The years are counted from the commencement of the Annals, which, from circumstances independent of the text, is fixed A.D. 444. Hence, lvii and clvii, coincide with A.D. 501, and A.D. 601, respectively. It is not until the last quarter of the tenth century that the entries notably improve in fulness and frequency; during which period the table was probably composed,--the earlier dates being put down not because they were of either local or general importance, but because they were known to the writer. Such, at least, is the inference from the style. Lives of Saints may have furnished them all. They agree more or less with the Irish Annals, and, probably, are to a great extent taken from the same sources. The _Annales Cambrenses_ contain few or no facts directly bearing upon the ethnology of Great Britain, except so far as the existence of a literary composition, of a given antiquity, is the measure of the civilization of the country to which it belongs. One of its entries, however, has an indirect bearing. The value of Gildas depends upon the time at which he wrote. We have already seen that a small piece of autobiography in his history tells us that he was born in the year of the _Bellum Badonicum_. Now the date of this is got from the Annales Cambrenses, A.D. 516. There is no reason to believe it other than accurate. It were well if such a composition as the _Annales Cambriæ_ were called (what it really is) a list of dates; since the word _chronicle_ has a dangerous tendency to engender a very uncritical laxity of thought. It continually gets mistaken for a _register_; yet the two sorts of composition are wholly different. That the habit of making cotemporaneous entries of events as they happen, just as incumbents of parishes, each in his order of succession, enter the births, deaths, and marriages of their parishioners, should exist in such institutions as religious monasteries or civil guild-halls, is by no means unlikely. But, then, on the other hand, there is an equal likelihood of nothing of the sort being attempted. Hence, when a work reaches posterity in the shape of a chronicle or annals, its antiquity and value must be judged on its own merits, rather than according to any preconceived opinions.