不列顛的毀滅 第 3 章

CHAPTER ONE. Of the situation of Britain. — The island of Britain, set almost at the farthest limit of the world toward the northwest and west, balanced — as it is said — by the divine scale that weighs the whole earth, stretched out rather more toward the northern pole away from the southwest, holding a space of eight hundred miles in length and two hundred in breadth (apart from the longer tracts of various headlands, which are encompassed by the arched bays of the Ocean); girt about by its diffusion and, so to speak, by an everywhere impassable circle, except for the strait of the southern region by which one sails to Gaul Belgica, walled as it were by the arms of the two mouths of the noble rivers Thames and Severn, by which formerly transmarine luxuries were borne to it in ships, and by the better mouths of other smaller rivers;

adorned with two-times-ten and twice-four cities and several castles, with the construction of walls, of serrated towers, of gates, of houses, whose roofs, stretched out with menacing loftiness, were fastened in a strong frame on high — not unworthily fitted out; decorated with fields widely spread out, and with hills set in pleasant situation, fit for surpassing cultivation, and with mountains very suitable for the alternating pasturage of animals (the flowers of various colors, trodden by human steps, once imprinted on these a not unbecoming picture, as it were), chosen as a bride adorned with diverse necklaces:

irrigated with clear fountains, with frequent waves driving along snow-white gravels as it were, and with very bright streams gliding with a gentle murmur, and offering a pledge of sweet savor to those reclining on their banks, and with lakes overflowing with a cold torrent of living water. CHAP. II. Of the obstinacy. — This island, with neck and mind erect, ever since it was inhabited, now against God, sometimes against its citizens, occasionally even against kings from across the sea, and sometimes against its subjects, rises up ungrateful.

For what business can be more unsightly, or what more iniquitous, that human audacity should either commit or admit, than to deny to God fear, to good citizens charity, to those placed in higher dignity the honor due to them without detriment of the truth, and to break faith with the divine sense and the human, and, having cast off the dread of heaven and earth, to be governed by some one of one's own contrivances out of one's lusts?

Therefore, not omitting those ancient errors common to all nations, by which before the coming of Christ in the flesh the whole human race was bound and held fast; nor enumerating the very diabolical portents of my country, well-nigh surpassing the Egyptian ones in number (some of which, with their lineaments still deformed within or without the deserted walls, stiffened in the customary manner, we behold with grim countenances); nor crying out by name against the very mountains or hills or rivers, once deadly, but now useful for human purposes, upon which divine honor was heaped by the people then blind;

and keeping silence about the ancient years of monstrous tyrants, who in other regions far away have been made notorious (so much so that Porphyry, that rabid Eastern dog against the Church, with the pen of his madness and vanity annexed even this, saying: 「Britain is a province fertile in tyrants」), I shall nevertheless try to bring forward into the midst those things which in the times of the Roman emperors it both suffered and inflicted upon other citizens far away as evils; yet as far as I can, not so much from the writings of my country or the monuments of writers (since these, even if there were any, do not appear, having been either burnt up by the fires of enemies or carried far away by the fleet of exiled citizens) as from a relation from across the sea;

which, broken by frequent intervals, did not give enough. CHAP. III. Of the subjection. — For when the Roman kings had obtained the empire of the world, and had subjugated whatever neighboring regions or islands toward the East, and had strengthened the first peace with the Parthians and with the borders of their dominions by the changes of their better fame (which being accomplished, in well-nigh every land wars then ceased), the line of flame, as it were, of their rigid course toward the West could neither be checked nor extinguished by the dark-blue torrent of the Ocean;

but, crossing the strait, it conveyed to the island the laws of obedience with none resisting, and it subjugated by edicts a people unwarlike but unfaithful — not so much by sword and fire and engines, as it did other nations, as by threats alone or by the shaking of judgments, offering its obedience on the surface of the face indeed, though with grief pressed deep into the heart. CHAP. IV. Of the rebellion. — When these Romans straightway returned to Rome on account of a scarcity of provisions, as they say, suspecting nothing of rebellion, a treacherous lioness slew those left behind to announce more fully or to confirm the foundations of the Roman realm. When these things had thus been done, and such reports were brought to the senate, and it hastened with a swift army to avenge itself upon the crafty little foxes (as it feigned):

