“ Two short treatises exist, purporting to be lives of Gildas, and ascribed respectively to the 11th and 12th centuries; but the writers of both are believed to have confounded two, if not more, persons that had borne the name. It is from an incidental remark of his own, namely, that the year of the siege of Mount Badon—one of the battles fought between the Saxons and the Britons—was also the year of his own nativity, that the date of his birth has been derived ”

“ His materials, he tells us, were collected from foreign rather than native sources, the latter of which had been put beyond his reach by circumstances. The Cambrian Annals give 570 as the year of his death. ”