The greater part—certainly the noblest part—of this vast fabric of romance seems to have been woven by the genius of one man.[2193] Every side of the intellectual movement which throughout the latter half of the twelfth century was working a revolution in English thought and life is reflected in Walter Map. Born on the marches of England and Wales, probably in the early years of the civil war, he studied at Paris under Gerard la Pucelle, and came home again, while Thomas Becket was still chancellor, to occupy some post at court, doubtless that of chaplain to the king. He came of a family which had already done good service to the Crown; but once in personal contact with Henry himself, Walter can have needed no passport to the royal favour save his own versatile genius. At once a scholar, a theologian and a poet, an earnest political and ecclesiastical reformer and a polished man of the world, shrewd and practical, witty and wise, he soon rose high in the king’s confidence and esteem. Henry employed him in the most varied capacities—as a justice-itinerant in England, as an ambassador to the court of France, as a representative of English orthodoxy and theological learning at the Lateran council of 1179; while in the intervals of these missions he was in close and constant attendance upon the king himself. In addition to his post in the royal household he held several ecclesiastical preferments—a canonry at S. Paul’s, the parsonage of Westbury in Gloucestershire, and the precentorship of Lincoln, which he resigned in 1196 to become archdeacon of Oxford.[2194] By that time his literary work was probably for the most part done. The only book now extant which actually bears his name, the treatise De Nugis Curialium—“Courtiers’ Triflings”—is a fruit of the busy years spent in attendance upon King Henry from 1182 to 1189. By its title and origin it recalls the Polycraticus; and the difference between the two books marks the change which had come over the tone of educated English thought in the quarter of a century that lay between them. Walter Map was, in all likelihood, as ripe a scholar as John of Salisbury; but there is nothing scholastic in his treatment of his subject. His book is far less elaborate in form and methodical in arrangement than John’s; it has, in fact, no visible arrangement at all; it is a collection of miscellaneous notes—scraps of folklore from the Welsh marches, tales brought home by pilgrims and crusaders from Byzantium or Jerusalem, stories from the classics, sayings from the Fathers, fragments of information gleaned from the by-ways of history, personal anecdotes new and old, sketches of contemporary life and manners in the world and the Church, court-news, court-gossip, court-scandal—all, as it seems, picked out at random from the writer’s private commonplace-book and flashed in picturesque confusion before the eyes of the literary public of his day. Yet the purpose of it all is as earnest as that of the Polycraticus, though veiled under a shew of carelessness. Walter appeals to a wider circle than John; he writes not for a chosen band of kindred souls, but for all sorts and conditions of men who know Latin enough to read him, for courtiers and men of the world who have neither time nor patience to go through a course of philosophical reasonings and exhortations, but who may be caught at unawares by “truth embodied in a tale,” and are the more likely to be caught by it the more unexpected the shape in which it comes. When Walter stops to point the moral of his stories—for a moral they always have—he does it with the utmost tact; more often he leaves his readers to find the moral for themselves. “I am your huntsman; I bring you the game; dress the dishes for yourselves!” he tells them.[2195] But he strikes down the quarry—if we may venture to borrow his own metaphor—with a far more unsparing hand than his predecessor. King Henry himself, indeed, never was spared in his own court; but it is in the satirist’s attitude towards the Church that we find the most significant sign of the times. The grave tone of righteous indignation, the shame and grief of the Theobaldine reformers at the decay of ecclesiastical purity, has given place to bitter mockery and scathing sarcasm. Where John lifts up his hands in deprecation of Heaven’s wrath against its unworthy ministers, Walter points at them the finger of scorn. John turns with eager hope from the picture of decaying discipline and declining morality, which he paints with firm hand but with averted face, to the prospect of a reformation which is to be the spontaneous work of the clergy and the “religious” themselves; Walter has seen this dream of reform buried in the grave of S. Thomas—perhaps we should rather say of Theobald—and now sees no way of dealing with the mass of corruption but to fling it bodily into the furnace of public criticism and popular hatred. The mightiest creation of his genius is the “Bishop Goliath” whose gigantic figure embodies all the vice and all the crime which were bringing disgrace upon the clerical order in his day. The “Apocalypse” and “Confession” of this imaginary prelate have been ascribed to Walter Map by a constant tradition whose truth it is impossible to doubt, although it rests upon no direct contemporary authority.[2196] The satire is in fact so daring, so bitter, and withal so appallingly true to life, that the author may well have deemed it wiser to conceal his name. He is the anonymous spokesman of a new criticism which has not yet fully discovered its own power; of a public opinion which is no longer held in check by external authority, but which is beginning to be itself an independent force; which dares to sling its pebble at abuses that have defied king and Pope, and will dare one day to sling it at king and Pope themselves. That day, however, was still far distant. Walter’s ideal of perfection in Church and state is one with John of Salisbury’s, only it is set forth in a different shape. The moral lesson which lies at the heart of the Arthurian romances comes home to us the more forcibly as we remember that the hand which drew Sir Galahad was the same hand which drew Bishop Goliath.

