The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales | Page 5

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.