ideas of A, in particular the heaviness of Roman rule; but he does not acknowledge his facts, rejecting two of the three massacres of Roman duces^[5]. He does not imitate his sources, but answers to them, reacting to them in a spirit of bold freedom and daring reinterpretation; I suspect that his public realized what he was doing, and that he expected them to realize it. The licet.may have been put there exactly to signpost his reaction to A's basic thesis; after all, he is not exactly hiding his intention to bring about a fundamental change in the whole culture^[6].

So where does this leave our attempted reconstruction of A? Gildas' story is beautifully clear and coherent, but it contains at least three freaks. First, it places the building of the Walls far too late. Second, it makes the Picts reach Britain after the Romans leave, which is not borne out by A, is explicitly denied by Nennius, and has Bede in a tizzy of helpless explanation. Third and, from our point of view, much more important, it places the only massacre of Roman functionaries at the beginning, not at the end, of Roman rule.

(On the other hand, Nennius also innovated. He misunderstood or misrepresented the story of the murder of the duces as taking place in its entirety at the end of Roman rule in Britain, whereas surely the first bout of murders and the first two expeditions must have been placed at the beginning; and Gildas' devastating Host, coming to take over Britain and establish Roman rule for centuries, became one single last strafe-expedition, after which the Romans left for good.)

There is no absolute evidence to reject Gildas' picture; but setting the differences out in the last of our tables will show which of the two possible versions is the more credible, balanced and convincing narrative.

In the left-hand table, every single narrative element is well motivated and well followed upon. Why do the British surrender to the Romans? To Gildas (of course) because they are cowardly and unmilitary; to my Reconstructed Account (RA), because the threat of the Picts hangs over them - they may be unmilitary, at least as compared with the Roman masters of the world, but they have a better reason than cowardice to accept the protection of the mightiest nation in existence. Each massacre takes place at a definite stage of Britain's relationship with the world empire: the first causes the ruin of the native ruling classes and the establishment of a royal caste of Roman rulers of Britain, as well as the Roman takeover of British wealth and sacred substances. The second causes the end of Roman power in Britain and brings in the ancient threat of the Picts again; the third eliminates any hope of rescue from Rome, leaving the British to their own desperate devices - they had wheedled the Romans into helping them once with the sablonibus embassy, but never again. The same goes for the three Roman invasions: the first comes in calm majesty, to establish Roman power and especially Roman law; the second in wrath, to destroy treacherous murderers; the third in mercy, to rescue a land already lost to the barbarians. And while RA's triad of Roman invasions is clear and coherent, it would be hard, reading Gildas alone, to realize that there is a triad in his narrative; it is present - along with at least two others, that of invading peoples and that of Pictish invasions - but obscured. And that alone would be enough, even if we had no other reasons to think so, to suggest that Gildas had innovated. From his point of view, omitting the pre-Roman Pictish threat would have two advantages: reinforcing his view that the Picts were late-comers to the island, and, by removing the most pressing reason for the British to seek Roman protection, reinforcing his picture of the British as cowardly.

The three Roman expeditions of RA may be read according to Georges Dumézil's theory of the Indo-European Three Functions. The first expedition has to do with law and majesty, with the assertion of rightful sovereignty, and, because of that, it lays the foundations of the others. The second is an overwhelming manifestation of military power, both caused and justified by the assertion of sovereignty of the first - it is because the Romans are already admitted as masters in Britain by law, that they can inflict such savage punishment on disobedient and treacherous subjects. The third is an act of mercy, to deliver the Britons from oppression and allow them to carry on a peaceful life. The link of this third expedition with Dumézil's third function is perhaps less clear, but the other two are quite clearly connected with the first and second.

In the confused Nennius ch.30 there is one statement that clearly refers to these three purposes: Romani autem ad imperium auxiliumque et ad uindicandum ueniebant. The clause is best read with ad+accusative "for the purpose of, towards", and with the three words imperium, auxilium, uindicandum as separate headings: for the sake of empire, and for help, and to avenge (avenge what?). For these reasons, the Romans "would come" - imperfect, the tense of what "used to happen". That is, this does not refer to a single expedition, but to the whole picture: these were the three reasons for which the Romans came to Britain in three expeditions. It is easy enough to see that each of these words describes one expedition: the first, for the sake of imposing their rule on Britain, ad imperium; the second, to avenge, ad vindicandum, their slighted majesty and their murdered representatives; the third ad auxilium, to rescue, the country - after its representatives had properly abased themselves for the crimes committed against Rome - from its ancient enemies.

The picture of RA centres on the Northern barbarians. According to RA, the Pictish-Scottish threat led the British to seek Rome's protection and rule, like a deprived freeman seeking the protection of a great lord; and once they had accepted their protection, with all the legal obligations it implied, they were guilty of "denial after acceptance", a crime comparable to high treason, if once they decided to rebel against Rome. This is common to both Gildas and Nennius. The Pictish threat is the hidden engine of everything else that happens - all the painful, duplicitous, and finally disappointing relationship between Britain and Rome. It is the central issue.