Side by side with Walter Map, in the foremost rank of this new school of critics and satirists, stands his probably younger contemporary, Gerald de Barri. Gerald was born in 1147 in the castle of Manorbeer, some three miles from Pembroke. He has left us a vivid picture of his childhood’s home—its ramparts and towers crowning a lofty hill-top exposed to all the winds that swept over the stormy Irish Sea, whirled up the creek that ran up from the Bristol Channel to westward of the castle, and ruffled with ceaseless wavelets the surface of the little stream that flowed through the sandy valley on its eastern side;—its splendid fishponds at the northern foot of the hill, the enclosed tract of garden-ground beyond, and at the back of all, the protecting belt of woodland whose precipitous paths and lofty nut-trees were perhaps alike attractive to Gerald and his brothers in their boyish days.[2197] His father, William de Barri, the lord of Manorbeer, represented one of those Norman families of knightly rank who had made for themselves a home in South Wales, half as conquerors, half as settlers, in the days of Henry I. His mother, Angareth, was a granddaughter of Rees Ap-Tewdor, prince of South Wales—a child of his daughter Nest by her marriage with Gerald the constable of Pembroke; and the fiery Celtic spirit as well as the quick Celtic wit which the boy inherited from her shews itself alike in every act of his life and in every page of his writings. On both sides he came of a race of fighting-men, and he was certainly not the least pugnacious of his family. The countless battles of his life were, however, to be fought with other weapons than the sword which had won Manorbeer for his paternal ancestors, and which was soon to win for some of his mother’s nearest kinsmen—for her half-brother Robert Fitz-Stephen, her nephews Meiler and Robert and Raymond, her own brother Maurice Fitz-Gerald—a wider heritage and a more lasting fame beyond the Irish Sea. Gerald’s bent towards the clerical profession shewed itself in his earliest years; as a child he was known at Manorbeer as “the little bishop.” At three different periods before he reached the age of twenty-five, he spent some years in study at Paris, where he also lectured upon rhetoric with considerable success. He finally came home in 1172, just as King Henry, having twice passed through South Wales on his way to and from Ireland, was planning out a new scheme for the government of the principality. One part of this scheme was, as we have seen, the delegation of the supreme authority to the young Welsh prince Rees Ap-Griffith. Another part was the revival of the policy begun by the Norman kings of managing the Welsh people through the instrumentality of the Church, and, to this intent, filling the ranks of the clergy in Wales with as many foreign priests as possible. Experience had, however, shewn that men of pure English or Norman blood were not always the fittest instruments for such a purpose. A year after Gerald’s birth a compromise had been tried in the appointment to the bishopric of S. David’s of a prelate who was half Norman and half Welsh:—David, son of Gerald of Pembroke and Nest, brother of Maurice Fitz-Gerald and of Angareth the wife of William de Barri. When Angareth’s son Gerald came home from Paris in 1172, therefore, the influence of her family was at its height. The foremost man in South Wales was her cousin Rees Ap-Griffith; the second was her brother the bishop of S. David’s. It was only natural that Gerald, sharing with his uncle the qualification of mingled Welsh and Norman blood, and already known as a distinguished scholar of the most famous seat of learning in Europe, should be at once selected for employment in the business of reforming his native land. Gerald himself was eager for the work; he had no difficulty in obtaining from Archbishop Richard a commission to act as his legate and representative in the diocese of S. David’s; thus armed, he began a vigorous campaign against the evil doings of clergy and laity alike—forcing the people to pay their tithes of wool and cheese, a duty which the Welsh were always very unwilling to fulfil; compelling the priests to abandon the lax system of discipline which they had inherited from the ancient British Church, and had contrived to retain in spite of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald; excommunicating the sheriff and deposing the archdeacon of Brecknock themselves when they dared to resist his authority, and receiving in 1175, as the reward of his zeal, the appointment to the vacated archdeaconry.

