Crossword-Solution: GILDAS 6 letters, 7 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

The most ancient historian of our own island, whose work has been preserved, is Gildas, who flourished in the latter part of the sixth century.

This writer, although he professes to be the first historiographer (9) of the Britons, has sometimes repeated the very words of Gildas (10); whose name is even prefixed to some copies of the work.

The work which follows, called the "Epistle of Gildas", is little more than a cento of quotations from the Old and New Testament.

The declamations of Gildas, the fragments, or fables, of Nennius, the obscure hints of the Saxon laws and chronicles, and the ecclesiastical tales of the venerable Bede, 126 have been illustrated by the diligence, and sometimes embellished by the fancy, of succeeding writers, whose works I am not ambitious either to censure or to transcribe.

Gildas 132 describes in florid language the improvements of agriculture, the foreign trade which flowed with every tide into the Thames and the Severn the solid and lofty construction of public and private edifices; he accuses the sinful luxury of the British people; of a people, according to the same writer, ignorant of the most simple arts, and incapable, without the aid of the Romans, of providing walls of stone, or weapons of iron, for the defence of their native land.