The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through
Wales
by Geraldus Cambrensis
Introduction
by W. Llewelyn Williams
Gerald the Welshman - Giraldus Cambrensis - was born,
probably in 1147, at Manorbier Castle in the county of
Pembroke. His father was a Norman noble, William de Barri,
who took his name from the little island of Barry off the
coast of Glamorgan. His mother, Angharad, was the daughter
of Gerald de Windsor1
by his wife, the famous Princess Nesta, the "Helen of
Wales," and the daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr Mawr, the last
independent Prince of South Wales.
Gerald was therefore born to romance and adventure. He
was reared in the traditions of the House of Dinevor. He
heard the brilliant and pitiful stories of Rhys ap Tewdwr,
who, after having lost and won South Wales, died on the
stricken field fighting against the Normans, an old man of
over fourscore years; and of his gallant son, Prince Rhys,
who, after wrenching his patrimony from the invaders, died
of a broken heart a few months after his wife, the Princess
Gwenllian, had fallen in a skirmish at Kidwelly. No doubt he
heard, though he makes but sparing allusion to them, of the
loves and adventures of his grandmother, the Princess Nesta,
the daughter and sister of a prince, the wife of an
adventurer, the concubine of a king, and the paramour of
every daring lover - a Welshwoman whose passions embroiled
all Wales, and England too, in war, and the mother of heroes
- Fitz-Geralds, Fitz-Stephens, and Fitz-Henries, and others
- who, regardless of their mother's eccentricity in the
choice of their fathers, united like brothers in the most
adventurous undertaking of that age, the Conquest of
Ireland.
Though his mother was half Saxon and his father probably
fully Norman, Gerald, with a true instinct, described
himself as a "Welshman." His frank vanity, so naive as to be
void of offence, his easy acceptance of everything which
Providence had bestowed on him, his incorrigible belief that
all the world took as much interest in himself and all that
appealed to him as he did himself, the readiness with which
he adapted himself to all sorts of men and of circumstances,
his credulity in matters of faith and his shrewd common
sense in things of the world, his wit and lively fancy, his
eloquence of tongue and pen, his acute rather than accurate
observation, his scholarship elegant rather than profound,
are all characteristic of a certain lovable type of South
Walian. He was not blind to the defects of his countrymen
any more than to others of his contemporaries, but the Welsh
he chastised as one who loved them. His praise followed ever
close upon the heels of his criticism. There was none of the
rancour in his references to Wales which defaces his account
of contemporary Ireland. He was acquainted with Welsh,
though he does not seem to have preached it, and another
archdeacon acted as the interpreter of Archbishop Baldwin's
Crusade sermon in Anglesea. But he could appreciate the
charm of the Cynghanedd, the alliterative assonance which is
still the most distinctive feature of Welsh poetry. He
cannot conceal his sympathy with the imperishable
determination of his countrymen to keep alive the language
which is their differentia among the nations of the world.
It is manifest in the story which he relates at the end of
his "Description of Wales." Henry II. asked an old Welshman
of Pencader in Carmarthenshire if the Welsh could resist his
might. "This nation, O King," was the reply, "may often be
weakened and in great part destroyed by the power of
yourself and of others, but many a time, as it deserves, it
will rise triumphant. But never will it be destroyed by the
wrath of man, unless the wrath of God be added. Nor do I
think that any other nation than this of Wales, or any other
tongue, whatever may hereafter come to pass, shall on the
day of the great reckoning before the Most High Judge,
answer for this corner of the earth." Prone to discuss with
his "Britannic frankness" the faults of his countrymen, he
cannot bear that any one else should do so. In the
"Description of Wales" he breaks off in the middle of a most
unflattering passage concerning the character of the Welsh
people to lecture Gildas for having abused his own
countrymen. In the preface to his "Instruction of Princes,"
he makes a bitter reference to the prejudice of the English
Court against everything Welsh - "Can any good thing come
from Wales?" His fierce Welshmanship is perhaps responsible
for the unsympathetic treatment which he has usually
received at the hands of English historians. Even to one of
the writers of Dr. Traill's "Social England," Gerald was
little more than "a strong and passionate Welshman."
