 Rydyn ni'n gwybod, mae gennych 6.15, felly rydyn ni'n gweithio i'w ddod i'r ffordd. Fyaf bod yn cael ei wneud o'r gwahodd ar y cyfnod hynny yma. Rydyn ni'n gwybod, mae'n gweithio. Rydyn ni'n David Pearson, mae'r ysgolwch yn ddechrau'r selechscanol o'r Pwnitsy Ffndaidd. Felly roedd yn cyfaciliadau ffandafol yn gweithio i gydag 11 anuel o'r Pwnitsy Ffndaidd. Rydyn ni'n gwneud o'r teimlo ar gyfer y Gwyrgylch Llywodraeth yn ddechrau'r gweithio'r ffordd, a'r Llywodraeth Llywodraeth i'r bwyllach a'r Llywodraeth Bryddau. Mae'n gwneud o'r Llywodraeth Bryddau, mae'n gwneud o'r Llywodraeth Bryddau'r Gwyrgylch Llywodraeth Ieithaf yw'n edrych bod y gallwn ni'n bwysig y museum yw'r iawn cyflwyno ein ffrindio ar 1856-1866, ond mae yw'r negent i'r cyflwyno ar y 40 yma, ond mae eisiau eisiau i'r cyflwyno ymddangos o'r cyflwyno ffrindio, ymddangosu, yw'r cyfan yn y ffioedd, oherwydd y llif, ym ddweud o'r ysgrifennu yma, oherwydd yma yng Nghymru'r Llyfriddor Llyfriddor. The year is the 10th anniversary of Katherine Dvas's death. But the annual lecture series is always an opportunity to remember her and to honour her memory and I'm sure we will be continuing to do that for many years to come. Benefactions to great cultural institutions are a wonderful thing and a gift to posterity. And I'm sure we should all reflect on our opportunities in that area. Yn ddod o'r dweud o'r ddiddordeb yn y sylwgr i'u cyd-aeth, y gallu'n gweithio'r dda i'r holl ffawr o'r ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb, neu ddigonio'n fwrdd o'r ddiddordeb yn ei ddefnyddio yma yma. Rydyn ni'n gofio'r ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb yn y ddiddordeb yma, ond rydyn ni'n meddwl i'w ddiddordeb a chyfeithio'r ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb. Rydyn ni'n gweithio bod rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio, ac mae'r wneud o'r gweithio dr Rowan Williams, ysbyty'r maes yng Nghymru yn Cymru ar ystod 2013, ond mae'n ffirmidol i'r clwm ydw i'r gweithio ar ystod, oherwydd mae'n gweithio'r Gweithio'r Gweithio'r Canterbury ar y diogel ar 2002. Yn ymdegwyd cyreol, mae'n gweithio'r gweithio ar ystod ystod, i gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'r gweithio ar ystod yn Cymru, ac yn Oxford, in 1992 and later Archbishop of Wales. He was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford for six years from 1986. He's a fellow of the British Academy. He has written many books. Those of you who've read his biography on the back of the leaflet advertising this year's lectures will have noted that he is also a poet, that he reads or speaks ten languages, that he learnt Russian in order to be able to appreciate Dostoevsky in the native tongue. It's a bit frightening, really. His lectures are going to be shining a torch into a period commonly known as the Dark Ages, looking at some of the great writers and chroniclers of the British Isles between the sixth and the ninth centuries and the book culture which they both drew upon and helped to create themselves. And so it is a great pleasure to hand over the lectern to him for lecture number one in this year's series. Thank you. It's an enormous honour to be invited to deliver these lectures, and I deliver them with some trepidation, as someone with some scholarly background in early Christian literature, some acquaintance with early Celtic literature, and a large and general curiosity and very few other qualifications. A few months ago, visiting Switzerland, I had the opportunity of spending an afternoon in the archive of one of the great 20th century theologians, a notably complex and austere writer. In one section of the archive were the books that had been found in his private quarters, and they included a large collection of Giorgette Hayer novels. It's hard to think of any more humanising discovery than that, but it's a reminder that our habit of looking at other people's bookshelves when we're in their rooms in order to discover more about them is something that has its uses. We like to understand the material repertoire that people are drawing on in making sense of their lives. And it's with that in mind that I propose in these lectures to look at three very different historians from the early Middle Ages with the question in mind of what their library consisted in. What was the book culture which they inherited? What did they instinctively quote, and equally importantly, what did they expect to be recognised by their readership and their audience? All of them, as I've said, are historians. That's to say, they're constructing a narrative of the society they inhabit, and in constructing such a narrative they're constructing the society itself. No chronicler is ever simply a passive recording machine of history, but someone who is actively creating a social world and an imaginative world. Hence the subtitles of my lectures, the invention of Britain, the invention of England, and the invention of Wales. And I want to suggest in these lectures that looking at the building blocks that are used for these acts of invention in our three chroniclers gives us not only a sense of what was going on in the early Middle