genuine oral traditions of the Welsh and Breton people. Genuine
traditions are true history in the sense that they preserve manners
and customs and modes of thought prevalent at the time when they
became current. Thus they are on quite a different level from
Geoffrey's inventions, though they cannot be taken as containing the
history of any of the individuals to whom they profess to relate. He
tells us in his preface that the actions of Arthur and many others,
though not mentioned by historians, "were celebrated by many people in
a pleasant manner and by heart," were sung by poets and handed down
from generation to generation, like the poetical traditions of every
people in primitive times. There can be no doubt that Geoffrey
collected a number of these old stories and wove them into his
narrative. Thus, the story of King Lear and his daughters has the
ring of a genuine popular tradition about it, though the dates and
pseudo-historical setting were probably supplied by Geoffrey. Again,
there were certainly prophecies attributed to Merlin current in
Geoffrey's time. But one may suspect Geoffrey of doing a good deal
more than translate the prophecies of Merlin; he adapted them; one may
even suspect him of parodying them. "After him shall succeed the boar
of Totness, and oppress the people with grievous tyranny. Gloucester
shall send forth a lion and shall disturb him in his cruelty in
several battles. The lion shall trample him under his feet ... and at
last get upon the backs of the nobility. A bull shall come into the
quarrel and strike the lion ... but shall break his horns against the
walls of Oxford." "Then shall two successively sway the sceptre, whom
a horned dragon shall serve. One shall come in armour and ride upon a
flying serpent. He shall sit upon its back with his naked body, and
cast his right hand upon its tail.... The second shall ally with the
lion; but a quarrel happening they shall encounter one another ...
but the courage of the beast shall prevail. Then shall one come with a
drum, and appease the rage of the lion. Therefore shall the people of
the kingdom be at peace, and provoke the lion to a dose of physic!"
Then as to Arthur. In Geoffrey's history he appears mainly as a great
continental conqueror--a kind of Welsh Charlemagne. "Many of the most
picturesque and significant features of the full-grown legend (as
Professor Lewis Jones points out)[1] are not even faintly suggested by
Geoffrey. The Round Table, Lancelot, the Grail were unknown to him,
and were grafted on the legend from other sources." But he made the
Arthurian legends fashionable; he opened for all Europe the hitherto
unknown and inexhaustible well of Celtic romance; and it may be said
without exaggeration that "no mediaeval work has left behind it so
prolific a literary offspring as the History of the Kings of Britain."
The value of Geoffrey is not in his fictions about past history, but
in his influence on the literature and ideas of the future. He stands
at the beginning of a new age: he is the first spokesman of the Age of
the new Chivalry. Read his glowing account of Arthur's court, where
"the knights were famous for feats of chivalry, and the women esteemed
none worthy of their love but such as had given proof of their valour
in three several battles. Thus was the valour of the men an
encouragement for the women's chastity, and the love of the women a
spur to the knight's bravery." Or, as an old French version has it,
"Love which made the women more chaste made the knights more valorous
and famous." We have here a new conception of love which has
profoundly influenced life and thought ever since--love no longer a
weakness as in the ancient world, or a sin as it seemed to the ascetic
spirit of the Church, but a conscious source of strength, an avowed
motive of heroism. And it was round Arthur and his court that the
French poets of the next generation wove their romances inspired by
this conception--the offspring of the union of Norman strength and
Celtic gentleness.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] See his paper on Geoffrey of Monmouth (Transactions of the
Cymmrodorion Society, 1899), to which I am much indebted.
III
GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS
Gerald the Welshman was certainly one of the most remarkable men of
letters that the Middle Ages produced--remarkable not merely for the
great range of his knowledge, or the voluminousness of his writings,
but for the originality of his views and variety of his interests.
In this lecture I intend to give first a general account of his life,
and then deal in more detail with his Itinerary through Wales.
We know a great deal about Gerald; he was interested in many things,
and not least in himself; he was not troubled by that shrinking sense
of his own worthlessness--with the feeling of being not an individual,
but a part of a community--which is so characteristic of mediaeval
writers, and led them often to omit to mention their own names.
