their weapons against their confederates.’[158] Bede then takes from Gildas the account of the ravages by the Saxons, and their victory by Ambrosius Aurelianus, down to the mention of the siege of ‘Mons Badonicus,’ which he places forty-four years after the arrival of the Saxons, or in the year 492. He then narrates the breaking out of the Pelagian heresy, the coming of Germanus and Lupus to Britain, the war upon the Britons by the Saxons and the Picts, which he connects with the league he had just mentioned as having been entered into between them, and the victory under the influence of Germanus, usually called the Allelujatic victory. This part of his narrative he takes from the life of Germanus, written within forty years of his death by Constantius of Lyons.[159] Such is the form into which Bede has reduced this legendary history. Let us now see how far, by the aid of contemporary notices, we can extract the few really historical facts imbedded in it. Though Gildas tells us very distinctly that the Barbarians who assailed the Roman province after Maximus, who usurped the Empire, had departed with the Roman army, and the British youth consisted solely of the two nations of the Picts and Scots, yet certain it is that bodies of Saxons were joined with them in their incursions. For the fact that they formed one of the barbarian tribes who burst into the province in 360 we have the united testimony of Ammianus and Claudian, and the latter authority is equally clear that they formed one of the bands who invaded the province after Maximus and were driven back by Stilicho. Ammianus tells us that in 368 the Count of the Maritime Tract was slain, and in the Notitia Imperii we find the same functionary termed Count of the Saxon Shore. In the same document this designation of the Saxon Shore is also applied to the country about Grannona in Gaul,[160] where the Saxons had established regular settlements. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the name of the Saxon Shore was given to the coast extending from the Wash on the north to near Portsmouth in the south, not because it was exposed to the ravages of the Saxons, but because they had likewise made settlements there.[161] We may well believe, then, that between the year 368 and the date of the Notitia, about the beginning of the fifth century, the Saxons who had been assailing the province from the east had effected a settlement on the shores of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Kent; and this accords with the two earliest dates given in Nennius, 374 and 392. The statement by Gildas that the Saxons came on the invitation of a proud tyrant and leader of the Britons, to whom, in the succeeding century, the name of Guorthegirn is given, and who is associated with the arrival of the Saxons at these early dates, seems to find its counterpart in the invitation given to the Barbarians to invade Gaul and Britain by Gerontius, a Count of Britain in the service of Constantine, in the year