Gerald the Welshman - Giraldus Cambrensis - was born, probably in
1147, at Manorbier Castle in the county of Pembroke. His father was
a Norman noble, William de Barri, who took his name from the little
island of Barry off the coast of Glamorgan. His mother, Angharad,
was the daughter of Gerald de Windsor {1} by his wife, the famous
Princess Nesta, the "Helen of Wales," and the daughter of Rhys ap
Tewdwr Mawr, the last independent Prince of South Wales.
Gerald was therefore born to romance and adventure. He was reared
in the traditions of the House of Dinevor. He heard the brilliant
and pitiful stories of Rhys ap Tewdwr, who, after having lost and
won South Wales, died on the stricken field fighting against the
Normans, an old man of over fourscore years; and of his gallant son,
Prince Rhys, who, after wrenching his patrimony from the invaders,
died of a broken heart a few months after his wife, the Princess
Gwenllian, had fallen in a skirmish at Kidwelly. No doubt he heard,
though he makes but sparing allusion to them, of the loves and
adventures of his grandmother, the Princess Nesta, the daughter and
sister of a prince, the wife of an adventurer, the concubine of a
king, and the paramour of every daring lover - a Welshwoman whose
passions embroiled all Wales, and England too, in war, and the
mother of heroes - Fitz-Geralds, Fitz-Stephens, and Fitz-Henries,
and others - who, regardless of their mother's eccentricity in the
choice of their fathers, united like brothers in the most
adventurous undertaking of that age, the Conquest of Ireland.
Though his mother was half Saxon and his father probably fully
Norman, Gerald, with a true instinct, described himself as a
"Welshman." His frank vanity, so naive as to be void of offence,
his easy acceptance of everything which Providence had bestowed on
him, his incorrigible belief that all the world took as much
interest in himself and all that appealed to him as he did himself,
the readiness with which he adapted himself to all sorts of men and
of circumstances, his credulity in matters of faith and his shrewd
common sense in things of the world, his wit and lively fancy, his
eloquence of tongue and pen, his acute rather than accurate
observation, his scholarship elegant rather than profound, are all
characteristic of a certain lovable type of South Walian. He was
not blind to the defects of his countrymen any more than to others
of his contemporaries, but the Welsh he chastised as one who loved
them. His praise followed ever close upon the heels of his
criticism. There was none of the rancour in his references to Wales
which defaces his account of contemporary Ireland. He was
acquainted with Welsh, though he does not seem to have preached it,
and another archdeacon acted as the interpreter of Archbishop
Baldwin's Crusade sermon in Anglesea.
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