author
Gildas
Best known for On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, this 6th-century British monk is one of the earliest writers to describe post-Roman Britain. His surviving work is valued both as a fierce moral sermon and as a rare historical source for the age after Rome.
1 Audiobook
On the Ruin of Britain
by Gildas
About the author
Living in the 6th century, Gildas is remembered as a British monk and writer whose work has had an outsized influence on how later generations understood early medieval Britain. Very little about his life can be pinned down with certainty, but he is traditionally associated with Britain and with monastic religious life.
His fame rests on De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain). In that work, he looked back on the troubles that followed the end of Roman rule, using history less as a chronicle than as a warning about corruption, failed leadership, and spiritual decline.
Because so few texts from that period survive, Gildas has become an essential voice for anyone interested in the world of the Britons before and during the early Saxon era. Readers often come to him for the history, but what gives his writing its lasting force is its urgency: he was not simply recording events, but trying to shake his audience awake.