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Britain, an island of the Ocean, which was once called Albion, lies between the north and the west, set over against, at a great distance, Germany, Gaul, Spain, the greatest parts of Europe. It is eight hundred miles long toward the north, and has a breadth of two hundred miles, except only for the more extended tracts of various promontories, by which it comes about that its circuit reaches four thousand eight hundred and seventy-five miles.
On the south it has Gallia Belgica, whose nearest shore is disclosed to those crossing over by the city which is called Rutubi Portus, now corruptly called Reptacaestir by the English people, the sea lying between, at a crossing of fifty miles from Gessoriacum, the nearest shore of the Morini, or, as some have written, of four hundred and fifty stadia. Behind it, where it opens upon the boundless Ocean, it has the Orkney Islands. The island is rich in crops and trees, and suited for feeding sheep and beasts of burden; it also produces vines in certain places; and it is a land productive of birds of various kinds by land and sea; it is also distinguished by rivers very full of fish and by abundant copious springs, and indeed it especially abounds in salmon and eel.
There are also very often caught seals, and dolphins, as well as whales; besides various kinds of shellfish, among which are mussels, in which they often find an enclosed pearl of every colour, the very best—that is, both ruddy and purple and hyacinth-coloured and green, but most of all white. There are also cockles more than abundant, from which is made a dye of scarlet colour, whose most beautiful redness can never grow pale through any heat of the sun, nor through any injury of the rains; but the older it is, the more comely it is wont to be. It has springs of salt water; it has also hot springs, and from them streams of warm baths suited to every age and sex, in distinct places, each according to its own kind.
For water, as Saint Basil says, takes on a fiery quality when it runs through certain metals, and becomes not only warm but even burning. The land, fruitful also in veins of metals—of copper, iron, lead, and silver—produces jet too, in great quantity and of the best; it is a black gem, and burns when put to fire; when kindled it drives away serpents; warmed by rubbing it holds fast things applied to it, just as amber does. It was once adorned with twenty-eight most noble cities, besides countless fortresses, which themselves too were furnished with most stout walls, towers, gates, and bars. And because it lies almost beneath the very northern pole of the world, it has bright nights in summer;
so that often in the middle of the night a question arises among those who behold it, whether the evening twilight still lingers, or whether the morning has already come, inasmuch as the sun by night returns through the northern regions to the east, not far beneath the earth; whence too it has in summer days of very great length, just as on the contrary it has nights of very great length in winter, the sun then withdrawing into the Libyan parts—that is, of eighteen hours. Likewise it has nights of very great shortness in summer, and days in winter—that is, of only six equinoctial hours; whereas in Armenia, Macedonia, Italy, and the other regions of the same line, the longest day or night completes fifteen hours, and the shortest nine hours.
At present, after the number of the books in which the divine Law was written, it searches out and confesses one and the same knowledge of the highest truth and true sublimity in the languages of five nations—namely the English, the Britons, the Scots, the Picts, and the Latins, the last of which, through the study of the Scriptures, has become common to all the rest. Now in the beginning this island had only Britons for inhabitants, from whom it received its name; who, brought, as is reported, from the Armorican tract into Britain, claimed for themselves its southern parts.
And when, beginning from the south, they had possessed the greater part of the island, it happened that the nation of the Picts, from Scythia, as they relate, entering the Ocean in long ships, not many in number, and being carried about by the blowing of the winds, beyond all the boundaries of Britain reached Ireland, and entered its northern shores; and finding there the nation of the Scots, they asked for themselves likewise settlements in those parts, but could not obtain them. Now Ireland is, after Britain, the largest island of all, situated to the west of Britain; but just as it is shorter than Britain toward the north, so, stretching out far beyond its bounds toward the south, it extends as far as opposite the northern parts of Spain, though a great sea lies between.
Coming therefore by ship as far as this island, the Picts, as we have said, sought that settlements and a dwelling-place be granted to them there too. The Scots answered that the island could not hold them both; but, they said, we can give you wholesome counsel as to what you may be able to do. We know there is another island, not far from ours, toward the rising of the sun, which we are often wont to behold from afar on clearer days. If you wish to go to it, you can make it habitable for yourselves; or, if any resist, you may use us as helpers. And so the Picts, seeking Britain, began to dwell in the northern parts of the island, for the Britons had occupied the southern parts.
And since the Picts had no wives and asked them of the Scots, they consented to give them only on this condition: that where the matter should come into doubt, they should choose for themselves a king rather from the female royal line than from the male; which, it is agreed, has been observed among the Picts even to this day. Now, as time went on, Britain, after the Britons and the Picts, received a third nation, that of the Scots, in the part of the Picts; who, advancing from Ireland under their leader Reuda, claimed for themselves among them, either by friendship or by the sword, the settlements which they hold to this day; from which leader, indeed, they are called even to this day Dalreudini, for in their tongue 'daal' signifies 'a part.'
