On the departure of the Romans, the Piets and Scots. . . occupied all the northern and most distant parts of Britain up to the wall. Here a dispirited British garrison stationed on the fortifications pined in absolute terror night and day, while from beyond the wall, the enemy constantly attacked them with hooked weapons, dragging the cowardly defenders down from the wall and dashing them on the ground.
Bede, Ecclesiastical History, 1.12 (731)
The collapse of the Roman province of Britannia left the Britons poorly prepared for independence and ill equipped to defend themselves against the depredations of their wild Celtic neighbours, the Piets of northern Britain and the Scots of Ireland. The demoralised and terrified Britons invited the Saxons, pagan pirates from the North Sea coast of Germany, to come and defend them in return for land to settle on. The Saxons soon defeated the Piets and Scots but, seeing what a feeble and cowardly bunch the Britons were, they sent back to Germany for reinforcements and began to take over the country for themselves. The Angles and Jutes from Denmark joined the Saxons to grab a piece of the action and, if they were not slain, the hapless Britons either fled abroad or were driven to seek a comfortless refuge in the mountainous west as the victors set about laying the foundations of England. Such is still the popular image of the fate of the Britons after the end of Roman rule. It provides a heroic foundation myth for the English and legitimises the lovingly nurtured victim culture of modern Celtic nationalism. In fact, this picture of moral collapse was created by later ecclesiastical writers to serve their own didactic purposes. The decision of the Britons to break with Rome - they were the only provincials to leave the empire by choice - does not suggest that they lacked confidence in themselves. The Britons were, in reality, the most successful of all the inhabitants of the former Roman Empire in resisting the Germanic barbarian invasions.
The responsibility for creating the myth of the helpless Britons lies firmly with Gildas, a British monk, who lived around the middle of the
Sixth century. Gildas was the author of one of the very few literary works to have survived from the period, De excidio Britanniae (‘On the Ruin of Britain’), a gloomily doom-laden jeremiad about the state of Britain and the Britons. De excidio is essentially an extended sermon in which Gildas argues that the various troubles experienced by the Britons since the end of Roman rule had been inflicted on them by a Just God because of their wicked behaviour. Gildas had received a good Classical education, and knew his Bible and the works of early Christian theologians, such as Jerome and Salvian, who had interpreted the decline of the Roman Empire in a very similar light. Indeed, this remained a standard Christian approach to history throughout the Middle Ages. God allowed bad things to happen to his people because they were sinful. The depredations of the Huns, Goths and Vandals, as well as those of the Angles, Saxons, Piets and Scots, not to mention plagues and famines, were all amenable to explanation in these terms. The only certain way to stop such awful things happening was the path of moral reform. Because of the moralistic nature of his work, Gildas had an interest in painting as grim a picture as possible of the state of immediate post-Roman Britain. It is hardly surprising that English historians from the Venerable Bede (d. 735) onwards accepted Gildas’s testimony uncritically (not that they had anyone else’s to compare it with). As a monk, Bede shared Gildas’s gloomy worldview. As an Angle, Bede was not inclined to be sympathetic towards the Britons, who were in any case members of the schismatic Celtic church and so quite obviously less righteous than the Angles and Saxons, who by this time had converted to orthodox Catholicism and accepted the authority of the pope.
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