Gildas, the sixth-century controversialist, is in the twenty-first century as controversial as ever. Most disagreement comes from his unreliable account of Roman Britain; but questions on his origins, dates, education and theology still prompt dispute.Footnote 1 When so much is uncertain, hard evidence becomes vital. This paper hence discusses one particular crux, on his schooling. It occurs in an eleventh-century Vita Gildae by an unknown monk of Rhuys (near Vannes in south Brittany), who, after describing Gildas’s education by St Illtud at Llantwit Major, in the Vale of Glamorgan, gave this passage:

Lurking within the syrup of this is the tough nut of Iren. Nobody has known where it was, though this has not stopped some from thinking that they do. Hugh Williams, whose translation is given above, took it as ‘probably a form of the Irish Erenn’ and quoted evidence from Bede and later authors for British students in Ireland. But he was careful to point out that it is ‘extremely improbable, if not impossible’ that Gildas actually attended any Irish school of Latin. In his day such institutions did not exist.Footnote 2 The truth of this might seem obvious. Ireland, although she was to have her own ecclesiastical teachers, including those at Bangor from about ad 550, had no such instructors in about 500. The point is proved by lives of sixth-century Irish saints, which mention their coming to Britain to study, above all at the mysterious monastery of ‘Rosnat’ (which may have been Old Kea, in Cornwall). If, in the middle years of the sixth century, men and women left Ireland to study in British schools, it becomes even more unlikely that Gildas should have repaired to any Irish school when these budding Irish saints were not even born.Footnote 3

Despite this, Baring-Gould and Fisher stated that Gildas attended schools other than that of Illtud and (ignoring Williams’s caveat) declared that he ‘apparently went to Ireland, there to finish his monastic training’.Footnote 4 Sir John Lloyd was more judicious. He did not mention this passage on Gildas, yet commented that ‘genuine records’ of him ‘might be expected to make their appearance’ in the Rhuys life, even though the manuscripts used by seventeenth-century editors have vanished, so that modern scholars depend solely on printed texts.Footnote 5

The Irish claim recurs in James Kenney’s account of the Breton-Latin life. He noted that it relates how Gildas ‘was educated under St Iltud and, later, in Ireland’.Footnote 6 Assertions on Gildas’s schooling in Ireland are made again by present-day scholars. Michael Lapidge tells us that Gildas, after studying with St Illtud, ‘set off for Ireland so that he might seek the learning of other wise men “both in philosophy and in divine learning” ’. Professor Lapidge here cites the Rhuys life on ‘liberal arts and philosophy’, observing that some take Illtud as himself a rhetor, a teacher of declamation, as practised in Roman politics and law. But, he adds, ‘in fact the text itself gives the lie to any such interpretation; it is most unlikely that any traditional schools (teaching philosophy and rhetoric) were to be found in Ireland in the first half of the sixth century’, because Ireland ‘had never been part of the Roman empire’. And, becoming more emphatic, he maintains that the monk of Rhuys

Professor Ó Riain of Cork offers the statement on Gildas that: ‘In the light of the history of the reception of his writings, however, it must seem more likely that his education also lay in the hands of Irish masters, as is in fact claimed in his eleventh-century biography.’Footnote 8 There are two points here: the illogical notion that, because Gildas was widely read in Ireland, therefore he was educated in Ireland; and oblivion to what Hugh Williams and Michael Lapidge pointed out on schools of classical rhetoric in sixth-century Ireland: that there were none. We note again the use of ‘in fact’: a phrase used, perhaps, by those who feel ice thinning below them. Since then nothing radical seems to have been said on Gildas’s schooling. However, Richard Sharpe has some persuasive comments on where Gildas wrote. He opts for the ‘area of towns and villas that includes Cirencester, Gloucester, and Bath’, though he adds that Gildas ‘at the time of writing was not apparently a town-dweller’.Footnote 9 There are also some sensible remarks by Jonathan Wooding, who speaks up for the school of Illtud at Llantwit in Glamorgan, and explains how the Rhuys life confused it with the monastic settlement on Caldey Island, off Tenby in Pembrokeshire.Footnote 10

