Towards the end of his long life, the cleric and writer Gerald of Wales (1146-1223) described the things that had motivated him in life. He had, he claimed, never aspired to wealth or important jobs; instead, he had always been inspired by his love of literature, and his greatest desire was to write. If he achieved fame, he hoped it would be for his intellectual endeavours, because ‘what you write down and give to the world… is never lost’, whereas material possessions did not last.

This sounded noble, but, unfortunately, Gerald was rewriting his own history. Born at Manorbier Castle, Pembrokeshire, in around 1146, he was the youngest son of William de Barry and his wife Angharad; his extended family included both the leading Anglo-Norman settler families in south-west Wales, and native Welsh princes. While his elder brothers were raised to be knights, he was educated for the church, and claimed that, as a boy, he built sand-churches, while they build sandcastles. His father nicknamed him ‘my bishop’, and all the evidence suggests that Gerald shared this parental dream.

To begin with, things went well: the young Gerald spent several years studying and teaching at the schools of Paris, and then his uncle David fitz Gerald, Bishop of St Davids, made him archdeacon of Brecon. When Bishop David died in 1176, Gerald expected to succeed him. But then Henry II objected to his appointment, saying (or so Gerald claimed) that he was of such vigour, honesty and high birth that he would have been a thorn in the royal side. And so the bishopric went to Peter de Leia, an English-born monk.

Gerald returned to Paris, where he undertook higher-level study of civil and canon law, as well as theology. Then, in the mid-1180s, he became a royal clerk. He apparently made a good impression on Henry II, but complained that everything he should have received as a result of his remarkable abilities was taken from him ‘by that suspect, dangerous, hateful name: Wales’. His fellow courtiers mocked his birthplace and accused him of disloyalty, and he felt that he was not entirely trusted by either side: ‘both peoples regard me as a stranger… one nation suspects me, the other hates me’. By 1196, he was so disillusioned that he retired from royal service, proclaiming that ‘it was empty foolishness to follow the court’.

Gerald was still an ambitious man and, despite his undoubted passion for intellectual pursuits, he knew that they would not bring him the worldly advancement he clearly craved, since ‘authors… have long since ceased to be respected’. Hope flared in 1199, when he was elected bishop of St Davids’ for a second time, but once again his Welsh origins posed a problem – and his promises to revive the see’s claim to be an archbishopric, independent of the English church, only made things worse. After Pope Innocent III quashed his election, Gerald resigned his archdeaconry, spent two years with relatives in Ireland, and then retired to Lincoln, where he spent his days writing the books which he hoped would be his legacy.

Ironically, Gerald’s most famous works were written during the 1180s – a difficult period in his life, but one during which his travels provided him with valuable inspiration. In 1185-6, he was in Ireland with the future King John; this trip (along with a previous visit in 1183) inspired the History and Topography of Ireland (1186-7) and the Conquest of Ireland (1189). His job also took him back to his birthplace, which he wrote about in the Journey Through Wales (c. 1191) and the Description of Wales (c. 1194). The first of these volumes described his 1188 visit, on which he accompanied Baldwin of Canterbury to preach the crusade. According to his own account, he attracted larger crowds than the archbishop; in Shrewsbury a woman complained that he had ‘bewitched our husbands’ into taking the Cross. He also enjoyed several successful stints as an envoy to the Welsh princes, claiming that when he visited his homeland shortly after Henry II’s death, he ‘pacified the country by his arrival and intervention’.

Gerald considered his writings on Wales and Ireland to be among his minor works, partly because they focused on secular subjects; he seems to have felt that, as a cleric, he should have been thinking (and writing) about religious issues, as he did in his later years. From a modern perspective, they are by far the most interesting and widely-read volumes in his vast oeuvre. In both the History and Topography of Ireland and the Description of Wales, he attempts something truly innovative: a nuanced, full-scale description of a country and its inhabitants. Major classical works of ethnography, such as Tacitus’ Germania, were not in circulation in Gerald’s lifetime; nor is he likely to have read non-European examples, such as Ibn Fadlan’s account of his early tenth-century encounters with the peoples of the far north. Both works should thus be considered as products of Gerald’s idiosyncratic and perpetually curious mind.

