consciousness. It would be difficult to find a story more clear and simple in its main outlines than the growth of modern Wales from its earliest conscious beginnings in the fifth and sixth centuries, where we discern a number of small patriotic communities gradually cohering as they become more and more conscious of their common life. But when for all this there is substituted a golden age wherein Britannia is converted into the Isle of Britain and the Britons masters of the same from end to end ; where wicked Vortigern calls in the heathen from Germany, who drive the Britons pell-mell from the eastern districts of England into the midlands, and out of the midlands into Wales, there to relapse into barbarism ; where every step in the Cymric advance from age to age, marked by such names as Cadwallon, Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, and the post-Norman princes, is regarded as a convulsive effort of a dying people to regain some of the glory of the past—it can readily be understood how the history of Wales has suffered and how its national vigour has been enfeebled.
After the death of Arthur, who is commonly reputed to have perished in a civil war, we hear of no other military leader whom we may regard as the gwledig of Britannia in power as well as in title (that is, allowing that Arthur did really bear the title). Aurelius Caninus, one of the five kings addressed by Gildas, is also known as Cynan Wledig,[1] so that it is possible that he was regarded as one of Arthur's successors. One gathers from the Epistola that he ruled east of Devon in the
- ↑ Hist. Reg. Brit. XI. c. 5 ; Oxford Brut, 233.
