But that battle, according to Nennius, was the one of all the twelve recorded by him in which Arthur gave the most signal evidence of his individual prowess; before his single onset “nine hundred and sixty men” fell. Now Gildas, an unimpeachable sixth century authority, makes no reference whatever to Arthur’s achievements in this, or any other, encounter with the Saxons. This silence, so far as it affects the historicity of Arthur, is less disturbing than it appears to be, when account is taken of the character and motive of Gildas’s work as a whole. The _De Excidio_ is not so much a history as a homily. Gildas belonged to a “Romanist” party, and what the more or less unorganised Britons sought to do for themselves, and their independence, was to him but a decline upon savagery and selfish native pride. It did not suit his purpose to celebrate the name and virtues of any British prince, and it is significant that, apart from Ambrosius,--by birth, apparently, no less than by his training and sympathies, a thorough-going “Roman,”--he does not mention by name a single British chieftain except as a target for his invective. In the _mirabilia_ attached to Nennius’s _History_ Arthur is a mythical figure as remote and as elusive as he is in early Welsh poetry and triadic lore. In them, as in the earliest Welsh poems, he is pre-eminently Arthur “the warrior,” but he is known besides as the owner of a famous hound, and as the father of a son whose name had been given to one of the natural features of the country. The first “marvel,” in connection with which Arthur’s name occurs, is in the region of Buelt, or Builth. Here, we are told, is a mound of stones, on the top of which is one stone bearing the mark of a dog’s foot. This mark was made by Cabal, “the dog of Arthur the warrior” (_Arthuri militis_), when he was hunting “the boar Troit” (_porcum Troit_). The pile of stones was put together by Arthur, and is called Carn, or the Cairn of, Cabal. The marvel lay in the fact that, though men might come and carry away the top stone “for the space of a day and a night,” the stone was invariably found in its proper place the next day. Another marvel, described in immediate succession, belongs to “the region which is called Ercing,” or Archenfield. There may be found a tomb close by a spring which is called the Source of the Amir,--_juxta fontem qui cognominatur Licat Amir_, after the name of the man who was buried there. This Amir was the son of “Arthur the warrior,” who himself killed, and buried him, on that spot. The “marvellous” property of this tomb was that, when men came to measure it, at various times, they never found it of the same size; “and,” the writer ingenuously adds, “I have made proof of this by myself” (_et ego solus probavi_). These two _miracula_, as he calls them, are all that Nennius, or his authority, has to tell us of the mythical, as distinguished from the historical, Arthur.