Ireland, moreover, far surpasses Britain in the breadth of its situation and in the wholesomeness and serenity of its air, so that there snow rarely remains more than three days; no one cuts hay there in summer on account of winter, nor builds stables for his beasts; no reptile is wont to be seen there, no serpent can live; for serpents often carried thither from Britain, as soon as the ship draws near to the land and they are touched by the smell of that air, perish; nay rather, almost all things which come from that island avail against poison.
In short, we have seen that, when certain men had been struck by a serpent, the scrapings of the leaves of books which had come from Ireland, and the very scrapings put into water and given to drink, immediately allayed and consumed for such men all the force of the spreading poison and the whole swelling of the inflamed body. The island is rich in milk and honey, nor lacking in vines, and distinguished by the hunting of fish and birds, and also of stags and roes. This, moreover, is properly the homeland of the Scots; going forth from it, as we have said, they added a third nation in Britain to the Britons and the Picts.
There is, moreover, a very great arm of the sea which in ancient times separated the nation of the Britons from the Picts, which bursts in from the west into the land over a long stretch, where there is a most strongly fortified city of the Britons, even to this day, which is called Alcluith; to the northern part of which arm the Scots whom we have mentioned, coming, made for themselves a place of homeland. Now this same Britain was inaccessible and unknown to the Romans down to the time of Gaius Julius Caesar;
who, in the six hundred and ninety-third year from the founding of the City, and in the sixtieth year before the time of the Lord's incarnation, holding the rank of consul with Lucius Bibulus, while he was waging war against the nations of the Germans and Gauls, who were separated only by the river Rhine, came to the Morini, whence there is the nearest and shortest crossing into Britain; and with about eighty transport and light vessels prepared, he was carried over into Britain, where, wearied first by a bitter battle, then seized by an adverse storm, he lost the greater part of his fleet and no small number of foot soldiers, and almost all his cavalry. Returning into Gaul, he sent his legions into winter quarters, and ordered six hundred ships of both kinds to be made;
with which, again carried over into Britain at the beginning of spring, while he himself was advancing with his army against the enemy, the ships standing at anchor were seized by a storm and either dashed against one another or driven upon the sands and broken up; of which forty perished, the rest were repaired with great difficulty. Caesar's cavalry was defeated in the first encounter by the Britons, and there the tribune Labienus was slain. In the second battle, with great peril to his own men, he put the conquered Britons to flight. Thence he set out to the river Thames. On its farther bank an immense multitude of the enemy had taken its stand under the leadership of Cassobellaunus, and had fortified the bank of the river, and almost the whole ford beneath the water, with very sharp stakes;
the traces of which stakes are to be seen there to this day, and it appears to those inspecting them that each of them was as thick as a man's thigh, and, encased in lead, was fixed immovably in the depth of the river. When this was detected and avoided by the Romans, the barbarians, not bearing the onset of the legions, hid themselves in the woods, whence by frequent sallies they grievously and often mauled the Romans. Meanwhile the most strongly fortified city of the Trinovantes, with its leader Androgius, having given forty hostages, surrendered to Caesar. Following this example, several other cities came into alliance with the Romans.
With these pointing the way, Caesar at length, by a hard-fought battle, took the stronghold of Cassobellaunus, situated between two marshes, further fortified by the cover of woods, and crammed with all manner of things. Thereupon Caesar, returning from the Britons into Gaul, after he had sent his legions into winter quarters, was surrounded and harassed on every side by sudden tumults of wars. Now in the seven hundred and ninety-eighth year from the founding of the City, the emperor Claudius, the fourth from Augustus, desiring to show himself a prince useful to the commonwealth, sought war everywhere and victory from every quarter. And so he set in motion an expedition into Britain, which seemed to have been stirred into tumult on account of deserters not handed back;
he was carried over into the island, which no one before Julius Caesar, nor anyone after him, had dared to approach, and there without any battle or bloodshed, within a very few days, he received the greater part of the island into surrender. He also added to the Roman Empire the Orkney Islands, situated in the ocean beyond Britain, and in the sixth month from his setting out he returned to Rome, and imposed upon his son the name Britannicus. He completed this war in the fourth year of his reign, which is the forty-sixth year from the incarnation of the Lord; in which year too a very grievous famine occurred throughout Syria, which is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles to have been foretold by the prophet Agabus.
