The other battle, of those mentioned by Nennius, that looms large in subsequent Arthurian story is that of _Mons Badonis_, or Badon Hill. This battle is of exceptional interest because it is possible to assign to it an approximately certain date. The record in the _Annales Cambriæ_ of the year 516 as its precise date is of less importance than the fact that Gildas, the celebrated sixth century scribe, expressly refers to the battle as having been fought in his natal year. In his _De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniæ_, amid much vehement denunciation of the British people and their degenerate leaders, Gildas gives a short sketch of the history of Britain down to his own time. Coming to the Saxon invasions, he states that they were first successfully checked under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the last of the Romans, “a modest man, who alone of all his race chanced to survive the shocks” of that troubled time. After this, he continues, the struggle went on with varying fortune “until the year of the siege of Badon Hill, and of almost the last great slaughter inflicted upon the rascally crew. And this commences (a fact I know) as the forty-fourth year, with one month now elapsed; it is also the year of my birth.”[29] So far as the date goes, this seems to mean that the year of the battle of Badon and of Gildas’s own birth was the forty-fourth from that in which he wrote. As the _De Excidio_ must have been written before the death of Maelgwn Gwynedd--the Maglocunus against whom Gildas directs some of his choicest invective--in or about the year 547, the date of the fight at Badon Hill cannot well have been later than 504. At any rate, Gildas’s testimony is sufficient warrant that some time during the first decade of the sixth century a battle was fought against the Saxons at a place called Badon Hill, in which the Britons were the victors.