Sometimes it was his pleasure to pose as a citizen of the
world. He loved Paris, the centre of learning, where he
studied as a youth, and where he lectured in his early
manhood. He paid four long visits to Rome. He was Court
chaplain to Henry II. He accompanied the king on his
expeditions to France, and Prince John to Ireland. He
retired, when old age grew upon him, to the scholarly
seclusion of Lincoln, far from his native land. He was the
friend and companion of princes and kings, of scholars and
prelates everywhere in England, in France, and in Italy. And
yet there was no place in the world so dear to him as
Manorbier. Who can read his vivid description of the old
castle by the sea - its ramparts blown upon by the winds
that swept over the Irish Sea, its fishponds, its garden,
and its lofty nut trees - without feeling that here, after
all, was the home of Gerald de Barri? "As Demetia," he said
in his "Itinerary," "with its seven cantreds is the fairest
of all the lands of Wales, as Pembroke is the fairest part
of Demetia, and this spot the fairest of Pembroke, it
follows that Manorbier is the sweetest spot in Wales." He
has left us a charming account of his boyhood, playing with
his brothers on the sands, they building castles and he
cathedrals, he earning the title of "boy bishop" by
preaching while they engaged in boyish sport. On his last
recorded visit to Wales, a broken man, hunted like a
criminal by the king, and deserted by the ingrate canons of
St. David's, he retired for a brief respite from strife to
the sweet peace of Manorbier. It is not known where he died,
but it is permissible to hope that he breathed his last in
the old home which he never forgot or ceased to love.
He mentions that the Welsh loved high descent and carried
their pedigree about with them. In this respect also Gerald
was Welsh to the core. He is never more pleased than when he
alludes to his relationship with the Princes of Wales, or
the Geraldines, or Cadwallon ap Madoc of Powis. He hints,
not obscurely, that the real reason why he was passed over
for the Bishopric of St. David's in 1186 was that Henry II.
feared his natio et cognatio, his nation and his family. He
becomes almost dithyrambic in extolling the deeds of his
kinsmen in Ireland. "Who are they who penetrated into the
fastnesses of the enemy? The Geraldines. Who are they who
hold the country in submission? The Geraldines. Who are they
whom the foemen dread? The Geraldines. Who are they whom
envy would disparage? The Geraldines. Yet fight on, my
gallant kinsmen,
"Felices facti si quid mea carmina possuit."
Gerald was satisfied, not only with
his birthplace and lineage, but with everything that was
his. He makes complacent references to his good looks, which
he had inherited from Princess Nesta. "Is it possible so
fair a youth can die?" asked Bishop, afterwards Archbishop,
Baldwin, when he saw him in his student days.2
Even in his letters to Pope Innocent he could not refrain
from repeating a compliment paid to him on his good looks by
Matilda of St. Valery, the wife of his neighbour at Brecon,
William de Braose. He praises his own unparalleled
generosity in entertaining the poor, the doctors, and the
townsfolk of Oxford to banquets on three successive days
when he read his "Topography of Ireland" before that
university. As for his learning he records that when his
tutors at Paris wished to point out a model scholar they
mentioned Giraldus Cambrensis. He is confident that though
his works, being all written in Latin, have not attained any
great contemporary popularity, they will make his name and
fame secure for ever. The most precious gift he could give
to Pope Innocent III., when he was anxious to win his
favour, was six volumes of his own works; and when good old
Archbishop Baldwin came to preach the Crusade in Wales,
Gerald could think of no better present to help beguile the
tedium of the journey than his own "Topography of Ireland."