Gerald was born about 1146, at Manorbier, in Pembroke--"the most
delightful spot in Wales." His ancestry is interesting. His father was
a Norman noble, holding of Glamorgan, William de Barri by name; his
mother was the daughter of another Norman noble, Gerald de Windsor of
Pembroke, and the famous Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tudor, the Helen of
Wales. He was cousin of the Fitzgeralds who played so important a part
in the conquest of Ireland, and connected with Richard Strongbow and
the great house of Clare. He thus "moved in the highest circles," and
lived in an atmosphere of great deeds and great traditions.
He was from the first marked out by his own inclinations for an
ecclesiastical career. He tells us that when he and his elder brothers
used to play as children on the sands of Manorbier his brothers built
castles but he always built churches. He received an elementary
education from the chaplains of his uncle, the Bishop of St. David's;
he seems to have been slow at learning when a child, and his tutors
goaded him on not by the birch rod, but by sarcasm--by declining
"_Stultus_, _stultior_, _stultissimus_." His higher education was not
obtained in Wales, and it is singular that he does not notice any
place of learning in Wales in all his writings. He studied at
Gloucester, and then at Paris, the greatest mediaeval university. We
have it on his own authority that he was a model student. "So entirely
devoted was he to study, having in his acts and in his mind, no sort
of levity or coarseness, that whenever the Masters of Arts wished to
select a pattern from among the good scholars, they would name Gerald
before all others." Later he lectured at Paris on canon law and
theology; his lectures, he tells us, were very popular. He returned
thence in 1172, two years after the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, whose
example and struggle for the rights of the Church made a deep and
lasting impression on him. Gerald soon obtained preferment: he held
three livings in Pembroke, one in Oxfordshire, and canonries at
Hereford and St. David's. His energy soon made itself felt. He
excommunicated the Welshmen and Flemings who would not pay tithes; and
then attacked the sins of the clergy. Most of the Welsh clergy were
married, contrary to the laws of the Church. Gerald hated a married
priest even more than he hated a monk. The Welsh priest, he says, was
wont to keep in his house a female (_focaria_) "to light his fire but
extinguish his virtue." "How can such a man practice frugality and
self-denial with a house full of brawling brats, and a woman for ever
extracting money to buy costly robes with long skirts trailing in the
dust?" Gerald hated women--the origin of all evil since the world
began: observing that in birds of prey the females are stronger than
the males, he remarks that this signifies "the female sex is more
resolute in all evil than the male." Among the married clergy he
attacked was the Archdeacon of Brecon; and the old man, being forced
to choose between his wife and his archdeaconry, preferred his wife.
Gerald was made Archdeacon of Brecon. In later years he had qualms of
conscience about the part he took in this business.
Between 1180 and 1194 he was often at Court and employed in the
king's affairs. Henry II. selected him as a suitable person to
accompany the young prince John to Ireland in 1185, and the result was
his two great works--"The Topography," and "The Conquest of Ireland,"
which are the chief and almost the only authorities for Irish history
in the Middle Ages. The former work he read publicly at Oxford on his
return; it was a great occasion: we must tell it in his own words.
"When the work was finished, not wishing to hide his candle under a
bushel, but wishing to place it in a candlestick, so that it might
give light, he resolved to read it before a vast audience at Oxford,
where scholars in England chiefly flourished and excelled in
scholarship. And as there were three divisions in the work, and each
division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On
the first day, he received and entertained at his lodgings all the
poor people of the town; on the second, all the doctors of the
different faculties and their best students; and on the third, the
rest of the students and the chief men of the town. It was a costly
and noble act; and neither present nor past time can furnish any
record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England."
In 1188 he accompanied the Archbishop of Canterbury in his tour
through Wales to preach the Third Crusade. With this we shall deal
later.
He was abroad with Henry II. at the time of the old king's death, and
has left a valuable account of his later years in the book "On the
Instruction of Princes." His connection with the Court gave him
opportunities for studying the great characters of the time at close
quarters, and we have from his pen graphic sketches of many of them.
Take this description of Henry II.: "He had a reddish complexion,
rather dark, and a large round head. His eyes were gray, bloodshot,
and flashed in anger. He had a fiery face; his voice was shaky; he had
a deep chest, and long muscular arms, his great round head hanging
somewhat forward. He had an enormous belly--though not from gross
feeding. Indeed he was temperate in all things, for a prince. To keep
down his corpulency, he took immoderate exercise. Even in times of
peace he took no rest--hunting furiously all day, and on his return
home in the evening seldom sitting down either before or after supper;
for in spite of his own fatigue, he would weary out the Court by being
constantly on his legs."
