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On the Ruin of Britain
St Gildas, tr. Williams, 1899
For the fire of righteous vengeance, caused by former crimes, blazed from sea to sea, …
For the fire of righteous vengeance, caused by former crimes, blazed from sea to sea, heaped up by the eastern band of impious men; and as it devastated all the neighbouring cities and lands, did not cease after it had been kindled, until it burnt nearly the whole surface of the island, and licked the western ocean with its red and savage tongue1. In this assault, which might be compared to the Assyrian attack upon Iudaea of old, there is fulfilled in us also, according to the account, that which the prophet in his lament says:—
They have burnt with fire thy sanctuary in the land,
They have defiled the tabernacle of thy name;
and again,
O God, the gentiles have come into thine inheritance,
They have defiled thy holy temple,2
and so forth. In this way were all the settlements brought low with the frequent shocks of the battering rams; the inhabitants, along with the bishops of the church3, both priests and people, whilst swords gleamed on every side and flames crackled, were together mown down to the ground, and, sad sight! there were seen in the midst of streets, the bottom stones of towers with tall beam4 cast down, and of high walls, sacred altars, fragments of bodies covered with clots, as if coagulated, of red blood, in confusion as in a kind of horrible wine press: there was no sepulture of any kind save the ruins of houses, or the entrails of wild beasts and birds in the open, I say it with reverence to their holy souls (if in fact there were many to be found holy), that would be carried by holy angels to the heights of heaven. For the vineyard, at one time good, had then so far degenerated to bitter fruit, that rarely could be seen, according to the prophet, any cluster of grapes or ear of corn, as it were, behind the back of the vintagers or reapers.
Notes
- The meaning we attach to this description of the Saxon invasion, especially the words “from sea to sea,” “the western ocean,” has an important bearing on the date of the De Excidio. See Introduction.
- Jerome’s first revision of the Old Latin Psalter, made A.D. 383, and called Psalterium Romanum, reads, as Gildas here, coinquinarunt (ἐμίαναν in LXX). But the second, the Psalterium Gallicum of A.D. 392, preserved in the Vulgate, has polluerunt, which is the rendering of ἐβεβήλωσαν in the previous quotation. In chapters 30, 104, we have further indications that Gildas used an old Psalter, probably older than either revision of the old Latin made by Jerome.
- Praepositis ecclesiae. “The four terms, episcopus, sacerdos, antistes, praepositus, are used for bishop. The first three have only this one sense . . . Propositus normally means a bishop, . . . but in 514.18 praepositi are the clergy in the absence of the bishop: in 475. 15 praepositi et diaconi are synonymous” (E. W. Watson, “The Style and Language of St. Cyprian,” in Studia Biblica, vol. iv, p. 257). What is said here of Cyprian’s use of these four terms holds true, for the most part, of Gildas about two hundred years later.
- Or, with lofty door.