He is equally pleased with his own eloquence. When the
archbishop had preached, with no effect, for an hour, and
exclaimed what a hardhearted people it was, Gerald moved
them almost instantly to tears. He records also that John
Spang, the Lord Rhys's fool, said to his master at Cardigan,
after Gerald had been preaching the Crusade, "You owe a
great debt, O Rhys, to your kinsman, the archdeacon, who has
taken a hundred or so of your men to serve the Lord; for if
he had only spoken in Welsh, you would not have had a soul
left." His works are full of appreciations of Gerald's
reforming zeal, his administrative energy, his
unostentatious and scholarly life.
Professor Freeman in his "Norman
Conquest" described Gerald as "the father of comparative
philology," and in the preface to his edition of the last
volume of Gerald's works in the Rolls Series, he calls him
"one of the most learned men of a learned age," "the
universal scholar." His range of subjects is indeed
marvellous even for an age when to be a "universal scholar"
was not so hopeless of attainment as it has since become.
Professor Brewer, his earliest editor in the Rolls Series,
is struck by the same characteristic. "Geography, history,
ethics, divinity, canon law, biography, natural history,
epistolary correspondence, and poetry employed his pen by
turns, and in all these departments of literature he has
left memorials of his ability." Without being Ciceronian,
his Latin was far better than that of his contemporaries. He
was steeped in the classics, and he had, as Professor
Freeman remarks, "mastered more languages than most men of
his time, and had looked at them with an approach to a
scientific view which still fewer men of his time shared
with him." He quotes Welsh, English, Irish, French, German,
Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, and with four or five of these
languages at least he had an intimate, scholarly
acquaintance. His judgment of men and things may not always
have been sound, but he was a shrewd observer of
contemporary events. "The cleverest critic of the life of
his time" is the verdict of Mr. Reginald Poole.3
He changed his opinions often: he was never ashamed of being
inconsistent. In early life he was, perhaps naturally, an
admirer of the Angevin dynasty; he lived to draw the most
terrible picture extant of their lives and characters.
During his lifetime he never ceased to inveigh against
Archbishop Hubert Walter; after his death he repented and
recanted. His invective was sometimes coarse, and his abuse
was always virulent. He was not over-scrupulous in his
methods of controversy; but no one can rise from a reading
of his works without a feeling of liking for the vivacious,
cultured, impulsive, humorous, irrepressible Welshman.
Certainly no Welshman can regard the man who wrote so
lovingly of his native land, and who championed her cause so
valiantly, except with real gratitude and affection.
But though it is as a writer of books that Gerald has
become famous, he was a man of action, who would have left,
had Fate been kinder, an enduring mark on the history of his
own time, and would certainly have changed the whole current
of Welsh religious life. As a descendant of the Welsh
princes, he took himself seriously as a Welsh patriot.
Destined almost from his cradle, both by the bent of his
mind and the inclination of his father, to don "the habit of
religion," he could not join Prince Rhys or Prince Llewelyn
in their struggle for the political independence of Wales.
His ambition was to become Bishop of St. David's, and then
to restore the Welsh Church to her old position of
independence of the metropolitan authority of Canterbury. He
detested the practice of promoting Normans to Welsh sees,
and of excluding Welshmen from high positions in their own
country. "Because I am a Welshman, am I to be debarred from
all preferment in Wales?" he indignantly writes to the Pope.
Circumstances at first seemed to favour his ambition. His
uncle, David Fitz-Gerald, sat in the seat of St. David's.
When the young scholar returned from Paris in 1172, he found
the path of promotion easy. After the manner of that age -
which Gerald lived to denounce - he soon became a pluralist.
He held the livings of Llanwnda, Tenby, and Angle, and
afterwards the prebend of Mathry, in Pembrokeshire, and the
living of Chesterton in Oxfordshire. He was also prebendary
of Hereford, canon of St. David's, and in 1175, when only
twenty-eight years of age, he became Archdeacon of Brecon.