By the same Claudius, Vespasian, who reigned after Nero, being sent into Britain, subjected to the dominion of the Romans the Isle of Wight also, nearest to Britain on the south; which has from east to west about thirty miles, from south to north twelve, distant from the southern shore of Britain by a sea of six miles in its eastern parts, and of three in its western. Now Nero, succeeding Claudius in the empire, dared absolutely nothing in military affairs. Whence, among countless other detriments to the Roman realm, he almost lost Britain; for under him two most noble towns there were captured and overthrown.
In the one hundred and fifty-sixth year from the incarnation of the Lord, Marcus Antoninus Verus, the fourteenth from Augustus, received the kingdom together with his brother Aurelius Commodus; in whose times, when Eleutherius, a holy man, presided over the pontificate of the Roman church, Lucius, king of the Britons, sent a letter to him, beseeching that by his mandate he might be made a Christian; and soon he obtained the effect of his pious request; and the Britons kept the faith they had received, inviolate and entire, in quiet peace, down to the times of the emperor Diocletian. In the one hundred and eighty-ninth year from the incarnation of the Lord, Severus, an African by birth, a Tripolitan from the town of Leptis, having attained the empire as the seventeenth from Augustus, held it for seventeen years.
This man, savage by nature, ever harassed by many wars, ruled the commonwealth most bravely indeed, but most laboriously. Therefore, as victor of the civil wars which had befallen him most grievously, he was drawn into the Britains by the defection of almost all his allies. There, after many heavy battles had often been fought, he judged that the part of the island he had recovered should be marked off from the other unsubdued nations, not by a wall, as some suppose, but by a rampart. For a wall is made of stones, but a rampart, by which camps are fortified to repel the force of enemies, is made of sods; these being cut out from the earth all around, a kind of wall is raised high above the ground, so that in front there is a ditch from which the sods were lifted, above which stakes of the strongest timber are fixed.
And so Severus carried a great ditch and a most stout rampart, further fortified with frequent towers, from sea to sea. And there, at the town of York, he died of disease. He left two sons, Bassianus and Geta; of whom Geta, adjudged a public enemy, perished, while Bassianus, having taken the surname Antoninus, gained possession of the kingdom. In the two hundred and eighty-sixth year of the Lord's incarnation, Diocletian, the thirty-third emperor from Augustus, chosen by the army, reigned twenty years, and made Maximian, surnamed Herculius, his colleague in the empire.
In their time a certain Carausius, of the lowest birth indeed, but ready in counsel and in hand, when he had been set to guard the shores of the Ocean, which the Franks and Saxons then infested, was acting more to the ruin than to the profit of the commonwealth, restoring to the owners no part of the booty wrested from the pirates, but claiming it for himself alone; thus kindling the suspicion that by deliberate negligence he was even allowing the very enemies to raid the borders; for which reason, being ordered by Maximian to be put to death, he took up the purple and seized the Britains; which, having most bravely claimed and held for seven years, he was at last killed by the treachery of his associate Allectus. Allectus afterwards held the island, snatched from Carausius, for three years;
whom Asclepiodotus, the praetorian prefect, crushed, and recovered Britain after ten years. Meanwhile Diocletian in the east, and Maximian Herculius in the west, ordered the churches to be laid waste, and the Christians to be afflicted and slain, in the tenth place after Nero; which persecution was longer and more savage than almost all those carried out before; for through ten years it was waged unceasingly by the burning of churches, the proscription of the innocent, and the slaughter of martyrs. Finally it exalted even Britain at that time with very great glory of confession devoted to God. For indeed in it suffered Saint Alban, of whom the priest Fortunatus, in his Praise of Virgins, when he made mention of the blessed martyrs who came to the Lord from the whole world, says:
"Fruitful Britain brings forth the excellent Alban." This same Alban, still a pagan, when the commands of impious rulers were raging against the Christians, received into his lodging a certain cleric fleeing from his persecutors; and when he observed him devoting himself to continual prayers and vigils day and night, suddenly looked upon by divine grace, he began to emulate the example of his faith and piety, and, gradually instructed by his saving exhortations, abandoning the darkness of idolatry, he became a Christian from a whole heart. And when the aforesaid cleric had lodged with him some days, it came to the ears of the wicked ruler that a confessor of Christ, to whom a place of martyrdom had not yet been appointed, lay hidden in Alban's house.
