The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales | Page 8

rouse the
dormant powers of the Cymry, Dr. David Powel edited in Latin a
garbled version of the "Itinerary" and "Description of Wales," and gave
a short and inaccurate account of Gerald's life. In 1889 Dr. Henry
Owen published, "at his own proper charges," the first adequate
account by a Welshman of the life and labours of Giraldus Cambrensis.
When his monument is erected in the cathedral which was built by his
hated rival, the epitaph which he composed for himself may well be
inscribed upon it -
Cambria Giraldus genuit, sic Cambria mentem Erudiit, cineres cui lapis

iste tegit.
And by that time perhaps some competent scholar will have translated
some at least of Gerald's works into the language best understood by
the people of Wales.
It would be impossible to exaggerate the enormous services which
three great Welshmen of the twelfth century rendered to England and to
the world - such services as we may securely hope will be emulated by
Welshmen of the next generation, now that we have lived to witness
what Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton has called "the great recrudescence
of Cymric energy." {5} The romantic literature of England owes its
origin to Geoffrey of Monmouth; {6} Sir Galahad, the stainless knight,
the mirror of Christian chivalry, as well as the nobler portions of the
Arthurian romance, were the creation of Walter Map, the friend and
"gossip" of Gerald; {7} and John Richard Green has truly called Gerald
himself "the father of popular literature." {8} He began to write when
he was only twenty; he continued to write till he was past the allotted
span of life. He is the most "modern" as well as the most voluminous of
all the mediaeval writers. Of all English writers, Miss Kate Norgate {9}
has perhaps most justly estimated the real place of Gerald in English
letters. "Gerald's wide range of subjects," she says, "is only less
remarkable than the ease and freedom with which he treats them.
Whatever he touches - history, archaeology, geography, natural science,
politics, the social life and thought of the day, the physical peculiarities
of Ireland and the manners and customs of its people, the picturesque
scenery and traditions of his own native land, the scandals of the court
and the cloister, the petty struggle for the primacy of Wales, and the
great tragedy of the fall of the Angevin Empire - is all alike dealt with
in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine
article. His first important work, the 'Topography of Ireland,' is, with
due allowance for the difference between the tastes of the twelfth
century and those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a
special correspondent in our own day might send from some
newly-colonised island in the Pacific to satisfy or whet the curiosity of
his readers at home." The description aptly applies to all that Gerald
wrote. If not a historian, he was at least a great journalist. His
descriptions of Ireland have been subjected to much hostile criticism
from the day they were written to our own times. They were assailed at

the time, as Gerald himself tells us, for their unconventionality, for
their departure from established custom, for the freedom and
colloquialism of their style, for the audacity of their stories, and for the
writer's daring in venturing to treat the manners and customs of a
barbarous country as worthy the attention of the learned and the labours
of the historian. Irish scholars, from the days of Dr. John Lynch, who
published his "Cambrensis Eversus" in 1622, have unanimously
denounced the work of the sensational journalist, born out of due time.
His Irish books are confessedly partisan; the "Conquest of Ireland" was
expressly designed as an eulogy of "the men of St. David's," the writer's
own kinsmen. But in spite of partisanship and prejudice, they must be
regarded as a serious and valuable addition to our knowledge of the
state of Ireland at the latter end of the twelfth century. Indeed,
Professor Brewer does not hesitate to say that "to his industry we are
exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state of Ireland during
the whole of the Middle Ages," and as to the "Topography," Gerald
"must take rank with the first who descried the value and in some
respects the limits of descriptive geography."
When he came to deal with the affairs of state on a larger stage, his
methods were still that of the modern journalist. He was always an
impressionist, a writer of personal sketches. His character sketches of
the Plantagenet princes - of King Henry with his large round head and
fat round belly, his fierce eyes, his tigerish temper, his learning, his
licentiousness, his duplicity, and of Eleanor of Aquitaine, his vixenish
and