He Detested The Practice Of Promoting
Normans To Welsh Sees, And Of Excluding Welshmen From High Positions
In Their Own Country.
"Because I am a Welshman, am I to be debarred
from all preferment in Wales?" he indignantly writes to the Pope.
Circumstances at first seemed to favour his ambition.
His uncle,
David Fitz-Gerald, sat in the seat of St. David's. When the young
scholar returned from Paris in 1172, he found the path of promotion
easy. After the manner of that age - which Gerald lived to denounce
- he soon became a pluralist. He held the livings of Llanwnda,
Tenby, and Angle, and afterwards the prebend of Mathry, in
Pembrokeshire, and the living of Chesterton in Oxfordshire. He was
also prebendary of Hereford, canon of St. David's, and in 1175, when
only twenty-eight years of age, he became Archdeacon of Brecon. In
the following year Bishop David died, and Gerald, together with the
other archdeacons of the diocese, was nominated by the chapter for
the king's choice. But the chapter had been premature, urged, no
doubt, by the impetuous young Archdeacon of Brecon. They had not
waited for the king's consent to the nomination. The king saw that
his settled policy in Wales would be overturned if Gerald became
Bishop of St. David's. Gerald's cousin, the Lord Rhys, had been
appointed the king's justiciar in South Wales. The power of the
Lord Marches was to be kept in check by a quasi-alliance between the
Welsh prince and his over-lord. The election of Gerald to the
greatest see in Wales would upset the balance of power. David Fitz-
Gerald, good easy man (vir sua sorte contentus is Gerald's
description of him), the king could tolerate, but he could not
contemplate without uneasiness the combination of spiritual and
political power in South Wales in the hands of two able, ambitious,
and energetic kinsmen, such as he knew Gerald and the Lord Rhys to
be. Gerald had made no secret of his admiration for the martyred
St. Thomas e Becket. He fashioned himself upon him as Becket did on
Anselm. The part which Becket played in England he would like to
play in Wales. But the sovereign who had destroyed Becket was not
to be frightened by the canons of St. David's and the Archdeacon of
Brecon. He summoned the chapter to Westminster, and compelled them
in his presence to elect Peter de Leia, the Prior of Wenlock, who
erected for himself an imperishable monument in the noble cathedral
which looks as if it had sprung up from the rocks which guard the
city of Dewi Sant from the inrush of the western sea.
It is needless to recount the many activities in which Gerald
engaged during the next twenty-two years. They have been recounted
with humorous and affectionate appreciation by Dr. Henry Owen in his
monograph on "Gerald the Welshman," a little masterpiece of
biography which deserves to be better known. {4} In 1183 Gerald was
employed by the astute king to settle terms between him and the
rebellious Lord Rhys.
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