there was no naval fleet at sea prepared to fight bravely for the country, nor a squared battle-line, nor a right wing or any other apparatus of war on the shore; but backs instead of shields were given to the pursuers, and necks (a chill tremor running through the bones) and hands to be bound are stretched out in womanish fashion: so much so that it is carried far and wide into a proverb and a derision, that the Britons are neither brave in war nor faithful in peace. CHAP. V. Of the second subjection and harsh servitude.

— And so, with many of the perfidious slain by the Romans, and some reserved as bondsmen for servitude (lest the land should be utterly reduced to a wilderness), the country being without wine and oil, they make for Italy, leaving behind some of their own as overseers, to fasten scourges upon the backs of the natives, a yoke upon their necks, the name of Roman servitude upon their soil, and to wear down the cunning nation not so much with a military hand as with whips; and, if the matter should so demand, to apply the sword (as it is said) drawn from the sheath to the side of that people: so that it should be reckoned not Britain, but a Roman island, and whatever it could have had of brass, silver, or gold should be marked with the image of Caesar. CHAP. VI. Of religion.

— Meanwhile, to the island stiffened with glacial cold and, as it were, not near to the visible sun by the longer recess of the lands, that true Sun — not from the temporal firmament, but from the very highest citadel of the heavens, surpassing all times — showing to the whole world the resplendent flashing of Himself, at the time (as we know) of the height of Tiberius Caesar (under whom, without any hindrance, His religion was propagated, death having been threatened, against the will of the senate, by the prince to the informers against His soldiers), first granted His rays, that is, Christ His precepts. CHAP. VII. Of the persecution. — Which, although received lukewarmly by the inhabitants, yet among some it was received wholly, and among others less so, up to the nine-year persecution of the tyrant Diocletian:

in which the churches throughout the whole world were overthrown, and all the sacred Scriptures that could be found were burnt up in the streets, and the chosen priests of the Lord's flock were slaughtered together with the innocent sheep: so much so that not even a trace (if it could have been brought about) of the Christian religion appeared in some provinces. How many flights there were then, how many slaughters, how many penalties of diverse deaths, how many ruins of apostates from religion, how many crowns of most glorious martyrs, how many rabid furies of persecutors, how great on the contrary the patience of the saints there were, the ecclesiastical history narrates:

so that the whole Church, in a dense host and vying with one another, leaving worldly darkness behind their backs, hastened to the pleasant realms of the heavens as to its own proper seat. CHAP. VIII. Of the holy martyrs. — Therefore God magnified His mercy with us, willing all men to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), and calling not less the sinners than those who think themselves to be just (Matt. 9:13; Mark 2:17; Luke...).

For He who by His freely given gift, as we learn, in the time of persecution, lest Britain should be wholly darkened by the thick gloom of black night, kindled for us the most brilliant lamps of the holy martyrs—whose graves now and the sites of their sufferings, were they not, because of our many crimes, taken from the citizens by the mournful division of the barbarians, would kindle in the minds of those who gaze on them no small ardour of divine charity. I speak of Saint Alban of Verulamium, of Aaron and Julius, citizens of the City of the Legions, and of the rest of both sexes who in diverse places stood firm in the battle-line of Christ with the highest greatness of soul.

The first of these, when for charity's sake he had hidden in his house a certain confessor who was pursued by his persecutors and was now on the very point of being seized—imitating in this Christ, who laid down His life for the sheep (John 10:15)—and then, having mutually exchanged garments, willingly gave himself up to be pursued unto peril in the place of the aforesaid brother, wearing his clothes:

Thus pleasing to God amid his holy confession and the shedding of his blood before the impious—who then displayed Roman tortures together with a dreadful apparition—he was wondrously adorned with miraculous signs, so that by fervent prayer he opened up an unknown path like that arid and seldom-trodden way of Israel (when, with the riverbed standing dry for a long time, near the gravel of the testament in the midst of the channel of the Jordan), and crossing with a thousand men on dry foot through the bed of that noble river—the waters of the river-mountains hanging up like sheer cliffs on either side—and he changed the former executioner, who saw such prodigies, from a wolf into a lamb, and made him together with himself more vehemently long for, and more bravely receive, the triumphant palm of martyrdom.