Ages, but a sense of what continues to contribute in one way or another to the picture we have and the story we tell about the identity of this society in Britain. The drawback, of course, is that prior to 700, our sources are very limited indeed. Before 700 there are only two writers we can unambiguously say are British in their formation and their major work. And those are St Patrick and Gildas, the main subject of this first lecture. Writing in the late fifth and mid sixth centuries. There are, in fact, just to do justice to the whole scene, two other writers allegedly born in Britain who play a very significant part in the intellectual life of the fifth and sixth centuries. The heretic Pelagius and the monastic writer and theologian Faustus of Rhea. Both are identified as Britons in our sources. Both are exceptionally sophisticated and eloquent writers, somewhat controversial in their way. But our problem is that we have absolutely no way of knowing how much of their intellectual formation took place in Britain and how much abroad. The chances are that neither of them had their primary formation in Britain and both of them, of course, had their career almost entirely outside Britain. Their presence haunts the discussion and prompts some interesting marginal questions and I'll be referring to them once or twice. But the focus of what I want to say has to do with those who can be identified as clearly British in education and in career. Patrick wrote a confession. That's to say a statement of self-defence almost certainly addressed to a synod of unsympathetic British bishops who thought that his activities in converting the Irish were over-enthusiastic. He also wrote an extremely rude letter to a British king who had conducted a raid on one of Patrick's convert settlements in Ireland. Patrick in his confession, a truly fascinating text, speaks of his own experience as someone kidnapped by Irish slavers as a teenager and describes the long years he spent in Ireland as a slave, his eventual, extremely exciting story of escape, his visits to Christian communities in Gaul, his return to Ireland, his travels between Ireland and Britain and some of his achievements as an evangelist in Ireland. He admits faults in the past, though we don't discover exactly what they are. He expresses through gritted teeth his respect and profound disagreement and with the British bishops with whom he's arguing. But for our purposes this evening, one of the most interesting things he says is that he writes rather bad Latin because his education was interrupted. He was kidnapped and enslaved in his mid-teens. And as far as we can see, that means that he had, as the child of a reasonably well-to-do family of the magistrate class in Roman Britain, he had received something of the education that a boy of that class would normally receive. What he had not gone through was a full course of rhetoric. He had not trained in the habits of composition and speech that marked someone who had gone through the full course of normal civic Roman education, the sort of education that would equip you to be a barrister, a magistrate or a diplomat. And Patrick is aware that the people to whom he's writing, the British bishops, are people who have, so to speak, higher degrees. They know how to construct a good Latin sentence and a good Latin argument. And he knows that he is going to sound rusticus, as he says. He's going to sound like a peasant. In fact he writes a very lively Latin, not always very correct and not particularly stylish but undoubtedly vivid and reflecting a spoken language. Gildus, on the other hand, perhaps a little less than a century later, Gildus is the exact opposite. Gildus writes a Latin which most readers regard as intensely annoying. It's extremely stylish, it's convoluted, it is deeply averse to saying anything simply, it shows off, shamelessly. It alludes to literary sources both classical and Christian. It's just a little bit archaic. Those who know late Latin argue plausibly that the kind of vocabulary Gildus uses is just a little bit more at home in the fifth than the sixth century. He is after all writing in an offshore island. But he's evidently someone who cares profoundly about style and somebody who has been through precisely the course of study that Gildus, that Patrick has not been through. Gildus never mentions Patrick, interestingly. And it is just possible that Gildus was perfectly well aware that he was exactly the sort of person Patrick would most have disapproved of. He mentions in passing the problem of British clergy who go off and get themselves ordained in Gaul. And since this is almost certainly what Patrick did, it may be that that is a side swipe at the Apostle of Ireland. So we have in Gildus somebody who's clearly been shaped by a very sophisticated Latin education. His range of reference, as we'll see in a moment, is by no means as wide as that of some other late Roman writers. Nonetheless, he takes for granted a fairly high level of Latin literacy. He assumes his readership will recognise allusions and he makes the most of them. He quotes Virgil explicitly once, indirectly or by