British and Welsh Christianity

Britain had been Christian under Roman rule, and when the province fell away and Anglo-Saxon settlers took the east, that church did not vanish — it survived in the west: in Wales, Cornwall, the north-west, and across the sea in Brittany, which British emigrants gave its name. Its own record is thin and largely furious. Gildas, writing around the 540s, delivered a book-length denunciation of British kings and clergy for the sins he believed had brought the Saxon catastrophe on them. Its life ran through monastic schools and founder-saints whose names still sit on Welsh parishes — David, Illtud, Teilo, Cadoc — and through inscribed memorial stones that are among the few hard traces of the period. When Augustine of Canterbury arrived from Rome and met British bishops around 603, they declined to accept his authority or to join his mission to the Saxons who had displaced them; they were not at the synod of Whitby in 664 either. The Welsh church came round to the Roman dating of Easter on its own, around 768.