But the others were so tortured with diverse torments and torn with unheard-of mangling of their limbs that without delay they fixed the gloriously won trophies of their martyrdom in the noble gates of Jerusalem, as it were. For those who survived hid themselves in woods and deserts and secret caves, awaiting from God, the just ruler of all, at some time stern judgments upon their executioners, but for themselves protection of their souls. Therefore, the ten years of the aforementioned storm not yet fully completed, and the wicked edicts withering away with the death of their authors, all the recruits of Christ, with glad faces, as it were after a wintry and prolonged night, received the mildness and serene light of the heavenly air; they restored the churches that had been razed to the ground;

they founded, built, and completed basilicas of the holy martyrs; and they displayed them like the banners of victory; they celebrated festal days; they performed the sacraments with pure heart and mouth; all the sons rejoiced, cherished as if in the bosom of mother Church. CHAPTER IX. On the various heresies. — For this sweet harmony of the head and members of the writing remained, until the Arian treachery, that savage serpent, vomiting its overseas poisons upon us, made the brethren who dwelt together in unity to be hatefully separated;

and thus, a way being made as it were across the Ocean, all manner of utterly wild beasts, brandishing in their dreadful mouths the deadly venom of every heresy whatsoever, fixed the lethal wounds of their teeth upon a fatherland ever wishing to hear something new and holding nothing firmly fixed. CHAPTER X. On the tyrants. — And likewise at length, the thickets of tyrants growing and now bursting forth into a vast forest, the island—holding the Roman name yet not its manners and law, but rather casting them away—sent forth the offspring of its most bitter planting to the Gauls, accompanied by a great band of attendants, and moreover bearing the insignia of an emperor, which it bore neither becomingly nor lawfully, but in tyrannical fashion and with a riotous, newly-initiated soldiery—namely, Maximus.

He, by cunning craft rather than by valour, annexing first all the neighbouring districts and provinces to his criminal kingdom against the Roman state through the nets of his perjury and lying, and stretching out one of his wings to the Spains and the other to Italy, and setting the throne of his most wicked rule at Trier, raged with such madness against his lords that he drove out two lawful emperors, one from Rome, the other from his most religious life. And without delay, hedged about with such fertile audacities, he is slain by a wicked beheading at the city of Aquileia—he who had in a manner cast down from their necks the crowned heads of the whole world's kingdom. CHAPTER XI. On the two victorious peoples, and on the first devastation.

— Thereafter Britain, stripped of all her armed soldiery and military supplies, abandoned to her savage rulers, despoiled of her great youth (which, having followed in the footsteps of the aforesaid tyrant, never again returned home), and utterly ignorant of all practice of war, lies trodden down, first by two cruelly savage peoples from overseas, the Scots from the north-west and the Picts from the north, and is stunned and groans for many years. CHAPTER XII. On the defence.

— The nation of the Britons, therefore, not bearing the Scots and the Picts, on account of whose harassment and most dire oppression they sent envoys to Rome with letters, demanding with tearful petitions a military force to vindicate them, and vowing continually with the whole strength of their soul their subjection to the Roman empire, if the enemy were driven further off. To them a legion is presently dispatched, unmindful of past evil, sufficiently equipped with arms. It, conveyed by ships across the Ocean into the fatherland and engaging hand to hand with the grievous enemies, laid low a great multitude of them, drove them all from the borders, and freed the subject citizens from such savage tearing and from imminent captivity.

