of earth in which it was visible that the ground was red with blood preserved from the martyr's death while the persecutor was pale. When all these things were revealed and made known a huge crowd of people was brought to god with the help of our Lord Jesus Christ to whom is honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen. It is possible to deduce from the interpolated passage that the name of the martyr was unknown before being revealed to Germanus, either in a vision he had of the martyr during his sea journey or in the dream he had in the basilica. It is also possible to deduce that it was simply the acta, or 'story of the martyrdom', of an already well known figure that was revealed to Germanus. The acta were then written down in tituli (translated above as 'placards'): that is possibly engraved in the walls of a church with illustrations. This might have been either in a church in Auxerre (Germanus's home town in Gaul) as argued by Sharpe and Wood, or in Britain. If the latter is the case, by being on public display, they might have served to give a definitive version of the saint's martyrdom, which could not be contradicted or reinterpreted (for instance by the addition of 'Pelagian' themes) In any case, it has been argued by Sharpe and Wood that these acta written down in tituli were actually the original, very simple and short, first version of the Passio Albani that has come down in the 'E' and later versions That is very possible but, of course, quite unprovable, but it seems clear that the Passio originates with the circle of Germanus at Auxerre. As time went on, more and more details and wondrous events were added to the account its most detailed version in the 8th century, in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The location of the tomb of Saint Alban that Germanus visited is most often thought to have been Verulamium, now St Albans. That is on the basis of what is in fact the earliest mention of the martyr Alban in an indigenous British source, in the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae probably written in the second quarter of the fifth century, by the British author Gildas. As part of his brief historical account he describes the persecution of Christians in Britain,which he