ern--but he
is not answerable for the derivation of the name from the word
_Sahs_=_dagger_. In regard to the important question as to the date of
the invasion, and the number of the invaders, he fixes 150 years before
his own time, and gives _three_ as the number of their vessels
(_cyulae_). Aurelius Ambrosius and the Pugna Badonica are especially
alluded to, the date of the latter event being the date of his own
birth. As this is an event which he might have known from his parents,
and as the later Roman writers are our authorities until (there or
thereabouts) the death of Honorius, it remains to inquire upon what
testimonies Gildas gave the few events which he notices between the
years 417[12] and 516. Is there anything which by suggesting the
existence of native cotemporary documents should induce us to consider
his evidence as conclusive? I think not. Such may or may not have
existed, the presumption being for or against them, according to the
view which the inquirer takes respecting the literary and civilizational
influences of the expiring Paganism of the Romans, and the incipient
Christianity of the early British Church, combined with the antiquity of
the earliest British and Irish records--a wide and complex subject, if
treated generally, but if viewed with reference to the specific case
before us (the authorities of Gildas), a narrow one.

In the case of Gildas it is perfectly unnecessary to assume anything of
the kind. The only material facts which he gives us are the letter to
AEtius for assistance, and a notice of the place which Vortigern finds in
the downfall of the Romano-British empire. The first of these points to
Rome rather than to Britain; the second is from the life of a Gallic
missionary--St. Germanus of Auxerre. To this may be added the high
probability of Gildas' work having been written in Gaul; a fact which,
undoubtedly, subtracts from the little value it might otherwise possess.

The next is an author of a very different calibre, the venerable Beda;
concerning whom we must remember that he stands in contrast to Gildas
from being Anglo-Saxon rather than British. Now, his history is
Ecclesiastical and not Civil; so that ethnological questions make no
part of his inquiries, and, as far as they are treated at all, they are
treated incidentally. Whatever may have been the records of the
Romano-British Church, or the compositions of Romano-British writers,
they form no part of the materials of Beda