In the following year Bishop David died, and Gerald,
together with the other archdeacons of the diocese, was
nominated by the chapter for the king's choice. But the
chapter had been premature, urged, no doubt, by the
impetuous young Archdeacon of Brecon. They had not waited
for the king's consent to the nomination. The king saw that
his settled policy in Wales would be overturned if Gerald
became Bishop of St. David's. Gerald's cousin, the Lord
Rhys, had been appointed the king's justiciar in South
Wales. The power of the Lord Marches was to be kept in check
by a quasi-alliance between the Welsh prince and his
over-lord. The election of Gerald to the greatest see in
Wales would upset the balance of power. David Fitz- Gerald,
good easy man (vir sua sorte contentus is Gerald's
description of him), the king could tolerate, but he could
not contemplate without uneasiness the combination of
spiritual and political power in South Wales in the hands of
two able, ambitious, and energetic kinsmen, such as he knew
Gerald and the Lord Rhys to be. Gerald had made no secret of
his admiration for the martyred St. Thomas e Becket. He
fashioned himself upon him as Becket did on Anselm. The part
which Becket played in England he would like to play in
Wales. But the sovereign who had destroyed Becket was not to
be frightened by the canons of St. David's and the
Archdeacon of Brecon. He summoned the chapter to
Westminster, and compelled them in his presence to elect
Peter de Leia, the Prior of Wenlock, who erected for himself
an imperishable monument in the noble cathedral which looks
as if it had sprung up from the rocks which guard the city
of Dewi Sant from the inrush of the western sea.
It is needless to recount the many
activities in which Gerald engaged during the next
twenty-two years. They have been recounted with humorous and
affectionate appreciation by Dr. Henry Owen in his monograph
on "Gerald the Welshman," a little masterpiece of biography
which deserves to be better known.4
In 1183 Gerald was employed by the astute king to settle
terms between him and the rebellious Lord Rhys. Nominally as
a reward for his successful diplomacy, but probably in order
to keep so dangerous a character away from the turbulent
land of Wales, Gerald was in the following year made a Court
chaplain. In 1185 he was commissioned by the king to
accompany Prince John, then a lad of eighteen, who had
lately been created "Lord of Ireland," to the city of
Dublin. There he abode for two years, collecting materials
for his two first books, the "Topography" and the "Conquest
of Ireland." In 1188 he accompanied Archbishop Baldwin
through Wales to preach the Third Crusade - not the first or
the last inconsistency of which the champion of the
independence of the Welsh Church was guilty. His "Itinerary
through Wales" is the record of the expedition. King Richard
offered him the Bishopric of Bangor, and John, in his
brother's absence, offered him that of Llandaff. But his
heart was set on St. David's. In 1198 his great chance came
to him. At last, after twenty-two years of misrule, Peter de
Leia was dead, and Gerald seemed certain of attaining his
heart's desire. Once again the chapter nominated Gerald;
once more the royal authority was exerted, this time by
Archbishop Hubert, the justiciar in the king's absence, to
defeat the ambitious Welshman. The chapter decided to send a
deputation to King Richard in Normandy. The deputation
arrived at Chinon to find Coeur-de-Lion dead; but John was
anxious to make friends everywhere, in order to secure
himself on his uncertain throne. He received the deputation
graciously, he spoke in praise of Gerald, and he agreed to
accept the nomination. But after his return to England John
changed his mind. He found that no danger threatened him in
his island kingdom, and he saw the wisdom of the justiciar's
policy. Gerald hurried to see him, but John point blank
refused publicly to ratify his consent to the nomination
which he had already given in private. Then commenced the
historic fight for St. David's which, in view of the still
active "Church question" in Wales, is even now invested with
a living interest and significance. Gerald contended that
the Welsh Church was independent of Canterbury, and that it
was only recently, since the Norman Conquest, that she had
been deprived of her freedom. His opponents relied on
political, rather than historical, considerations to defeat
this bold claim. King Henry, when a deputation from the
chapter in 1175 appeared before the great council in London
and had urged the metropolitan claims of St. David's upon
the Cardinal Legate, exclaimed that he had no intention of
giving this head to rebellion in Wales. Archbishop Hubert,
more of a statesman than an ecclesiastic, based his
opposition on similar grounds. He explained his reasons
bluntly to the Pope. "Unless the barbarity of this fierce
and lawless people can be restrained by ecclesiastical
censures through the see of Canterbury, to which province
they are subject by law, they will be for ever rising in
arms against the king, to the disquiet of the whole realm of
England." Gerald's answer to this was complete, except from
the point of view of political expediency. "What can be more
unjust than that this people of ancient faith, because they
answer force by force in defence of their lives, their
lands, and their liberties, should be forthwith separated
from the body corporate of Christendom, and delivered over
to Satan?"
