Old light on the Dark Age landscape: the description of Britain in the De Excidio Britanniae of Gildas

Abstract

The De Excidio Britanniae of Gildas contains the earliest surviving description of Britain written by a Briton. It comprises an amalgum of received knowledge and contemporary opinion, some of which was consciously retrospective, offered in a style which owes much to the juxtaposition of the island's virtues and its inhabitants' wickedness, for rhetorical purposes. However, assessment of the role that his description played within the whole work does suggest that the material included within it should be considered factually correct by Gildas and his audience. Gildas' debt to Orosius—his main source—was small. In general, the claims of this short document to be considered original are impressive. Analysis tends to support the view that Gildas wrote from a perspective focused in west-central southern Britain, despite his attempt to write for a wider British audience. This section, along with others, is most easily reconciled with composition shortly before 500, rather than the early-mid sixth century date to which it is often ascribed. It contains unmistakable allusions to widespread agriculture and to the alternation of livestock, presumably on a seasonal basis, onto mountain pastures. Such passing references to both intensive and extensive forms of land-use infer that both were normal features of the landscape with which Gildas and his audience were familiar. If such patterns of land-use were characteristic practices when Gildas was writing, then interpretation of the fifth century as a period of population collapse and agrarian dislocation is untenable.