Gildas

Gildas (c.500–570), abbot. Born probably near the Clyde, he became a monk at Llaniltud in S. Wales, perhaps after being married and widowed. He was a most notable and influential figure in Welsh monastic life especially through his numerous writings. Famous Irish monks became his disciples for a time; he himself visited Ireland and wrote letters to distant monasteries. In c.540 he wrote his famous work De excidio Britanniae, cited by Bede, which gives a vivid picture of the decadence of contemporary British secular rulers and clerics, and blames their own sins for the victory of the Anglo-Saxon invaders. This work shows rhetorical power as well as considerable knowledge of Holy Scripture, Virgil, and the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch. For some years he lived as a hermit on Flatholm Island in the Bristol Channel, but he ended his days in Brittany on an island near Rhuis (Morbihan). Here he had founded a monastery which became the centre of his cult. Gildas's chronology has been much disputed; it has also been asserted that there were in reality two men of this name who have been confused. Gildas's writings were widely known and used in Ireland, Wales, and England, not least by Wulfstan, archbishop of York, in the early 11th century, in his famous Sermon of the Wolf to the English people during the calamitous reign of Ethelred the Unready. Feast: 29 January.

Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.

• Works and Life of Gildas ed. T. Mommsen in M.G.H., Auctores Antiquissimi, xiii (1896), 3–110; N.L.A., i. 468–9; M. Winterbottom (ed.) Gildas, the Ruin of Britain and other works (1978); C. E. Stevens, ‘Gildas Sapiens’ in E.H.R., lvi (1941), 353–73; P. Grosjean, Notes d'Hagiographie celtique', Anal. Boll., lxxv (1957), 185–226; id., ‘Remarques sur le De excidio’, Bull. Du Cange, xxv (1955), 155–87. J. F. Kenney, Sources for the Early History of Ireland, i (1929), 176–9; M. Lapidge and D. Dumville (ed.), Gildas: New Approaches (1984), D. Howlett, Cambro-Latin Compositions (1998), pp. 33–56

Brythonic monk (c.495–c.570), born, according to tradition, near what is today Glasgow, contemporary of Dewi Sant, whose De Excidio Britanniae [On the Ruin of Britain] (c.540–8) is the only early work covering the phase of history to which King Arthur is usually assigned. His description of the battle at Mount Badon is most often cited. Gildas argued that the Brythonic defeat before the Saxons was occasioned by moral failure and that in repentance ‘good men’ should join monasteries; thus he sometimes bears the title ‘saint’, although later medieval writers thought the saint and the historian were two different people. Even though De Excidio is composed in an inventive Latin, Gildas is sometimes cited as a father of Welsh literary tradition; his name is also known in Cornish and Breton traditions; see Joseph Loth, ‘Le Nom de Gildas dans l'I^le de Bretagne en Irlande et en Armorique’, Revue Celtique, 46 (1929), 1–15; Pádraig Ó Riain, ‘Gildas: A Solution to His Enigmatic Name’, in Catherine Laurent and Helen Davis (eds.), Irlande et Bretagne (Rennes, 1994), 33–9. See also Michael Winterbottom (ed. and trans.), The Ruin of Britain (Chichester, UK, and Totowa, NJ, 1978); Michael Lapidge and David Dumville (eds.), Gildas: New Approaches (Woodbridge, UK, 1984).