who  held  land  in  Glamorgan,48  and  this  disregard  of  the  family’s  landholding  across
the  Bnstol  Channel  is  probably  an  accurate  of  reflection  of  its  position  by  Giraldus’s
lifetime.  In  common  with  their  Marcher  kinsmen,  to  whom  they  were  related  through
Nest,  the  de  Barris  of  Dyfed  had  planted  deep  roots  in  south-west  Wales,  where  they
represented  prime  examples  of  ‘the  local  magnates,  the  men  on  the  spot’.49
Giraldus  therefore  had  a  strong  interest  in  the  continuation  of  Marcher  power  in
Wales  and  did  not  sympathize  with  native  Welsh  political  aspirations.  He  sharply
distinguished  his  Cambro-Norman  kinsmen—the  ‘Geraldines’  or  ‘sons  of
Nest’—from  his  Welsh  relatives  in  the  dynasty  of  Deheubarth,  and  also  wrote  that
Wales  belonged  to  the  kingdom  of  England.50  This  did  not  mean,  though,  that  he
needed  to  be  ashamed  of  his  Welsh  blood:  quite  the  contrary,  this  arguably  gave  him
greater  nobility  than  did  his  paternal  descent,  for  whereas  his  mother  was  a  descendant
  of  a  Welsh  king  his  father  belonged  to  a  minor  branch  of  the  de  Barris  and
possessed  only  a  modest  estate,  possibly  only  two  knights’  fees,  in  Dyfed.51  Welsh
nobility  could  be  appropriated  by  the  conquerors  just  as  easily  as  the  sanctity  of
Welsh  saints,  not  least  St  David  himself,  whose  name  was  invoked  by  Giraldus’s
kinsmen  during  the  invasion  of  Ireland.52  Equally,  Giraldus  had  a  somewhat  uneasy
relationship  with  the  English  crown,  which,  especially  after  the  Anglo-Norman
intervention  in  Ireland,  was  highly  suspicious  of  the  Marchers  and  did  not,  in
Giraldus’s  view,  properly  appreciate  their  role  in  subduing  both  the  Welsh  and  the
Irish.53  His  identification  with  Wales  was  thus  essentially  a  colonialist  one:  it  represented
  an  assertion  of  control  over  a  half-conquered  country,  a  statement  that  a  land
which  had  once  belonged  to  the  Welsh  now  belonged  in  part—and  in  due  course,
Giraldus  hoped,  would  belong  in  full—to  families  like  his  own.
Let  us  look  next  at  where  Giraldus’s  career  took  him  and  try  to  assess  what  this
implies  about  his  attitudes  to  England  and  Wales.  To  judge  by  his  autobiographical
writings,  his  life-long  ambition  was  to  become  bishop  of  St  David’s  and  to  elevate
that  church  to  an  archbishopric.  As  has  often  been  pointed  out,  however,  the  events
of  his  life  suggest  otherwise.54  Another  interpretation  of  his  life  would  be  that  Giraldus
  sought  to  exploit  his  Welsh  connections  in  order  to  win  favour  and  promotion
from  the  Angevin  regime  in  England.  He  made  his  debut  as  an  ecclesiastical  reformer
  in  the  diocese  of  St  David’s  and  clearly  took  his  duties  as  archdeacon  of  Brecon
seriously.  However,  as  we  have  seen,  this  depended  on  cultivating  the  archbishop  of
Canterbury;  furthermore,  Giraldus  seems  to  have  deputed  much  of  his  work  as

48  Giraldus,  Opera  6  p.  66,  Davies,  Giraldus  (as  n.  11)  p.  86.
49  Rowlands  (as  n.  1)  p.  145.  See  also  Flanagan  (as  n.  10)  pp.  145-9.
50  Giraldus,  Opera  1  pp.  58-60;  3  p.  166.
51  Bartlett,  Gerald  (as  n.  6)  p.  20  and  n.  43.  Cf.  T.  M.  Charles-Edwards,  Early  Irish  and
Welsh  Kinship,  Oxford  1993,  p.  174,  which  argues  that,  in  Welsh  society,  royal  status
could  be  transmitted  exclusively  through  females.
52  Rowlands  (as  n.  1)  p.  156.
53  Bartlett,  Gerald  (as  n.  6)  pp.  21-5.
54  See  e.g.  Richter,  Giraldus  (as  n.  6)  p.  127,  Bartlett,  Gerald  (as  n.  6)  pp.  46-8.

54