This has become obscured in both Nennius and Gildas, because the Saxon threat had obscured the Pictish, and because Gildas was bent on showing not the need of the British, but their worthlessness. But RA is a narrative of epic dimensions, whose full telling could take a long time, involving many of the peoples of the known world, Romans and Britons as well as Picts and Scots. It is certainly a tale of the past, to a large extent legendary; remove Gildas' pessimism, and you will see it bathed with a golden glow. It completes a cycle begun in prehistory with a mighty and decisive national triumph; the defeat of the Picts means at once Britain's final victory over the old enemy, and the consecration of the British nation to God. In Gildas, it is independent Britain's last serious war for a generation, putting an end to the Pictish threat until we are fully within recorded history - when their recovering menace will be the motor of an even more terrible invasion.

Indeed, even though the Saxons are on the face of it unknown to A, nevertheless it may be argued that RA preludes to them. As once the pressure of the northern enemy led the British to the onerous choice of accepting the Roman iugum iuris with a iuramentum, so in latter days it was to lead them to call in another military overseas people, and make a deal with them. I have already analyzed Gildas' Saxons as bad copies of Gildas' Romans; perhaps he was following a British tradition of interpretation. This legend must have been developing when the North British (I have already argued that A formed in the north) were largely cut out of the Roman world by the overwhelming Saxon interlopers. For all they knew, there still was a Roman empire on the continent^[7], beyond the barrier of barbarian invaders; the fact that it did not come to rescue them from the enemy may have given rise to the belief that it would not - because of that same ancient British treachery that had once brought its avenging armies to Britain. At the same time, the great British victory against the Picts - already itself an ancient heroic memory - acquired a central significance, as the one time when the British had managed to rescue themselves, with no need for Roman auxilium or the dangerous friendship of barbarians, thanks to the help of God. It probably came to sound like a call to wake up to the descendants of those who had once inflicted such a catastrophe on the Picts, and who, now, had to deal with another horde of barbarians because, at a later date, they had not felt able to face those self-same Picts without them.

Notes

^[1]The historical value of the Historia Brittonum, in Arthurian literature 6 (1986), 1-26.

^[2]It is at ch.28, the end of the legend of the Seven Emperors, that we find one single Massacre - rather than a triad; and it comes after the end of "Maximianus".  In other words, the legend of the Seven Emperors as told by Nennius has an ending which is exactly parallel to the innovations introduced by Gildas into A - one Massacre rather than three, and the introduction of the character of Maximus, who, as we will see, has no part to play in what can be reconstructed of the original narrative of A. In other words, we have good reason to believe that Gildas’ account, rather than the original of A, influenced the much later legend of the Seven Emperors.

^[3]It is perhaps worth pointing out that Gildas' use of B represents the first instance of something we will find thoroughly in charge in the Annales Romanorum, in Nennius and in Geoffrey of Monmouth: the attempt to reconcile British and Roman historical traditions - coupled with a convinction that the Roman record is more reliable. Gildas jettisons a whole section of A, changing its shape altogether, largely on the strength of historical allusions that must come from Roman records. He does not know, like Nennius, the skill of chronology, let alone live, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, in a world of Classical prose historiography he has thoroughly absorbed; but he has already, for whatever reason, decided that Roman data are superior to British, and where they conflict, it is the British that he revises.

^[4]It is worth, by the way, pointing out that Gildas may have had a huge effect on further Welsh legend. If we take him to have taken Maximus from historical continental sources to replace the protagonists of the Third Massacre, there is no reason to think that the figure of Maximus/Maximianus/Maxen was known to Britain before him. We have already met good evidence that his legend - whose growth Dumville dates to the Welsh Dark Age that followed the age of Gildas - was still being elaborated in Nennius' time: to wit, the obvious duplication of Good Maximus and Bad Maximianus, which Nennius understood perfectly well and to which he contributed. As for The dream of Maxen gwledig, its artificial nature, compounded of features of the legends of Constantine and St.Helena and Julius Caesar, is clear to see.

^[5]There probably is a point in the difference between Nennius' generic duces and Gildas' specific rectores. We have seen that the rectores were a specific category of Ambrosian functionaries: Gildas, with his eye as ever on contemporary conditions, may have wanted to stress the parallel between Roman imperial power and Ambrosian institutions, and therefore replaced the generic word duces with rectores to make the connection stronger. The house of Ambrosius, with its descent from the Romans of old, is legitimately the heir to Roman ius; and the tyranni of today are just as perfidious and as rebellious against right rule as their ancestors were to Rome.

^6] Which causes a slight vocabulary problem. I have resolved to call this the Gildasian age, Gildasian Britain, the Gildasian culture, for the obvious and sufficient reason that Gildas is both by far the most outstanding and the most informative writer of the period, and no description can prescind from him. But is it entirely sensible, or for that matter fair, to say of Saint Gildas that he was in revolt against the Gildasian age – or, for that matter, Gildasian culture? We do not call the age of Henry VIII the Thomasmorian or the Johnfisherine age (though perhaps we should); and it is, you might say funny, or you might say troublesome, to name a period for a writer in revolt against it.

^[7]Isolated groups usually retain outdated views of the outer world. In the early nineteenth century, the Afrikaners, dissatisfied by British rule, seriously looked for rescue from the Netherlands, thinking that it was still a world power.

History of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio P. Barbieri. Used with permission.

Comments to: Fabio P. Barbieri