The whole is very interesting and full of life. It occurs in the
"Conquest of Ireland," and is quoted in several of his other works.
Gerald's favourite author was Gerald of Barry, Archdeacon of Brecon.
The next important episode in his life was the struggle for St.
David's (1198-1203). It was really a fight for the independence of the
Welsh Church from England and its direct dependence on the Pope.
Gerald was elected bishop by the canons of St. David's, in opposition
to the will of King John (whose consent was necessary) and of Hubert
Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury (whose rights as metropolitan were
attacked). Gerald hastened off to Rome to get the Pope's support,
taking with him the most precious offering that he could think of--six
of his own books; for Rome had a bad name for bribery--and who could
resist such a bribe? But he found it advisable to supplement his books
by other promises, especially by the offer to the Pope of tithes from
Wales.
The Pope at this time was Innocent III.--the greatest of all the
Popes--who brought kings and nations under his feet and held despotic
sway over the Universal Church, and stamped out heresy in blood. In
the references to him in Gerald's works he appears in much more human
guise. We see him after supper unbending and laughing at Gerald's
anecdotes and cracking jokes of a somewhat risky character with the
archdeacon. It is clear that the Pope thoroughly enjoyed the
Welshman's company, but also that he did not take him very seriously
as an ecclesiastical statesman. "Let us have some more stories about
your archbishop's bad Latin," he would say, when Gerald was getting
too urgent on the independence of the Welsh Church or his own right to
the see of St. David's.
This archbishop was Hubert Walter, who was much more of a secular
administrator than an ecclesiastic, and whose Latin though clear and
ready might show a fine contempt for all rules of grammar. Gerald was
a stickler for correct Latin grammar; he is great on "howlers." There
is one of his stories, illustrating both the avarice of the Norman
prelates and the ignorance of the Welsh clergy: A Welsh priest came to
his bishop and said, "I have brought your lordship a present of two
hundred _oves_." He meant "_ova_"; but the bishop insisted on the
sheep; and the priest probably rubbed up his Latin grammar. Gerald had
also other patriotic reasons for his hostility to the archbishop, who
as chief justiciary--_i.e._, chief minister of the king--had recently
attacked and defeated the Welsh between the Wye and the Severn.
"Blessed be God," writes Gerald sarcastically to him, "who has taught
your hands to war and your fingers to fight, for since the days when
Harold almost exterminated the nation, no prince has destroyed so many
Welshmen in one battle as your Grace."
Gerald continued the struggle till 1203, though deserted by the Welsh
clergy. "The laity of Wales," he said, "stood by me; but of the
clergy whose battle I was fighting, scarce one." He was proclaimed as
a rebel, and had some narrow escapes of imprisonment or worse--escapes
which he owed to his ready wit and which he delights to tell. At last
he gave way, and during the remainder of his life we find him at Rome,
Lincoln, St. David's, revising his works and writing new ones,
modifying some of his judgments (especially that on Hubert Walter),
and encouraging Stephen Langton in the great struggle against John. He
was buried at St. David's, probably in 1223.
We will now return to the "Itinerary through Wales" and the
"Description of Wales." Jerusalem was taken by Saladin in 1187, and
the Third Crusade--the Crusade of Richard Coeur de Lion--was preached
throughout Europe. In 1188 Archbishop Baldwin made a preaching tour
through Wales accompanied by Glanville, the great justiciary of Henry
II., and Gerald of Barry. While the primary object was the preaching
of the Crusade, the king had an eye to business and saw that the Holy
Cause could be utilised for other purposes; it gave an opportunity for
the assertion of the metropolitan rights of Canterbury over the Welsh
Church, and for a survey of the country by the royal officials, which
was not possible under other circumstances. That is why the archbishop
and the justiciar accompanied the expedition. It is remarkable that
Gerald, the champion of the Welsh Church, should have given his
support to it; but he had not fully adopted the patriotic attitude of
his later years; and, with him as with most people of the time, the
rescue of the Holy Sepulchre was, in theory at any rate, the greatest
object in the world; while further, we must not forget that the
journey had many attractions for him as an author; it gave him "copy"
for a new book, and the chance of reading his Irish Topography to the
archbishop. Every day during the journey the archbishop listened to a
portion of this book, and at the end took it home to finish. As the
journey lasted at least fifty days, one may calculate that it took at
most an average of three pages a day to send the archbishop to sleep.
