Few figures from the medieval period have so vividly described their world, or themselves, as Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis). Born around 1146 at Manorbier Castle, on the south coast of Pembrokeshire, his father was a prominent Norman baron, while his mother was the daughter of a Welsh princess. This mixed bloodline would shape Gerald’s life and his writing, granting him a unique, if sometimes vexed, vantage point on the places he visited in medieval Britain.
More than a chronicler, Gerald was a man of ambition, intellect, and opinions – a churchman and reformer, an adventurer, and, above all, a writer determined that his legacy would be secured on the page. If his bishops and kings could frustrate his plans, his pen would not be so easily stilled.
Restless Scholar: Gerald’s Life and Career
Educated in Paris, the intellectual capital of twelfth-century Europe, Gerald returned to Wales and quickly rose through the church ranks, becoming archdeacon of Brecon. His position brought him into the orbit of Henry II, the formidable king who was wary both of ambitious prelates and fractious Welsh princes. Gerald’s mixed heritage made him a useful intermediary, but it also left him, in his own words, an outsider – despised, or at least mistrusted, by both Norman and Welsh alike.
His efforts to become Bishop of St David’s proved a life-long quest. The position not only promised power in Wales but potentially a return to an era when St David’s was independent of the English church and equal to Canterbury. Gerald lobbied fiercely, traveling multiple times to Rome to plead his cause before the pope. Each attempt ended in frustration, as politics – both ecclesiastical and national – thwarted his aims.
After losing his ecclesiastical ambitions, Gerald unleashed political polemics against the Angevin kings (Henry II and his descendants). In his treatise “The Instruction,” he aired every rumor and scandal he could find, including accusations of adultery involving Queen Eleanor and her family, portraying the royal lineage as “defective, born out of sin and ungodliness.” These allegations were shocking, personal, and meant to sully royal reputations.
Yet these struggles, rather than embittering him, seem to have redoubled his commitment to writing, and his prose is shot through with the urgency and candor of a man determined to make his case to posterity.
The Itinerary and the Description: Travels Through Wales
Gerald’s most celebrated work is the Itinerarium Cambriae (“Itinerary of Wales”), his account of the 1188 tour he made with Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury. The purpose was evangelistic: to recruit Welshmen for the Third Crusade following the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. His charismatic preaching incited reports of husbands abandoning their wives to “take the Cross”.
But for Gerald, the journey was also an opportunity to observe, judge, and record the varied landscapes, peoples, and peculiarities of his native land Accompanied by priests, notaries, and hangers-on – and enduring “roads worse than the ways of Hell” (his own words) – Gerald and Archbishop Baldwin trekked over 600 miles, from Hereford to St David’s and back, taking in an astonishing variety of country: bogs and mountains, windswept moors, castles perched on crags, tiny chapels, and bustling market towns.
What marks Gerald as a travel writer far ahead of his time is his insistence on the personal viewpoint. He interweaves observation with opinion: “This is what I saw, but this is what I think.” He is as likely to offer a scathing remark on the “barbarous ignorance” of a remote village as he is to recount, with relish, a folk tale from a fireside in Ceredigion. He describes ancient customs and marvels at oddities of the natural world – most famously, the beaver’s “wondrous genius for construction” and the barnacle goose, which, he asserts, hatches from driftwood.
His other great Welsh work, the Descriptio Cambriae (“Description of Wales”), is less a narrative and more a travel guide-cum-ethnography, full of musings on Welsh society, language, law, and character. Here, Gerald sometimes lapses into the prejudices of his time, extolling Norman “civilization” over native ways; but elsewhere, he voices genuine admiration for the independence and musical skill of the Welsh, especially their love of poetry and bardic tradition.
Into Ireland: The Topography and the Conquest
Gerald’s sorties into Ireland, first with Prince John in 1185, birthed two influential if controversial volumes: the Topographia Hibernica (Topography of Ireland) and the Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland). These works mix natural history, legend, political reporting, and polemic. With the zeal of both a tourist and a colonial observer, Gerald catalogues fantastical marvels – lake monsters, enchanted stones, trees that weep blood – and the “barbarous” customs of the local Irish. His accounts are colored by deep family ties: his own uncles carved out lordships during the Anglo-Norman conquest.
Both “Topography of Ireland” and “Expugnatio Hibernica” are infamous for depicting the Irish as barbaric, filthy, and backward – claims that had a long-lasting impact and were used to justify English colonization. His sermons in Ireland provoked outrage from local clergy, and his works remain controversial for their overt propaganda, xenophobia, and extraordinary stories (e.g. a man eaten alive by toads).
