During the 6th Century, Gildas was a cleric for the Britons, during more of the simultaneous invasions of the Picts, Scots, Saxons, Frisians, Angles, and Jutes.
From his,
De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae
On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain and
from http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~wiseman/DECB/DECBbestest.html
(and a couple of other web-history sites)
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410
Gildas
From Britain envoys set out with their complaints . . . to beg help from the Romans. . . . The Romans . . . informed our country that they could not go on being bothered with such troublesome expeditions . . . for the sake of wandering thieves who had no taste for war. Rather, the Britons should stand alone, get used to arms, fight bravely, and defend with all their powers their land, property, wives, children, and, more importantly, their life and liberty. . . . they should not hold out to them for the chaining hands that held no arms, but hands equipped with shields, swords and lances, ready for the kill. This was the Romans' advice.
420s
Gildas
Our citizens abandoned the towns and the high wall. Once again they had to flee; once again they were scattered, more irretrievably than usual; once again there were enemy assaults and massacres more cruel. . . . as a result constant devastations of this kind the whole region came to lack the staff of food.
427-
Gildas
So the miserable remnants sent off a letter again, this time to the Roman commander Agitius, in the following terms: `To Agitius, thrice consul: the groans of the British.' Further on came this complaint: `The barbarians push us back to the sea, the sea pushes us back to the barbarians; between these two we are either drowned or slaughtered.' But they got no help in return.
Meanwhile, as the British feebly wandered, a dreadful and notorious famine gripped them, forcing many of them to give in without delay to their plunderers, merely to get a scrap of food to revive them. Not so others: they kept fighting back, basing themselves on the mountains, caves, heaths and thorny thickets. Their enemies had been plundering the land for many years; Now for the first time they inflicted a massacre on them, trusting not in man but in God. The enemy retreated from the people. So the impudent Irish pirates returned home (though they were shortly to return) and for the first time the Picts in the far end of the island kept quiet from now on, though they occasionally carried out devastating raids of plunder.
440
Gildas
And they convened a council to decide the best and soundest way to counter the brutal and repeated invasions and plunderings by the peoples I have mentioned. Then all the members of the council, together with the proud tyrant, were struck blind; the guard - or rather the method of destruction - they devised for our land was that the ferocious Saxons (name not to be spoken!), hated by man and God, should be let into the island likes wolves into the fold, to beat back the peoples of the North.
441
Gildas
Then a pack of cubs burst forth from the lair of the barbarian lioness, coming in three keels, as they call warships in their language. . . . On the orders of the ill-fated tyrant, they first fixed their dreadful claws on the east side of the island, ostensibly to fight for our country, in fact to fight against it.
c.453
Gildas
Then they again complained that their monthly allowance was insufficient, purposely giving a false colour to individual incidents, and swore that they would break their agreement and plunder the whole island unless more lavish payments were heaped on them. There was no delay.
In just punishment for the crimes that had gone before, a fire heaped up and nurtured by the hands of the impious easterners spread from sea to sea. It devastated town and country round about, and, once it was alight, it did not die down until it had burned almost the whole surface of the island and was licking the western ocean with its fierce red tongue. All the major towns were laid low by the repeated battering of enemy rams; laid low too the inhabitants.
c.455-
Gildas
So a number of the wretched survivors were caught in the mountains and butchered wholesale. Others, their spirit broken by hunger, went to surrender to the enemy; they were fated to be slaves forever, if indeed they were not killed straight away, the highest boon. Others made for lands beyond the sea. Others held out, though not without fear, in their own land, trusting their lives with constant foreboding to the high hills, steep, menacing and fortified, to the densest forest and to the cliffs of the sea coast.
. . .
“Every colony is levelled to the ground by the stroke of the battering ram, the inhabitants are slaughtered along with the guardians of their churches, priests and people alike, while the sword gleamed on every side, and the flames crackled around. How horrible to behold in the midst of the streets the tops of towers torn from their lofty hinges, the stones of high walls, holy altars, mutilated corpses, all covered with livid clots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been crushed together in some ghastly wine-press!
. . .
“And there was no grave for the dead, unless they were buried under the wretched ruins of their homes, save the bellies of birds and beasts of prey — with reverence, be it spoken, of the blessed souls (if indeed there were many found) which were carried at that time by the holy angels to the height of heaven . . . Of the miserable remnant some flee to the hills, only to be captured and slain in heaps; some, constrained by famine, come in and surrender themselves to be slaves for ever to the enemy, if only their lives might be spared — and this was the best that was granted, others wailing bitterly passed overseas.” (Gildas: De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, chap. 24.)
http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/rsnz_ ... _01_002030. html
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gildas-full.html
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