"Grenzgänger"

Schneider, Reinhard

Bibliographic data

Description

Persistent identifier:: 1655725092

URN:: urn:nbn:de:bsz:291-sulbdigital-226447

Title:: "Grenzgänger"

Author:: Schneider, Reinhard

Place of publication:: Saarbrücken

Publisher:: SDV, Saarbrücker Dr. und Verl. Saarländische Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek

Structure type:: Monograph

Collection:: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Saarländische Landesgeschichte

Volume number:: 33

Year of publication:: 1998

Number of pages:: 225 S.

Copyright:: Saarländische Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek

Language:: eng

Digitised pages:: 230

Description

Title:: A cross-border career: Giraldus Cambrensis between Wales and England

Author:: Pryce, Huw

Structure type:: Chapter

Collection:: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Saarländische Landesgeschichte

Digitised pages:: 16

Full text

ties for individuals to travel between England and Wales, be they secular lords,
bishops, monks or merchants.5
At the same time the creation of Norman lordships in Wales accentuated the political
fragmentation of the country, injecting new ethnic and cultural divisions into what
has been aptly described as a country ‘of plural frontiers’.6 Of no region was this
truer than Dyfed in south-west Wales, the birth-place of the churchman, scholar and
author who is the subject of this paper: Giraldus Cambrensis or Gerald de Barri.7
Giraldus’s maternal grandmother, Nest, was the daughter of the Welsh king of
Dyfed, Rhys ap Tewdwr, killed by the Normans in 1093; Dyfed swiftly fell to the
Normans and was divided into a number of small lordships. Among the early Nor¬
man conquerors in the region was Giraldus’s maternal grandfather, Gerald of Wind¬
sor, castellan of Pembroke, who married Nest ‘with the object of giving himself and
his troops a firmer foothold in the country.’8 Giraldus’s father, William de Barri, was
a minor Norman lord whose castle lay at Manorbier. By ancestry, then, Giraldus was
three-quarters Norman and one quarter Welsh, the product of intermarriage which
was a fairly common characteristic in the Welsh March.9 This mixed ancestry was to
play an important part in his career, for he was related, not only to leading Norman
families in south-west Wales, but also to the native ruling house represented by the
successors of his great-grandfather, Rhys ap Tewdwr. When Giraldus was bom, c.
1146, this house was beginning to revive its power, notably at the expense of the
Clare lords of Ceredigion and the Cliffords of Llandovery. Just over twenty years
later, in 1169, many of Giraldus’s relatives, including two of his elder brothers,
seized the opportunity to seek new fortunes in Ireland by participating in the Anglo-
Norman intervention prompted by the request for military help from the exiled king
of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada.10 Giraldus thus came from a region of shifting
borders and also, more importantly, from a family well used to negotiating the
frontiers between natives and incomers in south-west Wales.
5 See e.g. Ralph A. Griffiths, Medieval Severnside: The Welsh Connection, in: R. R. Davies
et al. (eds.), Welsh Society and Nationhood, Cardiff 1984, pp. 70-89; Huw Pryce, In
Search of a Medieval Society: Deheubarth in the Writings of Gerald of Wales, in: Welsh
History Review 13 (1986-7) pp. 274-5.
6 Davies, Conquest (as n. 1) pp. 3-15; R. R. Davies, Frontier Arrangements in Fragmented
Societies: Ireland and Wales, in: Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (eds.), Medieval
Frontier Societies, Oxford 1989, pp. 77-100 (quotation at p. 80).
' On Dyfed, see Rowlands (as n. 1) and Pryce, Deheubarth (as n. 5). Of the extensive
secondary literature on Gerald, see especially Michael Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis, 2nd
edn, Aberystwyth 1976; Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales 1146-1223, Oxford 1982.
8 Giraldus, Opera 6 p. 91.
9 A. J. Roderick, Marriage and Politics in Wales, 1066-1282, in: Welsh History Review 4
(1968-9) pp. 4-8, 11-12.
10 Marie Therese Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship: Inter¬
actions in Ireland in the Late Twelfth Century, Oxford 1989, pp. 140-53.
46

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