ABSTRACT
The mid-fth century AD has come to be cited as the crucial date which marks the beginning of a new era in the relationship between the Insular Celts and the Anglo-Saxons. The last Roman legions had left Britain in the early part of the fth century, leaving behind a country which was characterised by confusion and lack of a strong administrative centre. Although there is evidence for some amount of contacts between the Celts (i.e. Britons) and the Anglo-Saxons even before the mid-fth century (see, e.g. Jackson 1953: 197; Higham 1994: 118-145), historical tradition has it that it was in 449 that the rst major Anglo-Saxon force, led by Hengest and Horsa, set foot in Britain. Though rst invited by the Britons as allies against foreign raiders such as the ‘Picts’ of Scotland and the ‘Scots’ (i.e. the Irish), they soon embarked on a series of rebellions against their hosts, which eventually led to an almost wholesale conquest of Britain within the next couple of centuries. As Jackson (1953: 199) writes, our main source of information here is the historical account by the British monk Gildas, who according to Jackson wrote his De excidio et conquestu Britanniae sometime in the rst half of the sixth century. Sims-Williams (1983: 3-5) points out some caveats in this dating, including the doubtful authority of the Annales Cambriae, on which it mainly rests. He is himself content to settle for a fairly broad dating in the sixth century, at a period earlier than the rst reference to Gildas by Columbanus ca 600, and later than the fth century “because of Gildas’s vagueness about the known history of the early part of that century” (op. cit., 5). However, a somewhat earlier date is proposed by Higham (1994: 141), who places the composition of De excidio within the late fth century, that is, around fty years after the adventus Saxonum. Although little is known about Gildas’s person or even where he wrote his work, there is evidence which suggests that he was based somewhere in central southern England (Higham 1994: 111-113; see, however, Sims-Williams 1983 for a more sceptical view). Other important near-contemporary sources are the two Gallic Chronicles of 452 and 511 (see Higham 1992: 69). Well-known,
though signicantly later, sources are the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum from the early eighth century, written by the Anglo-Saxon monk Beda Venerabilis (the Venerable Bede), and somewhat later still, the AngloSaxon Chronicle, which was compiled by several authors working in different places at different times, with the earliest versions dating from the ninth century.