It commanded them to build a wall across the island between the two seas, that it might be a terror, equipped for warding off the enemies, and a protection for the citizens. But this, built by an irrational mob without a director, not so much of stones as of sods, was of no avail. CHAPTER XIII. On the second devastation. — That legion having returned home with great triumph and joy, those former foes, like ravenous wolves wasted with deep hunger, leaping with dry jaws into the sheepfold, the shepherd not appearing, borne by the wings of oars and the arms of rowers and by sails bellied with the wind, break the boundaries, and cut down everything, and they reap, trample, and pass over all things as a ripe harvest. CHAPTER XIV.

On the second devastation again. — Again querulous envoys are sent, with rent garments (as it is said) and heads covered with sand, imploring aid from the Romans, and like timid chicks crouching under the most faithful wings of their parents, lest the wretched fatherland be utterly destroyed, and the Roman name—which echoed among them only in word, in their ears—should grow cheap, made odious by the reproach even of foreign nations. But they, as far as is possible to human nature, moved by the history of so great a tragedy, hastening their flights like those of eagles, the courses of horsemen on land and of sailors at sea, fix at first unexpected, then dreadful, talons of swords into the necks of the enemies, and they carry out that slaughter at a fixed season like the falling of leaves;

and it happens as when a mountain torrent, swollen by frequent rivulets of storms and overflowing its bed with sonorous course, with furrowed back and rough front, raising its waves (as they say) to the clouds—by which (though the eyes' pupils, oftentimes renewed by the blinkings of the eyelids, are as it were darkened by the joined whirlings of tiny wheels)—foams wondrously; yet with a single eddy it overcomes the masses set against it: so the noble auxiliaries put the bands of the rivals (such of them as could yet escape) to flight in haste across the seas, because they were greedily heaping up year by year their plunder across the seas, with none to resist.

Therefore the Romans, having returned to their fatherland, declaring that they could in no way be more frequently harassed by such laborious expeditions, and that for the sake of cowardly and wandering bandits the Roman standards, so great and so excellent an army, should be wearied by land and sea:

but rather that the island should, by accustoming itself to arms and fighting manfully, vindicate with all its might its land, its little substance, its wives, its children, and (what is greater than these) its liberty and life, and should by no means stretch out to peoples in no way stronger (unless they were dissolved by sloth and torpor) hands to be bound with fetters as though unarmed, but hands armed with shields, swords, and spears, and ready for the slaughter. And persuading them (because they thought that thereby too some advantage would accrue to the people they were leaving behind) they laid out in a straight line, at public and private expense, joining to themselves the wretched natives, a wall in the customary manner of construction—not as before—running from sea to sea between the cities which had perhaps been placed there for fear of the enemy; they handed strong counsels to a fearful people; they left specimens for the manufacture of arms. On the shore of the Ocean too, toward the southern region where their ships were kept and whence the wild beasts of barbarism were feared, they placed towers at intervals overlooking the sea; and they bade farewell, as though never to return.

CHAPTER XV. On the third devastation. — Therefore, when these had returned to their own land, there emerge in rivalry from the coracles in which they had been carried across the Tithican valley (as it were, when Titan is high and the heat is glowing, swarthy little worms from the deepest hollows of their burrows) foul herds of Scots and Picts, differing in part in manners, but agreeing in one and the same greed for shedding blood, and covering their thievish faces more with hair than the shameful parts of their bodies and what is next to them with garments: and having learned of the departure of their joint-debtors and the refusal of return, with their usual boldness they seize, as far as the wall, the whole northernmost and farthest part of the land in place of the inhabitants.

Against these, on the height of a fortress, a battle-line is drawn up for fighting—unfit for flight, useless with trembling hearts, which day and night languished on its stupid seat. Meanwhile there cease not the hooked and knotted weapons with which the most wretched citizens, dragged from the walls, were dashed to the ground. This indeed was for them the punishment of an untimely death, who were snatched away by such a death; yet by a swift end they escaped the wretched impending punishments of their brothers and little children. What more shall I say? The cities being abandoned and the high wall deserted, again flights for them: again dispersions more hopeless than usual. Again pursuits by the enemy: again slaughters more cruel are hastened: and as lambs by butchers, so the...

