So the miserable people of Britain sent off a letter to Rome, this time to the Roman commander Aetius, in the following terms: ‘To Aetius, thrice consul: the groans of the British’. Then came this complaint: ‘The barbarians push us back to the sea, the sea pushes us back to the barbarians; between these two kinds of death, we are either drowned or slaughtered’. But they got no help in return.

Then all the members of the council were struck blind; the protection - or rather the method of destruction - they decided on, was that the ferocious Saxons (name not to be spoken!), hated by man and God, should be let into the island like wolves into the fold, to beat back the peoples of the north. How utter the blindness of their minds! How desperate and crass the stupidity! Of their own free will they invited under the same roof a people whom they feared worse than death.

Then the Saxons came, coming in three keels, as they call warships in their language. The winds were favourable; favourable too the omens and auguries, which prophesied … that they would live for three hundred years in the land towards which their prows were directed, and that for half the time, a hundred and fifty years, they would repeatedly lay it waste.

On the orders of the King, they first of all stayed on the east side of the island, supposedly to fight for our country, in fact to fight against it. More Saxons arrived by ship, and joined up with those already here.

The barbarians … asked to be given supplies, saying they were soldiers ready to undergo extreme dangers for their excellent hosts, (the people of Britain). The supplies were granted, and for a long time ‘shut the dog’s mouth’. Then they again complained that their monthly allowance wasn’t enough …and swore that they would break their agreement and attack and plunder the whole island unless more payment was given to them. They didn’t wait, but immediately put their threats into action.

All the major towns were laid low by the repeated battering of enemy rams; laid low, too, all the inhabitants - church leaders, priests and people alike, as the swords glinted all around and the flames crackled. It was a sad sight. In the middle of the squares the foundation stones of high walls and towers that had been torn from their lofty base, holy altars, fragments of corpses, covered (as it were) with a purple crust of congealed blood, looked as though they had been mixed up in some dreadful wine-press.

Adapted from Gildas ‘The ruin of Britain’ translated by M. Winterbottom, chap 20, 23, 24