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On the Ruin of Britain

St Gildas, tr. Williams, 1899

33. Maelgwn of Anglesey (?)

And thou, the island dragon, who hast driven many of the tyrants mentioned previously, as well from life as from kingdom, thou last in my writing, first in wickedness, exceeding many in power and at the same time in malice, more liberal in giving, more excessive in sin, strong in arms, but stronger in what destroys thy soul—thou Maclocunus,¹ why dost thou obtusely wallow in such an old black pool of crimes, as if sodden with the wine that is pressed from the vine of Sodom? Why dost thou tie to thy royal neck (of thine own accord, as I may say), such heaps, impossible to remove, of crimes, as of high mountains? Why showest thou thyself to Him, the King of all kings, who made thee superior to almost all the kings of Britain, both in kingdom and in the form of thy stature, not better than the rest in morality, but on the contrary worse? Give a patient hearing for awhile to an undoubted record of those charges which, passing by domestic and lighter offences—if, indeed, any are light—shall testify only the things which have been proclaimed far and wide, in broad daylight, as admitted crimes. In the first years of thy youth, accompanied by soldiers of the bravest, whose countenance in battle appeared not very unlike that of young lions, didst thou not most bitterly crush thy uncle the king with sword, and spear, and fire? Not regarding the prophet’s word when it says: Men of blood and deceit shall not live out half their days. What wouldst thou expect of retribution for this deed alone from the righteous judge, even if such consequences as have followed were not to occur, when He likewise says by the prophet: Woe unto thee that spoilest; shalt thou not be spoiled? and thou that killest, shalt not thou thyself be killed? and when thou hast made an end of thy spoiling, then shalt thou fall.

Notes

Maglocune. Maglocunus is the Mailcun of the previous note, great-grandson of Cunedda Wledig. The name appears as Maelgwn in modern Welsh, generally Maelgwn Gwynedd, designating him as king of that portion of North Wales which was called Venedotia, and later Gwenedotia. The ancient Gwynedd extended from the river Clwyd (according to some, from the river Conway) westward, and to the south as far as the Mawddach or Dyfi. Maelgwn had as teacher the celebrated Illtud, and may or may not have been at his monastery at the same time as Gildas himself. The vow to take upon himself the secluded discipline of a monk came after having a taste of the stormy life of a king: the monastery, however, was abandoned, and Maelgwn seems—partly through his own brilliant qualities, partly as a family right—to have attained a position of pre-eminence over the other princes, or, as Gildas puts it, “te cunctis paene Britanniae ducibus tam regno fecit (Deus) quam status liniamento editiorem......” On the legend, which gives at least an echo of this fact, see Welsh Laws (1841), ii, 49-51. According to the Annales Cambriae, he died of the great plague in the year 547: “An. [547] mortalitas magna in qua pausat Mailcun rex Guenedotiae.” The date, 547, can only be an approximate one. Petrie, in the first edition, which appeared in the Monum. Hist. Brit., supplied 444 as the year of the Christian reckoning corresponding to ANNUS I of the Annalist, though, as he confesses, there is no certainty with respect to the era adopted by him (De aera vero, unde in annalibus condendis exorsus sit chronographus, minime constat). Some well-known dates of events are a few years wrong; others, especially the later ones, correct, as given in the Annales. Dr. Stokes does not add the corresponding years for the Irish Annals of Tigernach, which he edits in the Revue Critique (1896), but gives in brackets those of other Annals. Now the Tigernachian Annals say: K. vn. Mortalitas magna, which means that it occurred during a year in which the Kalends, or 1st of January, was a Saturday. The Annals of Ulster place it in 551, those of Inisfallen in 541 (Rev. Celt., p. 140). Not one of the three Irish documents agrees quite with the Welsh, but the errors cannot be important in any. We therefore adopt 547 as the approximate date of Maelgwn’s death. But, as he was alive when Gildas wrote, it has been rightly concluded that the De Excidio must have been written before 547. On the whole question of date, see Introduction.
Insularis draco is explained in Celtic Britain- as implying that “island” is Britain itself, not Mona. When we reflect that “dragon” is the last of the opprobrious epithets—cur, whelp, leopard, bear, dragon—applied to the five kings, one is drawn to the belief that even the insularis is also intended to wound. If so, the reference must be to Maelgwn in his island home, Mona.