weeping citizens are torn apart by the enemies, so that the remembrance of them might be likened to that of wild beasts of the field. CHAPTER XVI. On the famine. — For they tear one another to pieces, robbing for the brief sustenance of a scanty food of the most wretched citizens; and foreign disasters were increased by domestic commotions: so that by such frequent plunderings the whole region was emptied of every staff of food, except for the solace of the hunter's art. CHAPTER XVII. On the letters. — Therefore again the wretched remnant, sending letters to Aëtius, a man of Roman power (speaking in this manner), say: 'To Aëtius, thrice consul, the groans of the Britons.' And after a little, speaking: 'The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us back to the barbarians:'

between these arise two kinds of deaths: either we are slaughtered, or we are drowned. Nor do they have any help for these things. Meanwhile a dire and most notorious famine clings to the wandering and erring, which compels many of them without delay to give their conquered hands to the bloody plunderers, that they might take a little food to revive their souls; but others nowhere; rather, from the very mountains, caves, and forest-glades and dense thickets they continually rebelled. CHAPTER XVIII. On the victory. — And then for the first time they dealt slaughter upon the enemies, who for very many years had been ravaging in the land, trusting not in man but in God, according to that saying of Philo: 'It is necessary that divine help be present where human help fails.'

For a little while the boldness of the enemies subsided, but not the wickedness of our own people. The enemies withdrew from the citizens, but the citizens did not withdraw from their crimes. CHAPTER XIX. On the crimes. — For it was the constant custom of the nation (as it is even now) that it was weak for blunting the weapons of the enemy and strong and invincible for civil wars, and for bearing the burdens of sins: it is weak (as I say) for carrying out the insignia of peace and truth, strong for crimes and lies. The shameless ravagers therefore return to their winter homes, intending to return after no long time. The Picts, in the farthest part of the island, then for the first time and thereafter were at rest, sometimes making plunderings and crushings.

And so, in such respites, a savage scar is drawn over the desolated people, with another, more virulent, sprouting from the wound. For when the devastation was at rest, the island so abounded in such great stores of plenty as no age since could remember the like, along with which all kinds of luxury also grow. For it grew with a most powerful shoot, so that at the same time it might be said: 'Such fornication is heard of altogether as is not even among the Gentiles' (1 Cor. 5:1).

And not only this vice, but there were all the things that are wont to befall human nature, and especially (what even now too overturns the state of all good in it) hatred of the truth together with its assertors, love of falsehood together with its fabricators, the embracing of evil for good, veneration of wickedness for kindness, desire of darkness for the sun, the reception of Satan for an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). Kings were anointed, and not by God, but such as stood out more cruel than the rest; and a little after they were slaughtered by their anointers, with no examination of the truth, others being chosen more savage.

But if any of them seemed somewhat milder, and a little nearer to the truth, against this man, as if he were the subverter of all Britain, hatreds and weapons were hurled without respect, and all things which had displeased God and pleased Him were weighed in an equal balance at least, if indeed the displeasing things were not the more pleasing: so that deservedly that prophetic example, which was denounced to that veteran people, could be applied to the fatherland: 'Sons,' He says, 'without law, you have forsaken the Lord, and have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel. Why should you yet be inquired of, adding iniquity? Every head is sick and every heart mournful: from the sole of the foot unto the crown, there is no soundness in it' (Isa. 1:4-6).

And thus all things contrary to salvation were carried on, as if no medicine were bestowed on the world by the true Physician of all. And not only these secular men, but the very flock of the Lord and its pastors, who ought to have been an example to all the people, very many of them lay torpid in drunkenness, as if soaked with wine, dissolved, and were carped at by the swelling of animosities, the contention of quarrels, the rapacious talons of envy, and indiscriminate judgment of good and evil; so that manifestly, as it is even now, contempt seemed to be poured out upon the princes, and they to be led astray by their vain things and by error, in a pathless place and not in the way (Ps. 106[107]:40). CHAPTER XX. On the enemies suddenly announced.