Early in the next year his uncle, Bishop David, died. The young archdeacon had just issued victorious from a sharp struggle in behalf of the see against the bishop of S. Asaph’s, who had attempted to encroach upon its rights; the darling wish of his heart was to see it restored to its ancient metropolitical rank; and he had managed to kindle in his fellow-canons a spark of the same ambition. They saw in him the only man capable of bringing their desire to fulfilment, and made a bold attempt to obtain him for their bishop. By this time, however, both King Henry and Archbishop Richard had learned enough of Gerald’s character to perceive that, however useful he might be as an archdeacon in Wales, he was not at all the man to suit their purposes as bishop of any Welsh see, least of all as bishop of S. David’s. Henry, with a burst of fury, summarily refused the nomination of the chapter; a long wrangle ended in the appointment of Peter de Leia, prior of the Cluniac house of Much Wenlock, to the vacant see. Peter, being a foreigner, a monk, and a man of no great intellectual capacity, was utterly unable either to rule his turbulent Welsh flock or to cope with his self-willed and quick-witted Welsh canons; Gerald undertook to teach him his duties, but found him such an unsatisfactory pupil that he soon gave up the task in disgust, and again betook himself to Paris. There he remained, studying civil and canon law, and lecturing at the same time with great success, till the summer of 1180, when he returned to England, was received by the chapter of Canterbury at a great banquet on Trinity Sunday, and thence proceeded into Wales. He found Bishop Peter at his wits’ end, and the diocese in utter confusion, which he at once set himself to remedy after his own fashion. Thus matters went on till 1184, when Henry on his last hurried visit to England found time to intervene once more in the troubled affairs of South Wales. He called a council on the border, summoned Gerald to meet him there, and employed him to arrange the final submission of his cousin Rees to the English Crown; and then he dexterously removed the over-zealous archdeacon from a sphere where he was likely henceforth to be more dangerous than useful, by making him one of his own chaplains, and sending him next year to Ireland in attendance upon John. John came back in September; Gerald lingered till the following Easter. Two books were the fruit of this visit: a Topography of Ireland, published in 1187, and dedicated to the king; and the Conquest of Ireland, which came out under the patronage of Count Richard of Poitou in 1188. Towards the close of that year, when Archbishop Baldwin went to preach the Crusade in Wales, Gerald accompanied him half as interpreter, half as guide. An Itinerary of Wales forms the record of this expedition, which was followed by a journey over sea, still in the company of the archbishop, with whom Gerald seems to have remained in more or less close attendance upon Henry’s movements until the final catastrophe in July 1189. He then offered his services to Richard, who sent him home once more to his old task of helping to keep order in South Wales. For a while he found favour with all parties;[2198] William of Longchamp offered him the bishopric of Bangor, John, in his day of power after William’s fall, offered him that of Landaff. Gerald however refused them both, as he had already refused two Irish sees; he cared in fact for no preferment short of the metropolitan chair of S. David. Shut out of Paris by the war between Richard and Philip Augustus, he withdrew to Lincoln and resumed his theological studies under its chancellor William, whom he had known in his earlier college days on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève, till in the summer of 1198 he was roused to action once more by the death of Bishop Peter de Leia. The fight began at once; the chapter of S. David’s nominated Gerald for the vacant see; the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, set his face against the nomination; they defied his authority and appealed to king and Pope; Gerald himself fought his own battle and that of the see with indomitable courage, at home and abroad, for nearly four years; but the canons were less resolute than their bishop-elect, he found himself at last fighting alone against the world, and in 1202 he gave up the struggle and withdrew to spend the rest of his life in the quiet pursuit of letters.[2199]

For nearly thirty years it had been the aim of Gerald’s highest ambition to be the S. Thomas of his native land. He had struggled and suffered for the privileges of S. David’s in the same spirit in which Thomas had struggled and suffered for those of Canterbury, and it is by no means unlikely that had the occasion ever arisen, he would have been found ready to follow his model even unto death.[2200] But, unlike Thomas, he knew when to yield; and instead of dying for a lost cause, was content to live for posterity. Both men have had their fitting reward. Gerald the Welshman—“Giraldus Cambrensis”—still lives in his writings under the title won for him by his ardent patriotism; he lives however for us not as the champion of Welsh ecclesiastical independence, but as what he has been called by a writer of our own day—“the father of our popular literature.”