The Itinerary (which was later dedicated to Stephen Langton) contains
in the author's words an account of "the difficult places through
which we passed, the names of springs and torrents, the witty sayings,
the toils and incidents of the journey, the memorable events of
ancient and modern times, and the natural history and description of
the country."
The route pursued was as follows: From Hereford to Radnor, Brecon,
Abergavenny, Caerleon, Newport, Cardiff, Llandaff, Ewenny, Margam,
Swansea, Kidweli, Carmarthen, Haverford, St. David's, Cardigan, Strata
Florida, thence keeping close to the coast, through Bangor and
Chester; and then south by Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Ludlow, to Hereford.
The travellers were well received and entertained both by the Lords
Marcher and the Welsh princes. It was especially to the Welsh that
their attention was directed, and Welsh princes accompanied them
through their territories. The chief was Rhys ap Gruffydd (Gerald's
uncle), prince of South Wales, who was then at the height of his
power, and had been made chief justice of South Wales by Henry II., to
whom he faithfully adhered. Gwynedd and Powys were then divided among
several heirs. One of the princes of Powys, Owain Cyfeiliog, the poet,
was distinguished as being the only prince who did not come to meet
the archbishop with his people; for which he was excommunicated.
Gerald notes that he was an adherent of Henry II., and was
"conspicuous for the good management of his territory." Perhaps that
is why he would not have anything to do with the Crusade.
How far was the expedition successful in its primary object in gaining
crusaders? The archbishop and justiciar had already taken the cross;
they remained true to their vows and went to the Holy Land, the
archbishop dying at the siege of Acre, heartbroken at the wickedness
of the army. Gerald himself was the first to take the cross in Wales,
not acting under the influence of religious enthusiasm, but (as he
says himself) "impelled by the urgent requests and promises of the
king and persuasions of the archbishop," who wanted him to act as
historian; but Gerald, after setting the example, bought a
dispensation and did not go. A number of the lesser Welsh princes soon
took the cross. The Lord Rhys himself was eager to do so, but "his
wife by female artifices diverted him wholly from his noble purpose."
The wives were all dead against the whole affair. At Hay the wives
caught hold of their husbands, and the would-be Crusaders had
literally to run away from them to the castle, leaving their cloaks
behind them. A nobler spirit of self-sacrifice was shown by the old
woman of Cardigan, who, when her only son took the cross, said: "O
most beloved Lord Jesus Christ, I give Thee hearty thanks for having
conferred on me the blessing of bringing forth a son worthy of Thy
service." This son was probably worth more than the twelve archers of
the castle of St. Clears who were forcibly signed with the cross for
committing a murder; and one may reasonably look with suspicion on the
sudden conversion of "many of the most notorious murderers and robbers
of the neighbourhood" at Usk. It was this kind of thing that turned
the Holy Land into a sort of convict settlement.
The preachers clearly worked hard and had some trying experiences, and
kept up their spirits by little jokes, which Gerald retails. They
nearly came to grief in quicksands at the mouth of the river Neath.
"Terrible hard country this," said one of the monks next day in the
castle at Swansea. "Some people are never satisfied," retorted his
companion; "you were complaining of its being too soft in the
quicksand yesterday." The mountains were trying to men no longer in
their youth; after toiling up one the archbishop sank exhausted on a
fallen tree and said to his panting companions, "Can any one enliven
the company by whistling a tune?" "Which," adds Gerald, "is not very
easily done by people out of breath." From whistling the conversation
passed to nightingales, which some one said were never found in Wales.
"Wise bird, the nightingale," remarked the archbishop.
One serious difficulty they had was that none of them, not even
Gerald, knew Welsh sufficiently well to preach in it, though they
generally had interpreters. The archbishop, who would sometimes preach
away for hours without result, felt this much more than Gerald. He
declares he moved crowds to tears though they did not understand a
word of what he was saying. But one may take the words of Prince
Rhys's fool as evidence (if any were needed) that ignorance of Welsh
weakened the effect. "You owe a great debt, Rhys, to your kinsman the
archdeacon, who has taken a hundred or so of your men to serve the
Lord; if he had only spoken in Welsh, you wouldn't have had a soul
left."
