“…if the Lord did not spare a people, peculiar out of all the nations, the royal seed and holy nation… when they swerved from the right path, what will he do to such blackness as we have in this age? An age this to which has been added, besides those impious and monstrous sins which it commits in common with all the iniquitous ones of the world, that thing which is as if inborn with it, an irremovable and inextricable weight of unwisdom and fickleness”.
(St Gildas,  ‘ Ruin of Britain’, 6th century)