allusion, in several other places. He makes a passing reference to Bacchanalian revels, assuming that his readership will know what a Bacchanal is. He uses all the tricks of the Latin lawyer in the courtroom, as part of his rhetorical equipment. And although he never quotes Cicero, it's easy to imagine behind the way he writes a textbook of good Ciceronian exemplar, the sort of things you might want to say in a courtroom. Gildus is an educated man in a sense that would have been recognisable quite easily to anyone on the continent of Europe at the same period and indeed 200 or 300 years earlier. His repertoire is narrower, but his style and his culture is recognisably the same. He is, of course, writing a rather unconventional kind of book. The book he writes, the book we can be sure he wrote, a couple of slightly contested works also attributed to him in other contexts, but the main book on the downfallen conquest of Britain is a mixture of sermon, history and polemic. It begins with a wildly inaccurate history of Roman Britain and proceeds to a character assassination of five western British monarchs, concluding with a dogged and eloquent trawl through all the books of the Latin Bible, extracting all those things which denounce God's people for their unfaithfulness and applying those texts to the British of his own time. But what's important in the structure of the book for our purpose is, as I said earlier, that he clearly expects his readers to know what he's talking about. He tells us at one point that he's hesitated to put his book in the public arena because of modesty and various other reasons which he doesn't specify. Some of those reasons were probably precisely that there would have been readers of the book in the courts of the kings about whom he is so rude in western Britain. But he assumes, therefore, that he's not the only educated man in sixth century Britain. He assumes there's a public for what he writes. A public which will appreciate slightly self-consciously fine writing that will share his slightly old-fashioned tone that will recognise illusions to Virgil and appreciate the Ciceroonian elegance of his argument. Where did he learn his rhetoric? We can't, of course, answer that question and he gives us no clues at all. But he gives us in passing a very interesting piece of evidence in his paragraphs on the King of North Wales, Maglochanus, probably the same as the Milgun of Welsh genealogies. Milgun, he says, was as a young man educated by a magister elegans, a refined teacher, the refined teacher of almost all of Britain. Milgun, as a youth in other words, is taught the kind of thing that Gildus is being taught, or has been taught, by someone with, whatever this means in the context, a national reputation. It's tempting to think, and some have succumbed to the temptation, that Gildus himself studied with the same person. Fictions have been concocted about Gildus and Milgun as student friends alienated in later life. I think we can probably park the suggestions for the time being. But the point is that not only does he assume that the kings of western Britain and their courts and their clerks would have known what he was talking about. He very specifically pins down one of those kings and reminds him of his early education. He also describes how Milgun spent a brief portion of his youth in a monastery and then thought better of it and embarked on the kind of career more readily associated with sixth century British kings in Gildus's eyes, that is a career of more or less uninterrupted homicide and fornication. But there's also another piece of evidence which might be put into the mix here from somebody who was in fact Gildus's contemporary, the person who's come down in history as since Samson of Dole. Samson born in South Wales, who worked in Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and eventually Brittany, where he became a bishop. Samson is memorialised in a life written in Brittany possibly as early as the seventh century, certainly no later than the ninth, but even if late containing some very early material. And in this we once again read of a young man who goes to study with a magister of huge distinction who is familiar not only were told with scriptural and classical learning, but with the traditional law of his own country. His name were told was Hildodus, better known in Wales as St Iltyd, and the patron of Llaniltyd Vawr, Llanthwit Major in Glamorgan. So there's a school around one particular person that's remembered in hagiography, perhaps a century, perhaps two centuries later, which manifestly does the same sort of thing as the school attended by Marlgun King of Gwynedd and presumably the school attended by Gildus himself. So we're not talking about one outlying eccentric example of classical education surviving in post-Roman Britain. Evidently, there were centres where classical learning, ecclesiastical learning, and indeed if the life of Samson is right, some form of training perhaps in native poetic techniques survived together. We also have, though this is much more contested, the evidence of the inscribed stones of western Britain between