Abbot Ailred of Rievaulx, writing his Life of Ninian in the latter part of the twelfth century, placed the Saint of Galloway firmly in the fourth century by making him a contemporary of Martin of Tours, who died in 397 A.D. According to Ailred, Ninian visited Martin on his way home from Rome and borrowed masons from him to build a church in Britain. Martin was the leading ecclesiastical figure in Gaul, about whom much had been put on record even before he died. Ninian was an obscure figure in a dim borderland of the known world, about whose life and activities we possess no contemporary record whatever. The link with Martin has therefore been all-important for the historical reality of Ninian, and for centuries it has formed the basis of the accepted chronology of the saint. This link is now challenged. Since 1920, scholars have become aware of the existence in a German library of two eighth-century documents dealing with Ninian. Hitherto entirely overlooked or neglected, they were textually restored and critically examined by a German historian in the 'twenties1; and their implications on the story of Ninian brought home to British scholarship by another German, in 1940.2 They are poetical works but one of them contains some historical material. A number of British historians agree with these German commentators that the new evidence has made it difficult to maintain any longer that Ninian and Martin were contemporaries. On the other hand, the established view is still stoutly maintained by the author of the only recent general work on Ninian.3 Bede was the first writer to mention Ninian. The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation was completed in A.D. 731 and these words from Book III Chapter 4 were probably set down in the early years of the eighth century: