Dating Gildas

An increasing consensus has dated Gildas’ De excidio Britanniae to c. 530–545, as supported by possibly contemporaneous annal entries in the Irish and Welsh annals and against circumstantial evidence linking the text to the late fifth century. This article reviews the dating issue to point out that recent support for the traditional or ‘default’ dating of c. 530–545 is often based on circular arguments, and that more attention needs to be given to the cumulative contextual evidence for the text itself. Given a lack of decisive evidence, I argue that the dating for De excidio Britanniae should return to the conservative range of c. 479–550 established in the late 20th century.