Whether Gildas’s studying in Ireland is regarded as ‘extremely improbable, if not impossible’ (Hugh Williams), ‘most unlikely’ (Michael Lapidge), or ‘fact’ (Pádraig Ó Riain), what is strange is that anyone should take Iren to mean Ireland. The referee of this paper rightly points out that, according to his eighth-century Breton-Latin life, St Samson (who was a contemporary of Gildas) went to Ireland. He did so after having been an abbot in Dyfed, however; he did not go there for his education, and the Breton writer was perfectly capable of calling the place Hibernia in describing a later (and legendary) meeting of Gildas and St Bridget of Kildare. Why should he use Iren, when Hibernia was to hand?

If Iren is not Ireland, we may look for it elsewhere. The form is reasonably taken as Celtic, and specifically as Brittonic. Do we know of any place known for its schools, and at no great distance from south Wales, that might make sense of this obscure, corrupt toponym? It seems we do, and, though it needs drastic emendation, the case appears coherent and even compelling. If we seek about for a Celtic form resembling Iren, with vowel+r+vowel+n, we find one candidate, in the name of Cirencester or (in British-Latin) Corinium. The claims of Cirencester are, in principle, strong. It was the second city of Roman Britain; it must have gained in importance for the Britons once London fell to the English; it retained its significance in Anglo-Saxon politics and Welsh tradition; and it was no great distance from Llantwit, Glamorgan.

Yet how might Corinium give Iren in the Breton-Latin text? There are two stages here: the fate of Corinium in English and Welsh, and the fate of the Welsh form at the hands of uncomprehending scribes. First, Corinium. In Brittonic it would lose its final syllable in the fifth or early sixth century; thereafter internal i-affection in the seventh century would give (unattested) Old Welsh Cerin. Old English Ciren was reached probably by a different route, via (unrecorded) Primitive Old English Curin and then Cyrin.Footnote 11 If this hypothesis is correct, Old Welsh Cerin of the seventh century or later will lie behind Iren in the Rhuys life.

The case is strengthened by what scribes actually made of postulated Old Welsh Cerin. Asser’s life of King Alfred (written in 893) calls the place Cair Ceri; the fiery Welsh poem Armes Prydein (‘The Prophecy of Britain’, written in late 940, following West Saxon capitulation at Leicester) calls it Kaer Geri.Footnote 12 Since ceri is Welsh for ‘service tree’, a link with Corinium has been doubted.Footnote 13 But it seems folk etymology has been at work here, cerin in itself being meaningless. So much appears confirmed by a list of the twenty-eight cities of Britain found with the ninth-century Historia Brittonum. One of these variously appears as Kaer Lirion, Lerion or Lergum, and was formerly taken as Leicester.Footnote 14 This ‘Lerion’ is perhaps an error for Cerin. Despite its importance, Cirencester does not otherwise figure in this list of cities. If so, Cerin may have been corrupted to Lerion or Lirion under the influence of Old Welsh Cair Legion (‘City of Legions’, like Chester and Caerleon, both called Caerllion in Modern Welsh). Emendation to Cair Cerin of ‘unintelligible and unidentified’ Cair Lerion implies that Iren may result from similar misunderstanding. However, it can have nothing to do with the River Lerryn in Cornwall, where association of the two is merely a bad guess.Footnote 15

Ceri, Lerion and Lirion can thus all be derived from unattested Old Welsh Cerin, which would be the natural development of British Corinium. So, too, may Iren in the Rhuys life. Its loss of initial and vowel metathesis are both features known to textual scholars. The Ravenna Cosmography, that sink of scribal corruption, has examples of each. Examples of the first include ‘Bannio’ for Gobannium (‘smithies’), now Abergavenny, Wales, and ‘Ravonia’ for Bravoniacum (‘place of quern-stones’), now Kirkby Thore, Cumbria. The second is illustrated by Cirencester itself, where the Ravenna text has ‘Cironium’ for Corinium.Footnote 16 In the light of that, Iren for Cerin is far from impossible, though one notes that, even so, the consonants r and n retain their form and position. However, one may observe that the Old Welsh name behind it could not be earlier than the seventh century, when Corin became Cerin by internal i-affection. It cannot be as old as Arecluta, figuring in the Breton life as where Gildas was born (and often identified as Clydeside, Scotland). Although we shall return to Arecluta, it may here be stated that the retention in it of unstressed e proves the form to be no later than the sixth century, and thus of Gildas’s own time.