Based on his visits to Ireland, Gerald judged that its inhabitants were naturally handsome, and – thanks to the exceptionally pure air – very healthy. Unfortunately, ‘their external characteristics of beard and dress, and internal cultivation of the mind, are so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture’. They rode without saddles, went into battle unarmed (although they were remarkably good at throwing things), and lacked any of the attributes that Gerald considered to be signs of a civilised nation, such as towns, mines, or arable farming. Indeed, so devoted were they to laziness, that ‘they think that the greatest pleasure is not to work, and the greatest wealth is to enjoy liberty’.  Although technically Christian (having been converted by St Patrick in the fifth century), they were ‘a filthy people, wallowing in vice’ and frequently unbaptised – largely due to the shortcomings of the clergy, a subject on which Gerald delivered a rather provocative sermon at an ecclesiastical council in Dublin. He claimed that Ireland’s priests were good at chastity, celebrating mass, and fasting, but bad at performing their pastoral duties, and prone to drunkenness. This so angered Felix, the monk-bishop of Ossory, that he reportedly wanted to punch Gerald, or at least to give him ‘a very sharp answer’.

Gerald’s descriptions of his countrymen were a little kinder, though not uncritical. Like the Irish, the Welsh were a backwards people who paid little attention to commerce, shipping, or industry; instead, they were preoccupied with war and the defence of their honour. They had many virtues: they were hard workers, and very hospitable, although their homes were very basic, and they slept in communal beds covered only by the clothes they had worn all day. Intelligent, musical, and very funny (although none of the jokes Gerald quotes have stood the test of time), they also had unusually good teeth, since ‘They are constantly cleaning them with green hazel-shoots and then rubbing them with woollen cloths until they shine like ivory.’ Unlike the Irish, the Welsh were very pious, but this did not mean that they were always well behaved. According to Gerald, they were quarrelsome, never kept their oaths, and were prone to theft; they were also given to incest (by which he meant marrying their third cousins – medieval definitions of incest were much broader than now) and to cohabitating before marriage. Fortunately, they were less prone to sodomy than they had been in the past.

Much of what Gerald said about both the Irish and Welsh was undoubtedly based on his first-hand observations, but we can only really understand why he presents these people as he does if we consider the context in which he was writing. During the 11th and 12th centuries, many Western European nations pursued an aggressive policy of expansionism towards poorer, less organised regions; in the British Isles, this meant attempts by English kings to conquer both Wales and Ireland. Anglo-Norman forces began ravaging Wales soon after 1066, but the process of conquest was not completed until the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), and in Gerald’s time, Wales was a patchwork of Anglo-Norman lordships (mostly in the south of the country) and Welsh principalities. In Ireland, the conquest began in earnest in 1169; Henry II swiftly began granting Irish lands to his own barons, and established royal garrisons at Dublin, Waterford, and Wexford. From 1171, the Lordship of Ireland existed as a political unit subject to England – a rare medieval example of a colony in the modern sense.

Gerald was, in part, writing to justify this process of conquest, in which his relatives played an active role, both as settlers in Wales and as soldiers in Ireland; he was particularly keen to celebrate the military exploits of his brother Robert de Barry. His writings should undoubtedly be seen as part of a broader literary tradition in which invaders justified their actions by constructing hostile stereotypes of those they sought to conquer – a tactic which was underpinned by a growing conviction that Christians had a religious duty to correct those in error. Consequently, an invasion could be seen not as the aggressive expansionism it undoubtedly was, but as a just, almost holy, war.

