The 'Siege of the Badonic Mountain'

Abstract

Gildas's brief and somewhat opaque reference to the siege of Badon provides us with one of the very few events that we can be reasonably sure occurred in Britain during the century following the ending of Roman rule. Close attention to the way that he used this conflict within his text allows us to establish that it was included primarily as a means of fixing the year in which God's weighing up of His people ended and Gildas's present began. It was not a final battle that brought the Britons victory; on the contrary, it was the Saxons who had had the greater success in the war. That this 'not the least' conflict was sufficiently memorable 44 years later may, though, mean that it was comparatively local both to Gildas himself and the intended recipients of his letter.