Gildas

The sword gleamed, and the flames crackled around them on every side.  Miserable to behold, in the middle of the streets lay the tops of tall towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid clots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press; and with no chance of being buried, save in the ruins of the houses, or in the ravening bellies of wild beasts and birds.

This was written by a monk called Gildas Sapiens in the 6th century AD. It is part of a longer piece of writing called ‘On the Ruin of Britain’.

Glossary:
Behold — see
Coagulated— stuck together
Ravening— searching with greedy hunger

I love the description in this piece of writing. Gildas uses lots of descriptive verbs, for example ‘gleamed’. They really add to the atmosphere. 

Gildas wrote this in the 6th century. This was over a hundred years after the Roman army left Britain. It is a period of British history that is often called the Dark Ages. It is a time when new groups of people invaded Britain and sometimes stayed as well.

You can find out more about two of these groups on the BBC website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/vikings/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/anglosaxons/

As you look at these pages you could think about these questions:

When did they live?
When did they invade?
Where were they from?
What did they do here?