If Iren represents a corrupt but recognizable form of Old Welsh Cerin, does this suit the history of Cirencester in the early sixth century? It seems it does. Cirencester was important. It has been described as Roman Britain’s ‘second largest city’, almost certainly ‘the seat of the governor of a province’, the ‘centre of the richest area of villa estates’, and possessing splendid public and private buildings.Footnote 17 Charles Thomas thinks, following John Mann, that Cirencester (as probable capital of Britannia Prima, Wales and the West) had a bishop in the fourth century, whose representatives attended the Council of Arles in 314 together with the bishops of York, London and Lincoln.Footnote 18 Situated in one of the wealthiest parts of Roman Britain, a centre of communications and seat of government, Cirencester was exactly where one would expect to find a school of classical rhetoric and declamation. Yet it may be asked if such schools were likely to survive as late as the sixth century. At this point we seek help from archaeologists, whose evidence is mixed but supportive. On the one hand, we know that the forum was maintained into the fifth century, even when coins were no longer used. An unburied body in a street’s side-ditch suggests some breakdown of civic life, but we cannot tell whether this might relate to the plague of 443 or that of a century later, or to some other cause altogether.Footnote 19 Gildas’s own words on the heroic Ambrosius Aurelianus and his grandsons have been taken as referring to fifth- and sixth-century political authority in Cirencester, captured and thought worth capturing by the English in 577.Footnote 20 As for sixth-century artefacts found at or near Cirencester, they may have belonged to Germanic mercenaries, or they may not be Germanic at all.Footnote 21 In any case, nobody maintains that Cirencester was a ghost town in the early sixth century.

If Iren in the Rhuys life of Gildas can be taken as a corrupt but restorable form of Cerin, or Cirencester, with the implication that Gildas there gained his mastery of Latin oratory, we may turn upside down Professor Lapidge’s comment that, as regards Gildas’s studying philosophy and rhetoric in the manner of the Romans, ‘the text itself gives the lie to any such interpretation’. It seems, rather, that the luckless monk of Rhuys was struggling to tell the truth. He was passing on genuine information in saying that Gildas was trained by a traditional Roman rhetor; his ‘vague words’ about philosophy and the liberal arts were hence no ‘empty topos’, but were literally true. Thanks to information happily preserved by his hagiographer, we have reason to think that Gildas’s education followed the palmiest traditions of the Roman schools of rhetoric and law, and that he got it in Cirencester. It was there that ambitious young Britons of his day still trod in the steps of Cicero.

If this can be accepted, it turns a powerful light on much written about Gildas. Leslie Alcock dismissed the Latin lives of Gildas as ‘so late in date as to be of little historical value’.Footnote 22 Thomas O’Sullivan agrees, declaring that ‘the vitae are unlikely to tell us much that is of historical value about Gildas’.Footnote 23 Both comments must appear somewhat flimsy compared with the wiser remarks of Sir John Lloyd quoted above. Weightier, too, is a comment of Professor Charles-Edwards: that since the purpose of the education received by Gildas was ‘to staff the Roman bureaucracy, some remnants of the Roman governmental organization of Britain must have survived into the sixth century. If true, this is a conclusion of major historical importance; it seems to be supported by Gildas’s familiarity with Late Roman political vocabulary.’Footnote 24 One would like to think that this ‘conclusion of major historical importance’ is further magnified by the implication that Gildas studied at Cirencester. It would also augment, in an unexpected way, the Roman factor in a phrase of François Kerlouégan: that Gildas ‘a reçu son éducation dans le Sud-est du Pays de Galles actuel, région qui avait été fortement romanisée’.Footnote 25 In the remark that ‘Gildas received somewhere, from someone, a training which was in line with that given by the grammatici and rhetores of the Roman world’, with hyperbaton, antithesis, alliteration and ‘startling imagery’ as weapons in his ‘rhetorical armoury’, we could for ‘somewhere’ substitute ‘Cirencester’.Footnote 26 It would accord as well with recent archaeological evidence for fifth- and sixth-century occupation of the city.Footnote 27 But perhaps still more to the point are the views of Richard Reece, an authority on Roman Cirencester, who states that current knowledge of the town’s archaeology does nothing either to support or to rule out the present hypothesis, adding that ‘if the suggestion is correct, then it is even more interesting because of the total lack of archaeological evidence’.Footnote 28 Archaeology does not here underline philology. Instead, it is philology that seemingly fills a gap in the archaeological record.