For Gerald, things were complicated by his mixed loyalties, especially in relation to Wales. Both his Irish and Welsh works include sections on how conquest could be achieved, and how the conquered peoples should be governed. But the Description of Wales also suggested how the Welsh could resist conquest – an inclusion which he justified because ‘I am myself descended from both peoples.’ He also wrote positively about the Welsh princes, who ruled with ‘equity, prudence and princely moderation’, though lacking the polish and sophistication of their English counterparts. Even on the other side of the Irish Sea, where he was undoubtedly one of the invaders, he was not entirely without sympathy for the native rulers, blaming John’s failure in Ireland on his youthful inexperience, but also on his foolish mistreatment of those Irish lords who had been well-disposed to the English. Rather than give them the respect they craved, he treated them ‘with contempt and derision’, and even allowed his followers to pull their long, flowing beards.

Such nuance undoubtedly increases Gerald’s appeal to the modern reader, as does his interest in the natural world (shared with many of his contemporaries, and chiefly motivated by a desire to better understand God’s creation). He wrote at length about Welsh beavers, describing their skilful construction of dams and lodges and their remarkable ability to hold their breath underwater – as well as repeating the popular myth that, when pursued by a hunter, a male beaver would castrate himself, somehow knowing that his testicles (which were valued for their medicinal properties) were what its tormentor really wanted. He was also intrigued by barnacle geese, which he thought emerged fully formed from barnacles. This theory was seemingly supported by the crustacean’s feathery tentacles, compatible with contemporary ideas about spontaneous generation, although not everyone was convinced. In the 1240s, Emperor Frederick II examined many barnacles, saw no evidence that they produced birds, and thus concluded (correctly) that the geese bred in remote places.

Alongside his descriptions of wild animals, Gerald also included numerous accounts of strange phenomena. Some of these stories were truly miraculous, in the sense that they were produced by divine power: he described, for example, how St Nannan freed a village in Connaught from a plague of fleas. Gerald’s enthusiasm for miracles did not mean, however, that he accepted all such stories unquestioningly. Although he reported the lack of poisonous reptiles in Ireland, he rejected the story that St Patrick expelled them as ‘pleasant conjecture’, deeming it more likely that these creatures had never been there, perhaps because of a repellent quality in the soil. He also distinguished between miracles and marvels, which were simply remarkable works of nature. One of the most horrifying concerned a Pembrokeshire man who was eaten alive by a plague of toads, which descended on his sickbed ‘as if the entire local population of toads had made an agreement to go and visit him’. His friends killed some of the amphibians, but more kept appearing, so they put him in a large bag and hoisted him up to the top of a tree – but still the toads came, and ‘ate him right up, leaving nothing but his skeleton’.

Such stories seem amusing but, like Gerald’s descriptions of the human population, they arguably had a darker side, strengthening outsiders’ perceptions of Ireland and Wales as strange countries which needed to be brought under English control – a conviction that would persist for several centuries, aided by the popularity of his work. But when the History and Topography of Ireland was printed for the first time, in 1602, it received a hostile reaction from Irish readers. John Lynch, an exiled Jesuit, wrote a tract called Gerald Refuted, in which he claimed that he ‘greedily and foolishly gathered up the silly stories of people anxious to worm themselves into his favour’, producing a work which served as a ‘poisoned spring’ of falsehoods about Ireland.

Gerald is clearly an imperfect guide to the 12th-century British Isles and, thanks to his fondness for writing about himself, we also know that he was surely a hard man to like. Nevertheless, his increasingly bitter accounts of his many disappointments give us a unique insight into what it was like to be a man of mixed Anglo-Norman and Welsh descent in this turbulent period of British history. Without his boundless curiosity and his compulsion to write, we would know much less about both the kings and nobles who shaped this formative period of British history, and the ordinary men and women who lived in obscurity on the fringes of the known world. Ironically, had he achieved the glittering clerical career he so longed for, he would probably now be long forgotten. But as a chronicler of the Celtic fringes, he achieved the fame he felt he deserved.