Disaster in Gildas’ De Excidio Britonum

Gildas’ De excidio Britonum centers on disaster. Alongside the invasions which Gildas presents as his age’s dominant catastrophe, the work relates natural disasters, namely, plague and famine. Decades of insightful scholarship on Gildas’ text exists, but none examines the concept of disaster in Gildas’ work. The few studies which examine Gildas’ presentation of environmental catastrophes both misread Gildas and misuse the scientific data often mustered by environmental historians to better understand climate, famine, and disease.

This issue has broader implications. The disregard for the nuances of the De excidio in environmental scholarship on Gildasmirrors a broader trend in environmental history and paleoscience. Scholars in these fields often cherry-pick reports of environmental phenomena from complex, rhetorical texts such as the De excidio with little regard for the texts’ genres or credibility in relating natural occurrences. Similarly, historians who attempt to incorporate scientific and archaeological data into their work often rely on out-of-date information and fail to grasp its nuances.

As our only near-contemporary, narrative account of the last years of Roman Britain and the adventus Saxonum, as well as our earliest account of disease and famine in Britain, Gildas’ text is key to our understanding of the period. It is therefore crucial that interpretations of it consider all available contextualizing evidence for it, both textual and scientific. This talk therefore presents a novel examination of the De excidio’s central theme – disaster – which draws on archaeological, paleoclimatic, and plague ecological data alongside the text’s vast historiography.