[2201] Gerald’s first essay in authorship was made at the age of twenty; he was still busy with his pen when past his seventieth year;[2202] and all through the intervening half-century, every spare moment of his active, restless career was devoted to literary composition. His last years were spent in revising and embellishing the hasty productions of these earlier and briefer intervals of leisure. Even in their more finished shape, however, they still bear the impress of their origin. They breathe in all its fulness a spirit of which we catch the first faint indications in William of Malmesbury, and which may be described in one word as the spirit of modern journalism. Gerald’s wide range of subjects is only less remarkable than the ease and freedom with which he treats them. Whatever he touches—history, archæology, geography, natural science, politics, the social life and thought of the day, the physical peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native land, the scandals of the court and of the cloister, the petty struggle for the primacy of Wales and the great tragedy of the fall of the Angevin empire—is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine-article. His first important work, the Topography of Ireland, is, with due allowance for the difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a special correspondent in our own day might send from some newly-colonized island in the Pacific to satisfy or to whet the curiosity of his readers at home. The book made no small stir in the contemporary world of letters. Sober, old-fashioned scholars stood aghast at this daring Welshman’s disregard of all classical traditions and literary conventionalities, at the colloquialisms of his style, and still more at the audacity of his stories.[2203] For Gerald, determined to entertain his readers no matter by what means, and secure in their universal ignorance of the country which he professed to be describing, had raked together all the marvellous and horrible tales that could be found in Irish traditionary lore or devised by the inventive genius of his Irish informants; and the more frightful and impossible these stories were, the more greedily did he seize upon them and publish them. Irish scholars, almost from that day to this, have justly declaimed against Gerald for his atrocious libels upon their country and its people; yet the fact remains that, in the words of one of his latest editors, “to his industry we are exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state of Ireland during the whole of the middle ages.”[2204] His treatise De Expugnatione Hiberniæ is by far the most complete and authentic account which we possess of the English or Norman conquest of Ireland. The Topographia, despite its glaring faults, has a special merit of its own; its author “must” (as says the writer already quoted) “take rank with the first who descried the value, and, in some respects, the proper limits of descriptive geography.”[2205]

A far better specimen of his work in this direction is his Welsh Itinerary, followed some three or four years later by a Description of Wales.[2206] Here Gerald is on familiar and congenial ground, dealing with a subject which he thoroughly knows and understands, describing a country which he ardently loves and a people with whom, although by no means blind or indulgent to their faults, he is yet heartily in sympathy, because he is one of themselves. In these treatises therefore we see him at his very best, both as a writer and as a man. In his own opinion the best of all his works was the Gemma Ecclesiastica,[2207] or Jewel of the Church, a handbook of instructions on the moral and religious duties of the priesthood, compiled for the clergy of his own archdeaconry of Brecknock. To modern readers it is interesting only for the glimpse which it affords of the social, moral and intellectual condition of the South-Welsh clergy in his day. In his Mirror of the Church[2208] the general state of religious society and ecclesiastical discipline, at home and abroad, is reflected as unsparingly as in the satires of Walter Map. The remainder of Gerald’s extant works are of the most miscellaneous character—a half-finished autobiography, a book of Invectives against his enemies political and ecclesiastical, a collection of letters, poems and speeches, a treatise on the Rights of the Church of S. David’s, some Lives of contemporary bishops, a tract nominally On the Education of Princes, but really occupied for the most part with a bitter attack upon the characters of Henry II. and his sons.[2209] All of them are, more or less, polemical pamphlets, coloured throughout by the violent personal antipathies of the writer,[2210] but valuable for the countless side-lights which they cast upon the social life of the period. As we read their bold language, we can scarcely wonder at Archbishop Hubert’s relentless determination to put down their author by every means in his power. But though Gerald the bishop-elect of S. David’s was no match for the primate of all England, Gerald the pamphleteer wielded a force against which the religious authority of the metropolitan and the hostility of the older race of scholars were both alike powerless. He and his colleagues in the new school of literature had at their back the whole strength of the class to which they belonged, a class of men who were rapidly taking the place of the clergy as leaders of the intellectual life and thought of the nation. When old-fashioned critics lifted up their protest against Gerald’s Irish Topography, he boldly carried the book down to Oxford, “where the most learned and famous English clerks were then to be found,” and read it out publicly to as many as chose to come and hear it. “And as there were three distinctions or 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 of the town; on the next day all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the third day the rest of the scholars, with the knights, townsmen and many burgesses.”[2211] If some of the elder teachers shook their heads, it mattered little to Gerald; their murmurs were lost in the applause of a younger generation which hailed him as one of its own most distinguished representatives.