While modern readers often bristle at his harsh judgments and credulity regarding the supernatural, Gerald’s Irish narratives are invaluable for their record of medieval society – its laws, its conflicts, its humor, and its resilience. As many have noted, he includes lively stories that no one else recorded, making his history a vital window on twelfth-century Ireland.
However, Gerald also advised English monarchs on the most ruthless ways to subdue Wales and Ireland – advocating starvation, confiscation of wealth, castle-building, and military campaigns, including naval blockades and direct attacks. His strategic writings were not just controversial but cited as influential for later invasions
The Art and Legacy of Gerald’s Travel Writing
Gerald’s travel books are not, strictly speaking, “histories” in the modern sense. They are part ethnography, part topographical survey, part memoir. He marshals formidable learning – quoting Latin classics, Church Fathers, and medieval authorities – yet his style is vividly personal. Anecdotes, marvels, belly-laughs, and complaints against rivals jostle for space alongside serious meditations on faith and fate.
What sets Gerald apart, and guarantees his place among the very first “travel writers,” is his blend of sharp observation and autobiographical flair. He does not just record what he sees; he interprets, moralizes, ridicules, and sometimes wonders. His ear for gossip, his eye for the telling detail, and his penchant for self-dramatization make his pages come alive. “This is the rudest and least cultivated region,” he grumbles about Merioneth, even as he compliments the spear-wielding skill of its sons.
For all his bluster and prejudice, Gerald’s work possesses warmth, humor, and candor. He rails against his enemies (and they were many) but is not above laughing at himself. Later generations have found in him a forerunner of the great travel writers – men and women who journey not only to record distances, but also to map the boundaries of curiosity, bias, and wonder.
Anecdotes and Vivid Episodes
Gerald’s journey was not all slog and politics. He delighted in recounting local legends and bizarre events: like the tale of the boy from St. David’s who was taken by fairies, or the Welsh exile who predicted King Henry II’s coming by reading omens in the behavior of a passing bird. At Cardigan Castle, he describes a feast thrown by Lord Rhys, where songs, instrumentals, and poetry provided raucous entertainment. Such feasts were, to Gerald, proof of Welsh antiquity (and weakness – they drank too much, he thought), but also symbols of a lively culture not yet erased by conquest.
One of his most famous stories comes at the end of Descriptio Cambriae, where a venerable old man of Pencader addresses Henry II, telling the king that “this nation will never in any way be destroyed by the wrath of man, unless it be by the punishment of God.” Historians have puzzled over the tale’s veracity, but there is no denying its dramatic power. In framing such utterances, Gerald paints himself both as reporter and muse, mapping the drama of history as well as the details of the countryside.
Style: Proud, Prejudiced, and Human
Modern readers may lament Gerald’s prejudices – against the Irish, at times against the Welsh, against women, and against anyone who dared dispute his claims to ecclesiastical office. But his writing is never bland. He writes in clear, vigorous Latin (his English and Welsh were serviceable at best), and he peppers his prose with quotations, classical references, and personal reminiscence. A “vain, conceited, and self-important” man, some critics have said. Yet his honesty about his ambitions and disappointments gives his work an engaging, almost confessional air.
He was equally at home sneering at the wretched roads of mid-Wales, marveling at the miracles of St. David’s, and dishing up comic episodes of peasant life. There is even a proto-scientific impulse in his fascination with the habits of animals, the nature of mountains, and the changing tides – a desire to see, if not always to understand, the marvelous world he traipsed through.
The Impact and Afterlife of Gerald
Gerald’s books became models for later genres: not only travel writing, but also autobiography, ethnography, local history, and satire. His stories of Welsh and Irish life have colored perceptions for centuries, supplying raw material for scholars, antiquarians, and novelists alike. He stands, with Chaucer and Bede, as one of the greatest medieval commentators on the British Isles.
Even now, travelers can trace his path across Wales, finding towns and castles little changed from his time, and pondering the same marvels that animated Gerald’s prose. His sense of place, his jumble of pride and grievance, make him a sympathetic guide to an era very much like our own: caught between tradition and change, parochialism and curiosity.
Gerald of Wales was a man of his time: ambitious, curious, both insider and outsider. His travel writings endure not only because they offer unique glimpses into the politics, personalities, and peculiarities of twelfth-century Britain and Ireland, but also because they foreground the author’s own quest for understanding, recognition, and, above all, immortality in words. If history has sometimes sided with his adversaries, Gerald’s legacy proves he was victorious on one front: his books are read and enjoyed still, “for what you write down and give to the world… is never lost”.