— Meanwhile, God willing to purge His family, and to amend it, infected with such great corruption of evils, by the mere hearing of tribulation, the feathered flight, as it were, of no unknown rumour penetrates the pricked-up ears of all, that the old enemies were now at hand, willing to destroy utterly the whole region and to inhabit it after their usual manner, from end to end. Yet they in no way profit by this, but, likened to senseless beasts of burden, gripping fast with strait (as it is said) bites the rein of reason, they ran along the broad way that leads down to diverse vices and to death (the way of salvation, though narrow, being abandoned). CHAPTER XXI. On the famous plague. — Therefore, while (as Solomon says) the hard servant is not amended by words;

the fool is scourged, and does not perceive it (Prov. 29:19): for a pestilent plague fell fatally upon the foolish people, which in a short time laid low so great a multitude of them, the sword being removed, as the living could not bury. But not even by this are they amended, so that that saying of the prophet Isaiah was fulfilled in that people also, saying: 'And God called the people to weeping, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: behold, they began to kill calves and to slaughter rams; behold, to eat and to drink and to say: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die' (Isa. 22:12,13). For the time was drawing near in which its iniquities, like those of the Amorites, should be filled up. CHAPTER XXII. On the counsel. — For counsel is taken:

what should rather be decreed as best, or what most wholesome, for repelling such frequent and such deadly invasions and plunderings of the aforesaid peoples. CHAPTER XXIII. On the enemy far more savage than the first. — Then all the counsellors, together with the proud tyrant Vortigern, leader of the Britons, are blinded, and devising such a defence—nay rather, ruin—of the fatherland, that those most ferocious Saxons of accursed name, hateful to God and men, should be let into the island, as wolves into the sheepfolds, to drive back the northern peoples. Than which nothing more pernicious, nothing more bitter, was ever done to it. O the deepest darkness of mind! O the despairing and raw dullness of heart!

Those whom they dreaded more than death when they were absent, they invited, as it were of their own accord, under the roof of a single dwelling: 'The princes of Tanis are fools (as it is said), giving foolish counsel to Pharaoh' (Isa. 19:11). Then there burst forth a brood of whelps from the lair of the barbarian lioness, in three (as it is expressed in their tongue) cyulae, in our tongue ships of war, with favourable sails, with favourable omen and auguries; by which it was prophesied with sure presage among them that for three hundred years it should occupy the land toward which it had steered its prows; but for a hundred and fifty, that is, half the time, it should also more often lay it waste.

Carried first into the eastern part of the island, at the bidding of the tyrant, it fixed its terrible talons, as though about to fight for the fatherland, but more surely about to assail it. To these the aforesaid mother (first finding that the band had prospered) likewise sends a more extensive heap of satellites and dogs, which, conveyed by ships, is united with the bastard companies. Thence the seed of iniquity, the root of bitterness, the venomous planting worthy of our deserts, sprouted on our soil with ferocious branches and tendrils. Therefore the barbarians, let into the island, demand that provisions be given them, as though to soldiers and to men about to undergo great dangers (as they falsely claimed) for good hosts.

These provisions, imparted for a long time, closed (as it is said) the dog's hunger. Again they complain that their monthly rations are not abundantly furnished to them, deliberately colouring their occasions; and unless a more profuse bounty were heaped upon them, they protest that they would lay waste the whole island, breaking the treaty. Nor was there delay: they follow up their threats with deeds. CHAPTER XXIV. On the overthrow of the cities. — For the cause of just vengeance for the preceding crimes was kindled, a fire from the east heaped up by the hand of the sacrilegious men, from sea to sea, and laying waste all the neighbouring cities and fields; which, once kindled, did not rest until, burning up almost everything, it licked the western Ocean with its red and savage tongue over the surface of the island.

In this Assyrian assault, then, to be compared to that of old upon Judaea, there was fulfilled also in us, according to the history, as it is said: 'They have set Thy sanctuary on fire, they have defiled the tabernacle of Thy name on the ground' (Ps. 73[74]:7). And again it says: 'O God, the nations are come into Thine inheritance, they have defiled Thy holy temple' (Ps. 78[79]:1), and so forth.

