Ecclesiastic and author; of Norman descent on his father’s side; born about 1147, at the castle of Manorbeer, near Pembroke, in South Wales. The last seventeen years of his life were spent in studious retirement. He spent about eight years in the University of Paris—four years from 1168 to 1172, and another four years from 1176 to 1180. He was made Archdeacon of Brecknock in 1172. He was a restless, ambitious ecclesiastic, refusing in 1190 the bishopric of Bangor and in 1191 the bishopric of Llandaff in the hope of being made Bishop of St. David’s. Died in St. David’s, after 1216, perhaps in 1220. He was a witty, brilliant, but egotistical writer. His most famous books, both written in Latin, are the “Topography of Ireland” (1188) and the “Itinerary through Wales” (1191). His complete works, edited by Brewer and Dimock, were published, under the direction of the master of the rolls, in seven volumes (London 1861–1877.)

  That Girald of Wales was a man of uncommon activity, genius, and learning, is undeniable; but these and his other good qualities were much tarnished by his insufferable vanity, which must have been very offensive to his contemporaries, as it is highly disgusting to his readers.

  Noble in his birth, and comely in his person; mild in his manners, and affable in his conversation; zealous, active, and undaunted in maintaining the rights and dignities of his church; moral in his character, and orthodox in his principles; charitable and disinterested, though ambitious; learned, though superstitious; such was Giraldus. And, in whatever point of view we examine the character of this extraordinary man, whether as a scholar, a patriot, or a divine, we may justly consider him as one of the brightest luminaries that adorned the annals of the twelfth century.

  The works of Giraldus Cambrensis are numerous, and they are all interesting for the light they throw on the historical events and on the political and religious condition of the age in which he lived. They are not the meditations of the solitary student, or the controversial disquisitions of the theologian; but they reflect faithfully the thoughts and opinions of a man busy in all the intrigues and convulsions of the world around him, and are filled with minute and private anecdotes and stories of the people among whom he lived and with whom he acted. His style, though less ostentatiously learned than that of Peter of Blois, is that of a scholar and a man of extensive reading. His descriptions are generally marked by a clearness of narrative and a distinctness of conception which are not often found among the medieval writers; and, when he dwells on his own wrongs, or enters upon his own enmities, his style is distinguished by a warmth of eloquence which is peculiar to him.

  Tall, stalwart, bushy-browed Gerald the Welshman, called also Silvester (the Savage)—which was but an English word for Welshman in his day—represented in the twelfth century the church militant in Wales. A man ready at the worst season to cross Alps, or defy archbishops, if not kings, in the pursuit of his idea, he really lives in his writings. They are yet warm with his own natural heat. The strong flavour of his personality in all he writes, and his Welsh blood, give often to his manner an excess of boastfulness, and there is some Welsh pedantry, perhaps, but it is not the vanity of a weak self-contemplation that mingles with Gerald’s flow of social anecdote and hearty comment on affairs of men, while jest and pun and practical home-thrusting humanise his use of his book-knowledge. He planned his narratives upon no model, good or bad, but spoke his mind with vivid earnestness, with strength and fearless truth that was the more genuine for its impetuosity. His sketches of his own career (“De Rebus a se Gestis”) and his letters are alive with action and the soul of action in the mind and temper that beget the stir which they describe. His personal account of Ireland, to be found in Camden’s “British Writers,” is no dry antique itinerary, but a series of vigorous and graphic sketches both of men and things, unequalled in Gerald’s own time for its spirit and truth; as a picture of Ireland, remaining without equal till the time of Spenser.