about 500 and about 700. Suddenly there's a great explosion of stone monuments in western Britain, standing stones inscribed in Latin. The work of David Howlett and Charles Thomas has argued very, very strongly that we have to read these inscribed stones as reflecting a very high level of Latin literacy because of the puns, the letter counting games, the palindromes, and various other little verbal puzzles that they may contain. I say may because these conclusions have been challenged by some other scholars. Nonetheless, it's very clear that during the period we're talking about, this quite new development of Latin inscribed standing stones, some also inscribed in the Ogham alphabet, the Irish Ogham alphabet. This new development reflected a self-consciousness about Latin, about Latinate or Roman identity in the kingdoms of western Britain, those kingdoms to which Gildus directs his polemic. That being said, it seems clear enough that the formation received by Gildus could not have been exclusively that of a late imperial grammatical education, simply because his literacy, his Latin literacy, is far more evident in his use of ecclesiastical than of secular literature. That's to say, he may quote or allude to Virgil, but far more frequently he will refer to the great writers of the Latin Christian West of the century before his own time. There are several allusions to, though they're not directly identified allusions to, the letters of Saint Jerome and also to Jerome's well-known treatise d'Eiviris illustribus, his compendium of Christian biographies. We know this because there are certain ways in which Gildus tells familiar stories from early Christian history with details that can only come from Jerome and sometimes with confusions that can only come from Jerome. He evidently also had access to Latin translations of certain Greek works. Jerome's great enemy, Rufinus, had translated the massive ecclesiastical history of Eiviris into Latin and brought it up to date about a century after Eiviris' own day, around 400, that is, and Rufinus had also translated some of the more prominent Greek fathers, including the great orator, Gregory Nazianzen, into Latin. Once again, there's a detail in one of Gildus's anecdotes which can almost certainly come only from Rufinus' translation of Gregory Nazianzen. He probably knows the life of Saint Martin of Tur, the great French monastic saint by Sulpisius Severus. He almost certainly knows because there are phrases which echo very strongly the text, the universal history of the Spanish Oeurosius, early fifth century. He refers to the martyrdom of Saint Alban in sufficient detail to suggest that he has some kind of account of the martyrdom before him and refers in passing to the other early martyrs of Britain, Aaron and Julius, usually supposed to have suffered in Carlyon in South Wales, though there is some debate about the exact interpretation of the name. So, Gildus has a reasonably broad ecclesiastical library behind him. And it seems a little unlikely that there are the straightened and conflicted circumstances of mid sixth century western Britain could have supported many centres or institutions with both a good secular and a good ecclesiastical library existing in separation. In other words, I suspect that the evidence points us towards some convergence institutionally between the secular and the ecclesiastical. That is, we're beginning to see here what we see far more conspicuously on the continent of Europe some 50 years later, a convergence between ecclesiastical education and secular. The adoption, so to speak, of the secular classical educational ideal by ecclesiastical bodies including monasteries. Gildus does not incidentally seem to have been a monk, though he was almost certainly a cleric, very probably a deacon. This judgment runs against what some scholars have argued in the last few decades. Michael Lappage, author of, by far, the best study of Gildus's intellectual world, has said that Gildus is very definitely someone who belongs in the secular, the classical mode, and not the monastic. His rhetoric, his style, his concern about style is something which monastic writers of that period would have deplored. It would have been worldly and pagan. And yet it's very hard to think that someone of Gildus's broad education in both fields received those two strands of education entirely independently of one another. So one of the questions I would want to ask about Gildus's library is whether it was indeed the library of something like, said Iltid's community in the Llanthydd Major. Whether it was, in fact, a place rather like the monastery of Cassiodorus in Italy later on, where the classical heritage and the ecclesiastical heritage were celebrated and deployed together. It's a suggestion that has been made, in fact, about Iltid's community that it was probably much more like Cassiodorus's slightly monasticised extended family in a villa, more like that than a conventional monastery. Because if we want to locate Gildus's library, it's most unlikely to have been any kind of a typical municipal library of the Roman urban world. We know something