So that all the columns were laid low to the ground with frequent battering-rams, and all the colonists, together with the prelates of the church, with the priests and people, while swords flashed on every side and flames crackled, were at the same time levelled to the ground; and—a pitiable sight—in the midst of the streets, the stones of towers torn from their lofty hinges and of the high walls, sacred altars, fragments of corpses covered with crusts and clots of purple blood, seemed mingled together as in some dreadful winepress, and there was no burial of any kind whatever except the ruins of houses and the bellies of beasts and birds in the open—saving the reverence due to the holy souls; if indeed many were found who at that time were borne to the heights of heaven by the holy angels.

For that vineyard, once good, had so degenerated, turned into bitterness, that, according to the prophet, scarcely was there seen behind the back of the grape-gatherers (Mic. 7:1) or of the reapers a cluster or itself. CHAPTER XXV. On the remnants. — And so some of the wretched remnants, caught in the mountains, were slaughtered in heaps: others, worn out with famine, coming forward, gave their hands to the enemies, to be slaves forever—if indeed they were not at once cut down; which stood in the place of the highest grace: others sought regions across the sea with great wailing, or by way of a chant, singing in this manner under the folds of their sails: 'Thou hast given us like sheep for food, and hast scattered us among the nations, O God' (Ps. 43[44]:12):

others, in the mountain hills, ramparted by menacing crags and densest forest-glades and sea-rocks, remained in their fatherland, though trembling, ever entrusting their life to a suspicious mind.

Therefore, after some time had intervened, when the most cruel plunderers had withdrawn home, the remnants, strengthened by the Lord (to whom the most wretched citizens flee from every side in diverse places, as eagerly as bees of the hive when a storm threatens), at the same time beseeching Him with their whole heart and (as it is said) loading the heavens with countless vows, that they might not be utterly destroyed unto extermination, under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus—a modest man, who alone of the Roman race chanced to survive the collision of so great a tempest, his parents, doubtless clad in the purple, having been slain in it; and whose offspring in our days has greatly degenerated from his ancestral goodness—take up their strength, challenging the victors to battle; to whom victory, by God's assent, fell according to their vow.

CHAPTER XXVI. On the last peace: which last victory has been granted to our times by the will of God. — And from that time now the citizens, now the enemies, were victorious, so that in this nation the Lord might prove, after His usual manner, the present Israel, whether the Lord loves them or not: up to the year of the siege of Mount Badon, which is near the mouth of the Severn, and of the well-nigh last and not least slaughter of the rascals, which (as I know) arises as the forty-fourth year, one month having now elapsed, which also is that of my own birth. But not even now, as before, are the cities inhabited, but, deserted and dismantled, they lie squalid to this day, since, though external wars have ceased, civil ones nevertheless have not.

For there clung to the memory of those who were witnesses of both marvels both the recollection of so desperate a ruin of the island and of the unhoped-for aid; and on account of this kings, public and private persons, priests and ecclesiastics, kept their own order.

But when these had passed away, and a generation had succeeded that knew nothing of that tempest and had experienced only the present calm, all the restraints of truth and justice were so shaken and overturned that of them not even, I will not say a trace, but not even a memorial, scarcely appears among the aforesaid orders, except in a few, and very few, who, on account of the loss of so great a multitude—which daily was prone toward the pit—are held to be of so small a number that the venerable mother Church does not in some manner see them reclining in her bosom, though they alone are the true sons she has.

Lest anyone should think that I carp at their excellent life, admirable to men and lovable to God (by whom our weakness is sustained, as by certain pillars and most wholesome supports, through their sacred prayers, that it may not utterly collapse), I have spoken—if I have said anything somewhat freely, nay rather more mournfully, compelled by the heap of evils, concerning those who serve not only the belly but the devil rather than Christ, who is the God blessed above all things forever (Rom. 9:5)—I have not so much disputed as wept. For indeed what shall the citizens conceal which not only the nations round about know, but cast in reproach? Thus read through the History of Gildas, written by the fingers of a doctor named Cormac, reduced in sense and adornment. This surpasses the lowly, and carps at the many proud.