Feast day: January 29
St. Gildas the Wise
A British monk whose fiery book on the ruin of Britain is the only surviving native account of the island in the chaotic years after Rome withdrew.
Gildas, surnamed 'the Wise,' was a British monk of the sixth century, born around the year 500 among the northern Britons and educated in Wales under the great teacher St. Illtud, alongside companions who themselves became saints. He later crossed to Brittany, where he lived as a monk and hermit at Rhuys and died about 570.
He owes his fame to a single book, 'On the Ruin of Britain' (De Excidio Britanniae), the only substantial written source to survive from the Britons of his age. It is part history, part sermon — a furious denunciation of the kings and clergy of his people, whose sins he blamed for the Saxon conquest then overrunning the island.
Because so little else survives, this angry pamphlet has become priceless to historians: it is the earliest British account of the period, preserving among other things the memory of the Britons' resistance at 'Mount Badon.' Bede and later writers leaned on him as the founding voice of British history.
More than a chronicler, Gildas was revered as a holy monk and a father of the Celtic monastic world. His feast is kept on 29 January.
Almost everything historians know about post-Roman Britain — the world behind the Arthur legends — survives only because Gildas wrote it down.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/06557c.htm
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