about what libraries were like in the Roman world. We have from North Africa, from Greece, some surviving evidence about what public libraries involved in the Roman Empire. We know something of the conditions under which they operated. We have a vague idea of the sort of books that they were within them. And we know that even in relatively remote parts of the Empire, like Spain, municipal libraries were active up to the late days of the Empire. It's certainly overwhelmingly likely that Roman Britain had its share of municipal libraries of this kind. If you wanted to check your text of Virgil, or perhaps your text of Horus, or of Pliny, or even of Cicero, there was somewhere you could go to do it. And if your library didn't contain a lot of primary texts, it would almost certainly have a good few textbooks that could be used in literary education. And you might be able to find your quote there. Or if not, to find one equally good. But by the sixth century, of course, Roman Britain has endured up to 300 years of de-urbanisation. As archaeologists in the last generation or so have made crystal clear, the collapse of town life in Roman Britain was not the effect of the Anglo-Saxon settlements. The evidence suggests that people were leaving the towns already by the third century, the late third century. Moving into villas, villar communities with a kind of squirarchical structure, evidently springing up, and to some extent their leadership and their forms of authority moved back cautiously into some of the semi-deserted towns during the sixth century. We have evidence from Roxeter, for example, of exactly that process happening, a resettlement sometime in the sixth century on a far smaller scale of a Roman city by people who have presumably come back in from the countryside who are recreating a market economy, creating a market town for the villar-based farms in the area. But that doesn't augur very well for municipal libraries in the towns. Just as municipal baths are allowed to fall down in late Roman Britain and late Roman elsewhere, occasionally being as perhaps in Roxeter reconstructed as Christian churches, if those baths are allowed to fall down, I would be prepared to bet that the libraries were as well. Book collections, in other words, would probably be the preserve of the wealthy villar-dwelling elite, which fits rather nicely into the picture we've just imagined of Sedilthed and people like him, magistri, masters, highly educated individuals from the governing class, who would perhaps attract to themselves a significant community of students and would have assembled a significant collection of literature. My argument is that that literature, by this time, would have been as much ecclesiastical as secular, so that in somewhere like Iltid settlement in Glamorgan, you would have been able to find a reasonable spread of Latin ecclesiastical works. Perhaps most importantly of all, and I move on later to think about this in more detail, most significantly of all, copies of the Latin Bible. So these are educational institutions on the border between the ecclesial and the civic. Not great-learned monastic libraries such as developed after Cassiodorus in the West. There is no British Monte Cassino, but communities where education was offered in ways that reflected classical Roman convention and which also educated people for a public life in the church. This perhaps is another thing worth considering here. People were being educated for public life in this way, undoubtedly. But increasingly in Britain as elsewhere, that public life was going to be largely centred around the survival of the church. The church, which in the Western Roman Empire was all that was left of the old imperial civil service. One of the great differences between the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern in the period between, say, 400 and 600 is the virtual disappearance in Western Europe of an educated lay professional class which survives in the East. Bishops took over the reins of administration in so many contexts, not least in cities, largely because nobody else could do it. They could read. They knew their ways around libraries. They knew how to deploy texts. They knew how to speak in public. They knew how to decide cases in law. And one factor which has not, I think, been taken into consideration enough in this particular context is that from the time of the Emperor Constantine's legitimation of Christianity at the beginning of the 4th century, bishops were expected to settle disputes in law within their jurisdiction. In other words, they were allowed to and encouraged to act as magistrates. And the kind of literary and rhetorical education that we've been speaking of, as typical of Gildes' background and that of others, is the education that would very definitely fit somebody for that kind of role. So it may very well be that what we're seeing in Ildid and perhaps there's other communities or settlements that we can guess at is a kind of staff college for bishops. A staff college, that is, for clergy, expected to settle public disputes, to know their way around enough Roman law to see what