The study is still unwritten which will range widely over the various elements in medieval historical writing and explore properly the basic questions of purpose and design. In the medieval context, it is wrong to look at the chronicles and annals written in one country alone: the significance of the historical activity, from the grandest to the most localised, within one area can only be assessed in a wider study. The number of people involved in historical writing, their degree of learning, their width of horizon, their attitude towards their sources, their awareness of the passage of time, basic issues such as these cannot be discussed adequately on English or French, much less Welsh, materials alone. My purpose, however, in this chapter is not to attempt this major study, but to bring together elementary suggestions for some of the ways in which the narrative sources for Welsh history may eventually be fitted into this European scene. At the same time, the practical purpose of this series has dominated the presentation, so that anyone unfamiliar with the present state of scholarship may have some straightforward introduction to the texts themselves and to appraisals of them.

The creation of Wales and the evidences for it are very much corollaries of the adventus Saxonum. As England was born, so was Wales, not quite by default, but rather by remainder. The slow end of Roman Britain and the gradual conquest of much of the island by Germanic tribes is attested in four principal early literary sources, which are essential also for the study of early Wales.