The story of the long fight between Gerald on the one
hand and the whole forces of secular and ecclesiastical
authority on the other cannot be told here. Three times did
he visit Rome to prosecute his appeal - alone against the
world. He had to journey through districts disturbed by
wars, infested with the king's men or the king's enemies,
all of whom regarded Gerald with hostility. He was taken and
thrown into prison as King John's subject in one town, he
was detained by importunate creditors in another, and at
Rome he was betrayed by a countryman whom he had befriended.
He himself has told us
Of the most disastrous chances
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
which made a journey from St. David's to Rome a more
perilous adventure in those unquiet days than an expedition
"through darkest Africa" is in ours. At last the very
Chapter of St. David's, for whose ancient rights he was
contending, basely deserted him. "The laity of Wales stood
by me," so he wrote in later days, "but of the clergy whose
battle I was fighting scarce one." Pope Innocent III. was
far too wary a politician to favour the claims of a small
and distracted nation, already half-subjugated, against the
king of a rich and powerful country. He flattered our poor
Gerald, he delighted in his company, he accepted, and
perhaps even read, his books. But in the end, after five
years' incessant fighting, the decision went against him,
and the English king's nominee has ever since sat on the
throne of St. David's. "Many and great wars," said
Gwenwynwyn, the Prince of Powis, "have we Welshmen waged
with England, but none so great and fierce as his who fought
the king and the archbishop, and withstood the might of the
whole clergy and people of England, for the honour of
Wales."
Short was the memory and scant the gratitude of his
countrymen. When in 1214 another vacancy occurred at a time
when King John was at variance with his barons and his
prelates, the Chapter of St. David's nominated, not Gerald,
their old champion, but Iorwerth, the Abbot of Talley, from
whose reforming zeal they had nothing to fear. This last
prick of Fortune's sword pierced Gerald to the quick. He had
for years been gradually withdrawing from an active life. He
had resigned his archdeaconry and his prebend stall, he had
made a fourth pilgrimage, this time for his soul's sake, to
Rome, he had retired to a quiet pursuit of letters probably
at Lincoln, and henceforward, till his death about the year
1223, he devoted himself to revising and embellishing his
old works, and completing his literary labours. By his fight
for St. David's he had endeared himself to the laity of his
country for all time. The saying of Llewelyn the Great was
prophetic. "So long as Wales shall stand by the writings of
the chroniclers and by the songs of the bards shall his
noble deed be praised throughout all time." The prophecy has
not yet been verified. Welsh chroniclers have made but
scanty references to Gerald; no bard has ever yet sung an
Awdl or a Pryddest in honour of him who fought for the
"honour of Wales." His countrymen have forgotten Gerald the
Welshman. It has been left to Sir Richard Colt Hoare,
Foster, Professor Brewer, Dimmock, and Professor Freeman to
edit his works. Only two of his countrymen have attempted to
rescue one of the greatest of Welshmen from an undeserved
oblivion. In 1585, when the Renaissance of Letters had begun
to rouse the dormant powers of the Cymry, Dr. David Powel
edited in Latin a garbled version of the "Itinerary" and
"Description of Wales," and gave a short and inaccurate
account of Gerald's life. In 1889 Dr. Henry Owen published,
"at his own proper charges," the first adequate account by a
Welshman of the life and labours of Giraldus Cambrensis.