a good argument might look like, or what evidence might count in court, and who would bring to that enough civil elegance to be persuasive in public discussion. So I suspect we may behind Gildes see not only the kind of library I've indicated of ecclesiastical and secular resource, but the kind of educational community that needs to equip the clergy in a collapsing social order for the maintenance of what order could still be made workable. One last comment on this general picture. Gildes, I've said, writes an elegant, slightly archaic, very self-conscious Latin. During this sixth century, we begin to see, what we see in the inscribed stones, a move towards the barock eccentric Latin, typical of some Irish writers of the seventh century and of an English writer like an old helm of Malmsbury. The well-known, indeed notorious, text, The Hesperica Famina shows you just what terrible things could be done with late Latin if you had an over-fansyful mind. We are, I think, just on the cusp of that. The point at which an elaborate, self-conscious classicism is about to spill over into something more like the barock, into a verbal exuberance, a near nonsensical exuberance, full of clever, over-involved verbal plays that we see in the Latin of a century or so later. But I mentioned the Bible and that brings me to the last part of what I want to outline and argue this evening. Gildus, as I've said, works his way stolidly through the entire scripture. And he quotes extensively from almost every book of Hebrew and Christian scripture and indeed has one significant quote an otherwise not very well known apocryphal book, the fourth book of Esdras, which for some reason was bound up with his Latin Bible. Scholars are still scratching their heads over exactly why it's there. Perhaps most interestingly, Gildus doesn't quote consistently from any one version of the Latin Bible. Thomas Olochlin of the University of Nottingham has recently produced an exhaustive study of Gildus's biblical quotation at really invaluable work in which he shows how Gildus oscillates between quoting from the Vulgate, Saint Jerome's new version, which he clearly knows, and a variety of what are usually called old Latin texts, that is the pre-Gerome Latin texts, especially of Hebrew scripture. There's no evidence at all that Gildus knew any Greek, although there was one doomed attempt I think some decades ago to show that he might have done. He owes his biblical scholarship almost entirely therefore to Jerome and to Jerome's Vulgate and some of Jerome's letters, possibly though this is very doubtful, possibly one or two of Jerome's commentaries. So he clearly has access to more than one copy of scripture. He's clearly somebody who belongs in a theological and literary culture for which there is no authorised version of scripture in Latin, and therefore he's someone who in his biblical quotations is using his intelligence. Using the version he prefers, whether for critical or pious reasons we don't know, sometimes obviously like all the fathers of the church quoting from memory with some inaccuracy, but working in an environment where there is no prescribed text to quote from, and that although people have tended to assume that the Vulgate established itself as authoritative very promptly in the fifth century, that actually reflects a far wider phenomenon than some earlier scholarship would have allowed. But the biblical quotations tell us a good deal about how he approaches his own job in relation to the society he's addressing. For example, when he attacks the kings of western Britain, Milgun and Canlus, Aurelius, Voteporius and Constantine, he associates each one of them with some animal or other. One is a bear, one is a leopard, one is a dragon. And this of course reflects the apocalyptic language of the prophet Daniel. The beasts who ravaged the earth before the last days are lepards and bears, lions and dragons. The kings are cast in these apocalyptic terms. They are the terrible subhuman powers which dominate the world before God finally vindicates his justice before all the nations. But the deeper story is actually a very simple one. Britain is a Christian country. Gilders takes that completely for granted. He's totally uninterested in native paganism and he probably wouldn't know a druid if he met one. Britain is a company of the baptized. And it's interesting just by the way that in some of the very earliest Welsh poetry of the early Middle Ages, the word bedith, baptism, is used as a collective term for Christian Britons. So that campaigning Celtic monarchs of the early Middle Ages sometimes are given the title Roiskbedith or Edbedith, Lord of Baptism or Lord of the Baptised or as it's tempting to translate it Commander of the Faithful. Britain, in other words, is for all practical purposes Israel. It is the chosen people. Not because the British are a chosen race, but because precisely as a Christian people, the new Israel, like the church in general, the story of Israel is the story of the present Christian nation. So it's a story of grace and covenant and a story of betrayal and punishment and possible restoration. It's