to Latin he spoke French and probably English, but little Welsh.84 85 At one point in his
career he was employed as a royal servant whose task it was to promote the policies
of the English crown in Wales and in other dominions of the Angevin kings. As an
ecclesiastic he benefited initially from the control established by Canterbury over the
Welsh dioceses, acting as the archbishop’s legate in the diocese of St David’s, even
if for a brief period later, from 1199 to 1203, he sought to gain papal recognition of
the status of St David’s as the metropolitan see of an independent Welsh province.
As his failure in the St David’s case showed, his ecclesiastical ambitions in Wales
could only be fulfilled with the consent of the crown and of Canterbury, such was
their authority over the Welsh bishoprics, especially in south Wales.
Yet if Giraldus offers an example of a cross-border career in a colonialist context, he
also reveals, uniquely perhaps, the tensions which could arise as a result of trying to
pursue such a career. As he himself complained shortly after his departure from the
court, he was too Welsh for the English, too English for the Welsh: ‘both peoples
regard me as a stranger and one not of their own . . . one nation suspects me, the
other hates me’,8i Giraldus belonged to an ethnically hybrid group which in its
marriages and social links had effectively broken down some of the barriers separating
native and settler societies in south-west Wales, at least at the aristocratic level.
However, his position was further complicated by his excellent education and his
commitment both to scholarship and to ecclesiastical reform. It was these elements
which drew him closer to England than was the case with his lay kinsmen, or even
his uncle, David fitz Gerald, bishop of St David’s, who lacked Giraldus’s scholarly
bent and, far from promoting ecclesiastical reform, alienated church lands as dowries
for his daughters.86 This suggests in turn that to talk in terms of a career that traversed
a geographical border is an oversimplification: it would be more accurate to
regard Giraldus as a man who crossed cultural frontiers which corresponded, in part,
to those dividing England and Wales. Above all else, Giraldus was a scholar and
writer, most at home in the company of highly educated clerics like himself.87 Thus
what he most liked about England were the opportunities it provided to rub shoulders
with men whose intellectual formation, like his, was deeply indebted to the learning
of France. One of the things that was unusual about him, however, was that he chose
to capitalize upon his own distinctive background and experience in works which
sought to make Wales (and Ireland) familiar to an English audience.
Nevertheless, while Giraldus’s most original writings were his books on Ireland and
Wales, he also wrote about bishops, saints and political events in England. His
84 Bartlett, Gerald (as n. 6) pp. 14-15; Michael Richter, Studies in Medieval Language and
Culture, Blackrock, Co. Dublin 1995, pp. 137-8.
85 Cited by Bartlett, Gerald (as n. 6) p. 17 from Giraldus, Opera 8 p. lviii. Cf. the comment
on this passage in Wilhelm Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters
(Schriften der MGH 2), Leipzig 1938, p. 144: ‘Der Waliser Girald, der als Engländer
aufgewachsen ist, findet nirgends mehr eine heimatliche Aufnahme.’
86 Michael Richter, A New Edition of the So-called Vita Dauidis Secundi, in: Bulletin of the
Board of Celtic Studies 22 (1966-8) p. 248; cf. Pryce, Deheubarth (as n. 5) pp. 275-6.
87 Thus, for example, Türk (as n. 19), p. 95; Walker, Cultural Survival (as n. 41) p. 48.
59