When his monument is erected in the cathedral which was
built by his hated rival, the epitaph which he composed for
himself may well be inscribed upon it -
Cambria Giraldus genuit, sic Cambria
mentem
Erudiit, cineres cui lapis iste tegit.
And by that time perhaps some competent scholar will have
translated some at least of Gerald's works into the language
best understood by the people of Wales.
It would be impossible to exaggerate
the enormous services which three great Welshmen of the
twelfth century rendered to England and to the world - such
services as we may securely hope will be emulated by
Welshmen of the next generation, now that we have lived to
witness what Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton has called "the great
recrudescence of Cymric energy."5
The romantic literature of England owes its origin to
Geoffrey of Monmouth;6
Sir Galahad, the stainless knight, the mirror of Christian
chivalry, as well as the nobler portions of the Arthurian
romance, were the creation of Walter Map, the friend and
"gossip" of Gerald;7
and John Richard Green has truly called Gerald himself "the
father of popular literature."8
He began to write when he was only twenty; he continued to
write till he was past the allotted span of life. He is the
most "modern" as well as the most voluminous of all the
mediaeval writers. Of all English writers, Miss Kate
Norgate9
has perhaps most justly estimated the real place of Gerald
in English letters. "Gerald's wide range of subjects," she
says, "is only less remarkable than the ease and freedom
with which he treats them. Whatever he touches - history,
archaeology, geography, natural science, politics, the
social life and thought of the day, the physical
peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of its
people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own
native land, the scandals of the court and the cloister, the
petty struggle for the primacy of Wales, and the great
tragedy of the fall of the Angevin Empire - is all alike
dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern
newspaper or magazine article. His first important work, the
'Topography of Ireland,' is, with due allowance for the
difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and
those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a
special correspondent in our own day might send from some
newly-colonised island in the Pacific to satisfy or whet the
curiosity of his readers at home." The description aptly
applies to all that Gerald wrote. If not a historian, he was
at least a great journalist. His descriptions of Ireland
have been subjected to much hostile criticism from the day
they were written to our own times. They were assailed at
the time, as Gerald himself tells us, for their
unconventionality, for their departure from established
custom, for the freedom and colloquialism of their style,
for the audacity of their stories, and for the writer's
daring in venturing to treat the manners and customs of a
barbarous country as worthy the attention of the learned and
the labours of the historian. Irish scholars, from the days
of Dr. John Lynch, who published his "Cambrensis Eversus" in
1622, have unanimously denounced the work of the sensational
journalist, born out of due time. His Irish books are
confessedly partisan; the "Conquest of Ireland" was
expressly designed as an eulogy of "the men of St. David's,"
the writer's own kinsmen. But in spite of partisanship and
prejudice, they must be regarded as a serious and valuable
addition to our knowledge of the state of Ireland at the
latter end of the twelfth century. Indeed, Professor Brewer
does not hesitate to say that "to his industry we are
exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state of
Ireland during the whole of the Middle Ages," and as to the
"Topography," Gerald "must take rank with the first who
descried the value and in some respects the limits of
descriptive geography."