the story that the prophets of Hebrew scripture repeatedly tell. And Gildus' long polemical sermon directed to his British contemporaries is a polemic based on that assumption. The British people, as bedith, as the company of the baptized are people who have, so to speak, come into the semantic world of God's chosen. A world in which God offers grace and opportunity which is repeatedly rejected by the people. That rejection brings the punishment of foreign invasion and foreign domination. First by the Romans, then by the Germanic settlers of the fifth century. If Gildus is inclined somewhat to over-egg his descriptions of the misery inflicted by the Germanic settlers and the archaeological record suggests that he may very well have done, it's because of course he wants to assimilate it to the ravages of Assyrians and Babylonians as described in Hebrew scripture. These are, again, apocalyptic disasters that he's describing. Britain, that is non-Germanic Welsh Britain, so to speak, Britain in his time, has had some decades of relative stability, only very relative. But this is not an occasion for complacency. Gildus looks back on recent and more distant history and identifies periods when things have been very stable and as a result people have become very wicked again. This is clearly happening at the time of writing, probably the 540s, and the five kings of the west are signal examples of it. It is certainly a very interesting feature of his writing, sometimes remarked on, that while he charges the kings of the west with more or less every crime in the book, he never suggests that they are either pagan or heretical. They are orthodox Christians. They're just extremely bad orthodox Christians. One interesting remark that Gildus makes in passing, which bears on this, has to do with the way in which Britain is first taken over by the Romans. As I say, he has a very inaccurate account of Roman Britain, which must rest on a foundation of oral tradition and a few misunderstood chronicle entries. But he notes that when Britain was taken over by the Romans, it ceased to be in any real sense Britannia. It became for all practical purposes Romania. Britain's identity was swallowed up in the Roman identity. But the implication that's in chapter 7 of the work, the implication of that is that when the Romans have gone again, or rather when the British in their usual perfidious, untrustworthy, rebellious way have told the Romans to take their civilization home, what have the Romans ever done for us. What is left is again Britannia and not Romania. That's why he can write a book on the fall and conquest of Britannia. That's why he can write a history of what is now, surprisingly, a unit in itself, not part of the Roman Empire, but a society, a nation is wrong, a community of some sort. Christian Britain, Britannia, no longer finding its identity in the imperial family. Gildus is into minds about whether the Roman Empire was entirely a good thing, but it does seem that in this particular passage, he's hinting very broadly that in the days of Romanitas, the British were saved from some of the worst consequences of their own folly and incompetence. Gildus notes several times that the British are not instinctively a particularly war-like people, for example. So they did rather well when the Romans were doing the defensive work, when, so to speak, the American nuclear arsenal was stretched over Britain's inadequate defences. So Britannia is something which Gildus is trying to think through in new terms. Britannia, not as a province of the Empire, but as something in itself. That something is the church that is Britain, the Christian community that is Britain. Therefore, the history of Britannia is now, in the post-Roman period, a history of Israel's graces and betrayals projected onto the screen of local history. That's the sense in which Gildus invents Britain, pulling Britannia out of the Roman orbit, giving it an identity, a history of its own, in a way that, of course, doesn't happen with other provinces of the Western Empire, setting it up as, so to speak, a local church-stroke state whose history is assimilated to that of God's people in Scripture. But the evidence is that this is not entirely novel to Gildus. I mentioned earlier the life of St Samson of Dole, and Samson's dates are roughly those of Gildus. His education clearly in some ways refers that of Gildus. And it's very interesting that if he is the Samson who is subscribed in the mid-6th century to a council of bishops in Gaul by writing a brief and rather elegant Latin hexameter containing his name and his assent to the Minutes, he had a really rather good classical education from St Ildid. But the significant thing in this context about Samson is his name. He has a Hebrew name. And the life of St Samson makes it clear that this was a widespread phenomenon in Western Britain, certainly in Wales, in the 6th century. Samson's parents are Amon and Hannah. He has a relative called Enoch. He has another more distant cousin with the wonderfully resonant Old Testament name of Amryphel. He is part of a generation of Welsh saints about most of whom