We may close with writers of this century. Nick Higham, in disputing a comment of John Morris, regards as an ‘assertion’ the ‘assumption’ that the Rhuys vita ‘was copied from a text contemporary with Gildas’s life. On this bold assumption depends either or both a birthplace in Strathclyde and an education at the feet of St Illtud in southern Wales.’Footnote 29 More carefully, Professor Dumville writes of ‘a famous article published in 1984’ in which Michael Lapidge ‘identified Gildas as the beneficiary of a conventional advanced Roman education, designed to prepare its recipients for public life. As the century 450–550 advanced, such an education was harder to obtain, since its raison d’être was disappearing as a result of changes in governance.’ If Gildas lived from the 490s to 570, publishing De Excidio Britanniae around 540, ‘we might deduce that in the first two decades of the sixth century, a hundred years after the presumed end of Imperial rule in Britain, a society and governmental structure still existed which was based closely on the Roman heritage’.Footnote 30

There are two points here. The first concerns Arecluta regio, which the Breton life gives as the birthplace of Gildas. That this is an authentic form of the sixth century is neither an ‘assertion’ (bold or otherwise) nor an ‘assumption’, but a deduction from the laws of Celtic philology (the form would pre-date syncope of unstressed internal syllables in the later sixth century, which would leave Arglud in Modern Welsh).Footnote 31 The second point is the actual whereabouts of Arecluta regio. In the last thirty years such scholars as E A Thompson and David Dumville have doubted the traditional identification with Strathclyde; improbable in itself, it is the more so given Gildas’s ignorance of the Picts and the history of the Roman Walls. The present writer has thus proposed that Arecluta was, rather, Arclid, near Sandbach in Cheshire.Footnote 32 If Gildas was brought up near Chester, it will explain his familiarity with Maelgwn, ruler of Gwynedd, and his knowledge of north Welsh geography, including Dinarth, stronghold of Maelgwn’s neighbour, Cuneglasus. Dinarth can be seen to this day on a hill west of Colwyn Bay; and Gildas knew it well enough to translate its name (‘bear’s den’) as receptaculum ursi.Footnote 33 It is reasonable to conclude that the Rhuys monk had ancient materials, but misunderstood them. If we can correct him on Arecluta (of the sixth century), we may do the same on Iren (of the seventh century or later). It is true that, doubts since the 1970s notwithstanding, reference books still maintain that Gildas was born near Glasgow.Footnote 34 So, too, do archaeological reports.Footnote 35 Yet reflection must suggest that it is not so.

On the whole matter, an antiquarian flourish of the seventeenth century provides us with a coda. Thomas Fuller (1608–61), cleric, royal chaplain and master of intriguing phrases, claimed in his Church History that Cricklade and Lechlade in Wiltshire were originally Greek-lade and Latin-lade, from ancient academies ‘famous both for eloquence and learning’. The reaction of John Aubrey (1626–97) to this etymology was dusty. ‘But whereas writers swallow down the old story that this place takes its name from certain Greek philosophers, who, they say, began here an university, it is a fond [= foolish] opinion.’Footnote 36 Nevertheless, if this paper’s conclusions are right, there really was an academy ‘famous both for eloquence and learning’ eight miles north west of Cricklade, at Cirencester: its sole monument the consummate Latinity of De Excidio Britanniae by Gildas, its only known pupil.