Although the monk Gildas wrote some five hundred years after Tacitus, and more than six hundred years after Cæsar, the same mistake is still made about the size of Britain, which the ancients had always over-estimated.
Account
by Gildas,
about
A. D. 560.
The island of Britain, situated on almost the utmost border of the earth, towards the south and west, and poised in the divine balance, so to speak, which supports the whole world, stretches out from the southwest towards the north pole, and is eight hundred miles long and two hundred broad, except where the headlands of sundry promontories stretch farther into the sea. It is surrounded by the ocean, which forms winding bays, and is strongly defended by this ample, and, if I may so call it, impassable barrier, save on the south side, where the narrow sea affords a passage to Belgic Gaul.