ABSTRACT
Gildas stood between two worlds, his back to the Roman past and his face to the Anglo-Saxon England of the future. It was pardy a consciousness of this transition which caused him to write his work on the fall and conquest of Britain, the De Excidio Britanniae et Conquestu (The Ruin and Conquest of Britain). He can claim the distinction of being the first man in Britain to write history (the pre-history of Britain and the history of the Roman occupation have to be written from archaeological and place-name evidence, and from continental literary sources).
