in  which  Giraldus  identified  closely  with  the  Welsh  in  order  to  try  and  explain  the
failure  of  his  attempt  to  become  bishop  of  St  David’s  and  to  raise  that  see  to  metropolitan
  status.  In  the  trenchant  words  of  Michael  Richter,  ‘Giraldus  only  became  a
fervent  Welshman  after  his  hopes  for  a  more  attractive  career  in  England  had  been
destroyed.’38  Likewise  John  Gillingham  has  recently  urged  that  ‘the  fact  that  for  a
while  Gerald  espoused  a  Welsh  cause  should  not  make  us  call  him  Giraldus  Cambrensis,
  no  matter  whether  we  translate  it  “Gerald  of  Wales”  or  “Gerald  the
Welshman”.  Either  way  it  tends  to  identify  him  too  emphatically  with  just  one  stage
of  a  career  which,  roughly  speaking,  began  as  pro-English,  went  first  pro-Welsh,
then  pro-French.’39
Now,  it  is  true  that  in  the  first  preface  to  his  De  Principis  Instructione,  written  c.
1195,  Giraldus  claimed  that  by  upbringing  and  mores  he  was  himself  English,  though
his  ancestry  included  some  Welsh  blood,  while  in  one  late  work,  De  Invectionibus  (c.
1216),  he  implied  that  during  his  time  as  a  court  clerk  his  chief  ambition  was  promotion
  to  a  bishopric  in  England.40  Nevertheless,  as  David  Walker  has  warned,  too
much  can  be  made  of  the  latter  statement,  and  there  is  plenty  of  other  evidence  to
show  that  Giraldus,  while  emphatically  not  identifying  with  the  native  Welsh,  regarded
  Wales  as  his  home.41  Thus  he  claimed  in  the  preface  to  the  Descriptio  Kambriae
that  the  book  was  a  ‘description  of  our  Wales’  (Kambriae  nostrae  descriptionem)\  he
referred  in  an  account  of  his  writings  to  a  map  he  had  made  of  Wales,  now  lost,  ‘to
illustrate  his  native  soil  more  fully’  (ad  natale  solum  plenius  illustrandum);  and  in  a
letter  defending  his  Irish  and  Welsh  works  he  described  these  as  dealing  with  the
histories  of  ‘our  home  grounds’  (finium  nostrorum).42  This  did  not  mean,  of  course,
that  he  saw  himself  as  Welsh.  Rather,  as  Robert  Bartlett  has  convincingly  argued,
Giraldus’s  principal  secular  identity  was  as  a  member  of  the  ethnically  mixed  Marcher
  families  of  south-west  Wales,  that  is,  with  a  group  which  was  neither  fully
Norman  or  English  nor  fully  Welsh,  but  combined  the  best  of  both  worlds.43  This
brings  us  to  the  second—and  in  my  view  more  fruitful—approach  to  the  question  of
Giraldus’s  attitude  towards  England  and  Wales,  namely  a  consideration  of  his  family
background  and  his  career.

38  Richter,  Giraldus  (as  n.  6)  p.  127;  see  also  ibid.  pp.  2,  10,  87,  94,  117-18;  Bartlett,  Gerald
(as  n.  6),  pp.  9-25,  46-8,  50-7.
39  John  Gillingham,  The  English  Invasion  of  Ireland,  in:  Brendan  Bradshaw  et  al.  (eds.),
Representing  Ireland:  Literature  and  the  Origins  of  Conflict,  1534-1660,  Cambridge  1993,
p.  33.
40  Giraldus,  Opera  8  p.  Iviii;  Davies,  De  Invectionibus  (as  n.  22)  p.  213,  cited  by  Richter,
Giraldus  (as  n.  6)  p.  87.
41  David  Walker,  Cultural  Survival  in  an  Age  of  Conquest,  in:  Davies  et  al.  (eds.)  (as  n.  5)  p.
48  n.  41.  Cf.  F.  M.  Powicke,  Gerald  of  Wales,  in:  Bulletin  of  the  John  Rylands  Library  12
(1928)  p.  393:  ‘The  main  preoccupation  of  his  life  was  found  in  Wales,  and  especially  in
the  bishopric  of  St  David’s,  where  his  home  and  connexions  were.’
42  Giraldus,  Opera  6  p.  155;  1  pp.  414-15;  Lefèvre  et  al.,  Speculum  Duorum  (as  n.  20)  pp.
172-3.
43  Bartlett,  Gerald  (as  n.  6)  pp.  20-5.

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