When he came to deal with the affairs of state on a
larger stage, his methods were still that of the modern
journalist. He was always an impressionist, a writer of
personal sketches. His character sketches of the Plantagenet
princes - of King Henry with his large round head and fat
round belly, his fierce eyes, his tigerish temper, his
learning, his licentiousness, his duplicity, and of Eleanor
of Aquitaine, his vixenish and revengeful wife, the
murderess of "Fair Rosamond" (who must have been known to
Gerald, being the daughter of Walter of
Clifford-on-the-Wye), and of the fierce brood that they
reared - are of extraordinary interest. His impressions of
the men and events of his time, his fund of anecdotes and
bon mots, his references to trivial matters, which more
dignified writers would never deign to mention, his
sprightly and sometimes malicious gossip, invest his period
with a reality which the greatest of fiction-writers has
failed to rival. Gerald lived in the days of chivalry, days
which have been crowned with a halo of deathless romance by
the author of "Ivanhoe" and the "Talisman." He knew and was
intimate with all the great actors of the time. He had lived
in the Paris of St. Louis and Philip Augustus, and was never
tired of exalting the House of Capet over the tyrannical and
bloodthirsty House of Anjou. He had no love of England, for
her Plantagenet kings or her Saxon serfs. During the French
invasion in the time of King John his sympathies were openly
with the Dauphin as against the "brood of vipers," who were
equally alien to English soil. For the Saxon, indeed, he
felt the twofold hatred of Welshman and Norman. One of his
opponents is denounced to the Pope as an "untriwe Sax," and
the Saxons are described as the slaves of the Normans, the
mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for their
conquerors. He met Innocent III., the greatest of Popes, in
familiar converse, he jested and gossiped with him in
slippered ease, he made him laugh at his endless stories of
the glory of Wales, the iniquities of the Angevins, and the
bad Latin of Archbishop Walter. He knew Richard
Coeur-de-Lion, the flower of chivalry, and saw him as he was
and "not through a glass darkly." He knew John, the
cleverest and basest of his house. He knew and loved Stephen
Langton, the precursor of a long line of statesmen who have
made English liberty broad - based upon the people's will.
He was a friend of St. Hugh of Lincoln, the sweetest and
purest spirit in the Anglican Church of the Middle Ages, the
one man who could disarm the wrath of the fierce king with a
smile; and he was the friend and patron of Robert Grosstete,
afterwards the great Bishop of Lincoln. He lived much in
company with Ranulph de Glanville, the first English jurist,
and he has "Boswellised" some of his conversations with him.
He was intimate with Archbishop Baldwin,
the saintly prelate who laid down his life in the Third
Crusade on the burning plains of Palestine, heart-broken at
the unbridled wickedness of the soldiers of the Cross. He
was the near kinsman and confidant of the Cambro-Normans,
who, landing in Leinster in 1165, effected what may be
described as the first conquest of Ireland. There was
scarcely a man of note in his day whom he had not seen and
conversed with, or of whom he does not relate some piquant
story. He had travelled much, and had observed closely.
Probably the most valuable of all his works, from the
strictly historical point of view, are the "Itinerary" and
"Description of Wales," which are reprinted in the present
volume.10
Here he is impartial in his evidence, and judicial in his
decisions. If he errs at all, it is not through racial
prejudice. "I am sprung," he once told the Pope in a letter,
"from the princes of Wales and from the barons of the
Marches, and when I see injustice in either race, I hate
it."
The text is that of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who published
an English translation, chiefly from the texts of Camden and
Wharton, in 1806. The valuable historical notes have been
curtailed, as being too elaborate for such a volume as this,
and a few notes have been added by the present editor.
Hoare's translation, and also translations (edited by Mr.
Foster) of the Irish books have been published in Bohn's
Antiquarian Library.
The first of the seven volumes of the Latin text of
Gerald, published in the Rolls Series, appeared in 1861. The
first four volumes were edited by Professor Brewer; the next
two by Mr. Dimmock; and the seventh by Professor
Freeman.
W. Llewelyn Williams. January 1908.
The following is a list of the more important of the
works of Gerald:
- Topographia Hibernica
- Expugnatio Hibernica
- Itinerarium Kambriae
- Descriptio Kambriae
- Gemma Ecclesiastica
- Libellus Invectionum
- De Rebus a se Gestis
- Dialogus de jure et statu Menevensis
Ecclesiae
- De Instructione Principum
- De Legendis Sanctorum
- Symbolum Electorum
The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through
Wales
by Geraldus Cambrensis
Contents
>>> First
Preface
|