In all about three thousand took the cross; but the Crusade was
delayed, zeal cooled, and it is probable that comparatively few went.
The _Itinerarium Regis Ricardi_ mentions, I think, only one exploit by
a Welshman in the Third Crusade; he was an archer, and so a South
Walian.
This brings me to one of the incidental notes of great value scattered
about the Itinerary. Speaking of the siege of Abergavenny (1182),
Gerald tells us that the men of Gwent and Glamorgan excelled all
others in the use of the bow, and gives curious evidence of the
strength of their shooting. Thus the arrows pierced an oak door four
inches thick; they had been left there as a curiosity, and Gerald saw
them with their iron points coming through on the inner side. He
describes these bows as "made of elm--ugly, unfinished-looking
weapons, but astonishingly stiff, large, and strong, and equally
useful for long and short shooting." Add to this that the longbow was
not a characteristic English weapon till the latter part of the
thirteenth century, that the first battle in which an English king
made effective use of archery (at Falkirk, 1298), his infantry
consisted mainly of Welshmen; and there can be little doubt that the
famous longbow of England, which won the victories of Crecy and
Poitiers and Agincourt, and indirectly did much to destroy feudalism
and villenage, had its home in South Wales.
Gerald was also a keen observer of nature, and his knowledge of the
ways of animals is extensive and peculiar. Perhaps even more marked
is his love of the supernatural; he could believe anything, if it was
only wonderful enough--except Geoffrey of Monmouth's History. But I
must confine myself to one story--the story of the boy in Gower who
(as the root of learning is bitter) played truant and found two little
men of pigmy stature, and went with them to their country under the
earth, and played games with golden balls with the fairy prince. These
little folk were very small--of fair complexion, and long luxuriant
hair; and they had horses and dogs to suit their size. They hated
nothing so much as lies; "they had no form of public worship, being
lovers and reverers, it seemed, of truth." The boy often went, till he
tried to steal a golden ball, and then he could never find fairyland
again. But he learnt some of the fairy language, which was like Greek.
And then Gerald compares words in different languages, and notes how,
for instance, the same word for _salt_ runs through Greek and British
and Irish and Latin and French and English and German, and the fairy
language, which suggests a close relation between all these peoples
in past ages. It is very modern; and it is not without reason that
Gerald has been called "the father of comparative philology."
In his "Description of Wales" Gerald describes the manner of life and
characteristics of the people. All are trained to arms, and when the
trumpet sounds the alarm, the husbandman rushes as eagerly from his
plough as the courtier from his court. Agricultural work takes up
little of their time, as they are still mainly in a pastoral stage,
living on the produce of their herds, and eating more meat than bread.
They fight and undergo hardships and willingly sacrifice their lives
for their country and for liberty. They wear little defensive armour,
and depend mainly on their mobility; they are not much good at a close
engagement, but generally victors in a running fight, relying more on
their activity than on their strength.
It was the fashion to keep open house for all comers. "Those who
arrive in the morning are entertained till evening with the
conversation of young women and the music of the harp; for each house
has its young women and harps allotted for the purpose. In each
family the art of playing on the harp is held preferable to any other
learning; and no nation is so free from jealousy as the Welsh." After
a simple supper (for the people are not addicted to gluttony or
drunkenness), "a bed of rushes is placed along the side of the hall,
and all in common lie down to sleep with their feet towards the fire.
They sleep in the thin cloak and tunic they wear by day. They receive
much comfort from the natural heat of the persons lying near them; but
when the underside begins to be tired with the hardness of the bed, or
the upper one to suffer from the cold, they get up and go to the fire;
and then returning to the couch they expose their sides alternately to
the cold and to the hardness of the bed."
Gifted with an acute and rich intellect they excel in whatever studies
they pursue, notably in music. They are especially famous for their
part-singing, "so that in a company of singers, which one very often
meets with in Wales, you will hear as many different parts and voices
as there are performers,"(!) and this gift has by long habit become
natural to the nation.
"They show a greater respect than other nations to churches and
ecclesiastics, to the relics of saints, bells, holy books, and the
cross; and hence their churches enjoy more than common tranquillity."