Whereupon he at once ordered soldiers to search for him more diligently. When they had come to the martyr's dwelling, immediately Saint Alban, in place of his guest and master, clad in his garb—that is, the caracalla with which he was clothed—presented himself to the soldiers, and was led bound to the judge. Now it happened that the judge, at the very hour in which Alban was being brought to him, was standing by the altars and offering sacrifices to the demons. And when he saw Alban, at once inflamed with exceeding anger, because he had presumed of his own accord to offer himself to the soldiers in place of the guest whom he had received, and to give himself up to danger, he ordered him to be dragged to the images of the demons by which he stood:
"Because you have chosen to conceal a rebel and a sacrilegious man rather than to deliver him to the soldiers, so that, as a despiser of the gods, he might pay the deserved penalty of his blasphemy, you shall have to discharge whatever punishments were due to him, if you attempt to depart from the worship of our religion." But Saint Alban, who of his own accord had disclosed himself to the persecutors of the faith to be a Christian, in no way feared the threats of the ruler; but, girded with the arms of spiritual warfare, he openly declared that he would not obey his commands. Then the judge said: "Of what family or stock are you?" Alban answered: "What does it concern you of what lineage I am born? But if you desire to hear the truth of religion, know that I am now a Christian, and am free for Christian duties." The judge said:
"I ask your name, which without delay declare to me." But he said: "By my parents I am called Alban, and I ever adore and worship the true and living God, who created all things." Then the judge, filled with wrath, said: "If you wish to enjoy the felicity of everlasting life, do not delay to sacrifice to the great gods." Alban answered: "These sacrifices, which are offered by you to demons, can neither aid those who are subject to them, nor fulfil the desires or vows of those who supplicate them. Nay rather, whoever offers sacrifices to these images shall receive as his reward the eternal punishments of hell."
On hearing these things, the judge, moved by exceeding fury, commanded the holy confessor of God to be beaten by the torturers, supposing that he might soften by blows the constancy of his heart, which he could not by words. And when he was afflicted with the most cruel torments, he bore these patiently—nay rather joyfully—for the Lord. But when the judge perceived that he could not be overcome by torments, nor recalled from the worship of the Christian religion, he ordered him to be beheaded. And as he was being led to death, he came to a river which, by a most rapid current, divided the wall from the sand where he was to be struck;
and he saw there no small multitude of people of both sexes, of different condition and age, which without doubt was being summoned by the prompting of the Godhead to attend upon the most blessed confessor and martyr, and so thronged the bridge of that very river that he could scarcely cross before evening. In short, when almost all had gone out, the judge had remained in the city without attendance. Therefore Saint Alban, in whom burned an ardent devotion of mind to come the more swiftly to martyrdom, drew near to the torrent, and, directing his eyes to heaven, the channel being at once dried up, he saw that the water had given way before him and granted a path to his steps.
And when, among the others, the executioner himself, who was to strike him, had also seen this, he hastened to meet him where he had come to the place destined for death—admonished, doubtless, by a divine prompting—and casting away the sword which he had held drawn, he threw himself at his feet, greatly desiring rather to be himself struck together with the martyr, or in place of the martyr whom he was bidden to strike. While therefore he, from a persecutor, had become a comrade of truth and faith, and while there was a just hesitation among the executioners as the sword lay on the ground, the most reverend confessor of God ascended the hill with the crowds; which hill, conveniently pleasant, with most seemly grace, was situated about five hundred paces from the sand, adorned with various flowers of plants—nay, clothed everywhere with them;
on which there was nothing suddenly steep, nothing precipitous, nothing abrupt; which, with its sides drawn out far and wide in the manner of a level plain, nature smooths flat—rendering it indeed already long since worthy, by the appearance of comeliness implanted in it, to be consecrated by the blood of the blessed martyr. On the summit of this, therefore, Saint Alban asked that water be given him by God, and immediately, the channel being enclosed, a perennial spring sprang up before his feet, so that all might recognize that even the torrent had rendered service to the martyr; for it could not be that on the lofty top of the hill the martyr should seek the water which he had not left behind in the river, unless he saw this to be fitting.
That river, indeed, having performed its service and fulfilled its act of devotion, leaving behind a testimony of its office, returned to its natural course. And so the most valiant martyr, beheaded in that very place, received the crown of life which God has promised to those who love Him. But the man who had laid impious hands upon those holy shoulders was not permitted to rejoice over the dead; for his eyes fell to the ground together with the head of the blessed martyr. There too was beheaded at that time the soldier who, seized beforehand by a heavenly impulse, had refused to strike the holy confessor of God; concerning whom it is certainly established that, although he was not washed in the font of baptism, he was nonetheless cleansed by the laver of his own blood, and made worthy of entrance into the kingdom of heaven.