we know nothing more than their names who are called David and Daniel and Assef and part of a tradition which continues right up to the early Norman period of clerics receiving, assuming or being given Old Testament names. So there's a succession of bishops in St David's called Abraham and Solomon. There is of course the famous Assa, biographer of King Alfred and several more local examples. There are one or two figures who have specifically New Testament names. There is a King Peter in South West Wales and David and a King Jacob or James in North West Wales in Gwynedd during the 6th, 7th century. But the overwhelming majority of these names come from Hebrew scripture. Even apparently clearly Celtic names like that of Saint Tylo conceal because of a long history of hypercharisms and corruptions but in the original texts seems very clearly another Hebrew name. Saint Tylo began life as Saint Eliad or possibly Saint Eleau or Elijah. The T is transferred from the end of the saint to the beginning of the name as often happens. Even St Ilytyd, Hildodus reappears in Geoffrey of Monmouth as Eldad, yet another Hebrew name. Now it's very hard to know how far to push this. It may be that some people, especially in the cases of Tylo and Ilytyd, used both a Celtic name and a biblical name that sounded a bit like it because Eliad and Ilytyd are perfectly credible Celtic names phonologically speaking. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating phenomenon and one which is peculiar to Britain. Virtually nowhere else in the western Christian world do you find the regular use of Old Testament names. Nowhere else do you find anything like the density and frequency of those names that occur in Wales. You have one odd outlier in Anglo-Saxon, early Anglo-Saxon England, the Bishop Ithemar of Rochester mentioned by Bede, but that's another story. But that does suggest that the identification of the British church with Israel was something which Gildus inherited rather than creating. So it becomes not the creator of this model of Britain as Israel, but someone who gives unprecedented and exhaustive literary expression to that vision. So throughout his work, Gildus is assuming that this is indeed the true history of the British. Whatever may have happened in the period of the Roman occupation, whatever exactly may have been going on in the events over 150 years or so before Gildus's writing, which he describes in such profoundly confusing ways, so much so that ink continues to flow in rivers on the subject of his chronology, the interesting thing is not the detail of that. It is how a pattern of betrayal and fall, restoration, punishment and so forth can be extracted from that or imposed upon it as part of creating a Britain which is ideally a society of Christian rulers and overseers, as he says, speculatores, magistrates, priests, religious and all those who keep the society running. A law governed society, governed by the law of Scripture and presumably the law of Christ, though Gildus is one of those who tends to get rather more enthusiastic about the Old Testament than about the New. But that's the history of Britannia. A narrative subject, a historical subject brought into focus by this remarkable writer through the means, through the medium of the narrative of Scripture. Gildus holds together, as I've said, something of the Roman legacy. He still refers to his fellow countrymen, especially when they're fighting the Germanic settlers as ques, they are the citizens as opposed to the others. But far deeper is that identification with Israel, which is why, as I say, I'm not entirely convinced that we should simply accept the verdict that Gildus's education is primarily secular or classical. There is, as I've suggested, enough in him to imply that his library, literal and metaphorical, has a substantial and significant classical element. He knows Virgil, he knows the textbooks, he knows what a good Latin sentence sounds like. But much more importantly for his purposes, he knows the story of the church, which includes the story of Israel. His interest in earlier patristic Latin literature is very often in the records of martyrdom and sanctity, especially martyrdom. And so his Britannia is undoubtedly a sacred community. And so far from that meaning that it's a community which shouldn't be challenged or questioned to identify it as a sacred community is to call it to a far more severe and demanding account than any merely secular community. Britain is a society living under judgment because it is a baptized society. And that's very near the heart of Gildus's argument. In the second of these lectures, I'll be moving on to look at what Bede does with some of this tradition and some other features of what he inherits. Noting the way in which Bede picking up some of Gildus's themes, not least the persistent failures and betrayals of the perfidious and incompetent Britons, but recasting the entire story, not in terms of a settled Israel invaded by pagan Babylonians in the form of the Anglo-Saxons, but this time a story of idle, heretical or idolatrous Canaanites invaded by righteous Israelites. Thank you.