Then the judge, struck by such an unprecedented display of heavenly miracles, presently ordered the persecution to cease, beginning to render honour to the slaughter of the saints, by which he had formerly supposed that they could be turned away from their devotion to the Christian faith. Now the blessed Alban suffered on the tenth day before the Kalends of July, near the city of Verulamium, which is now called by the English people Verlamacæstir or Wæclingacæstir; where afterward, when the tranquillity of Christian times returned, a church of wonderful workmanship and worthy of his martyrdom was built. In which place, indeed, the healing of the sick and the frequent working of miracles does not cease to be celebrated even to this day.
In that same storm of persecution suffered Aaron and Julius, citizens of the City of the Legions, and very many others of both sexes in various places, who, tortured with diverse torments and torn apart by an unheard-of mangling of their limbs, sent forth their souls to the joys of the heavenly city, their contest perfected. But when the whirlwind of persecution had subsided, the faithful of Christ, who in the time of danger had hidden themselves in woods and deserts and secret caves, coming forth into public, renewed the churches which had been razed to the ground; they founded, built, and completed basilicas of the holy martyrs, and everywhere displayed them like banners of victory; they celebrated feast days, and performed the sacred rites with pure heart and lips.
And this peace remained in the churches of Christ which were in Britain until the times of the Arian madness, which, when it had corrupted the whole world, infected even this island, so far removed beyond the world, with the poison of its error; and when, as it were, this road of pestilence had been opened across the ocean, without delay every plague of every heresy poured itself into the island, which ever rejoices to hear something new and holds nothing certain firmly. In these times Constantius, who while Diocletian was living governed Gaul and Spain, a man of the greatest gentleness and civility, met his death in Britain. He left as emperor of the Gauls his son Constantine, born of his concubine Helena.
Eutropius, however, writes that Constantine, made emperor in Britain, succeeded his father in the kingdom; in whose times the Arian heresy arose, and, though it was exposed and condemned in the Council of Nicaea, nonetheless, as we have said, sprinkled the deadly venom of its perfidy not only upon the churches of the whole world, but also upon those of the islands. In the year 377 from the incarnation of the Lord, Gratian, the fortieth from Augustus, held the empire for six years after the death of Valens, although already long before this he had reigned together with his uncle Valens and with his brother Valentinian.
When he saw the state of the commonwealth afflicted and almost collapsed, he, out of the necessity of restoring the commonwealth, clothed at Sirmium with the purple the Spaniard Theodosius, and set him at the same time over the empire of the East and of Thrace. At which juncture Maximus, a man indeed energetic and upright, and worthy of the office of Augustus had he not risen through tyranny against the faith of his oath, was made emperor in Britain almost against his will by the army, and crossed over into Gaul. There, by a sudden onslaught, he terrified Gratian Augustus, who was meditating a crossing into Italy, and, having encompassed him with treachery, killed him; and he drove his brother Valentinian Augustus out of Italy.
Valentinian, fleeing to the East, was received by Theodosius with fatherly affection, and presently even restored to his empire; the tyrant Maximus being shut in within the walls of Aquileia, captured, and slain by them. In the year 394 from the incarnation of the Lord, Arcadius, son of Theodosius, taking up the kingdom together with his brother Honorius, the forty-third from Augustus, held it for thirteen years. In whose times Pelagius the Briton scattered far and wide the poisons of his perfidy against the help of heavenly grace, using as his collaborator Julian of Campania, whom the unrestrained desire for the bishopric he had long since lost continually agitated;
To these men holy Augustine, as also the other orthodox fathers, replied with many thousands of catholic judgments, yet they were not able to correct their madness; but, what is more grievous, their madness, when rebuked, chose rather to grow greater by contradiction than to be cleansed by yielding to the truth. This Prosper the rhetorician beautifully suggests in heroic verses, when he says: A certain writer, whom devouring envy has long inflamed, is said to creep against Augustine. Who drove forth from the ground that wretched little snake, its head somehow covered in dark caverns, to lift itself up? Either the sea-girt Britons fed him with their own grain, or here his heart swells with Campanian herbage.
In the year 407 from the incarnation of the Lord, while Honorius Augustus, son of the younger Theodosius, held the empire, the forty-fourth in place from Augustus, two years before the breaking in upon Rome which was effected through Alaric king of the Goths—when the peoples of the Alans, Suevi, Vandals, and many others with them, having crushed the Franks and crossed the Rhine, raged throughout all Gaul—among the Britons Gratian, a townsman, was made tyrant and was slain. In his place Constantine, from the lowest rank of the soldiery, was chosen solely for the hope of his name, without any merit of worth; who, as soon as he had seized the empire, crossed over into Gaul. There, often mocked by the barbarians with uncertain treaties, he was a detriment rather to the commonwealth;