[In the following essay, Jones examines responses to Gerald's controversial accounts of the Irish.]

The English have never been especially complimentary of Celtic civilization; and, from the time of the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland in the twelfth century forward, words such as “barbarous,” “warlike,” “treacherous,” “slothful,” and “cruel” have come naturally to the minds of Englishmen contemplating their country's Irish neighbors. The ancient geographers, Pomponius Mela, Strabo, and Solinus, tended to place the misty Celtic realms beyond the pale of Mediterranean civilization; and early medieval authors such as Bede portrayed the Scots and Irish as typical “barbarians.”¹ During the Middle Ages the apparent contrast between the pastoral, itinerant, and kinship oriented society of the Irish and the feudal, manorial, urban, and more centralized Anglo-French civilization of southeast Britain seemed to justify English feelings of superiority. The most famous advocate of this unfriendly view of the medieval Irish was the twelfth-century Anglo-Welsh cleric and author, Gerald of Wales. His two books on Ireland—a rather extraordinary geographical and ethno-geographical treatise called Topographia Hibernica and a biased history of the English conquest of Ireland entitled Expugnatio Hibernica—have long been a source of annoyance to Irish patriots.² Throughout the medieval and Tudor periods English historians considered Gerald's books to be authoritative accounts of Irish history and culture. After their publication by William Camden in 1602, they became the focus of a heated literary controversy, which occurred against a backdrop of intense political and religious conflict between the two peoples. During the first half of the seventeenth-century two generations of Irish apologists for traditional Gaelic civilization, prompted by a new cultural nationalism, vigorously disputed the validity of Gerald's interpretation of Irish culture and the value of his works as historical sources.

Giraldus Cambrensis, twice bishop-elect of the Welsh see of St. David's, visited Ireland on at least two occasions: in 1183 with the Anglo-Welsh baron, Philip de Barri, and in 1185 in the service of Prince John of England.³ His two Irish books were the product of the last excursion. Modern historians have had difficulty in evaluating fairly the man and his work. Gerald's anecdotal style and his predilection for the exotic often make him appear too naïve and credulous to be taken seriously. On the other hand, his aggressive curiosity, combined with his desire to explain as well as describe the phenomena of both nature and human nature, sometimes gave his work an exceptional degree of perceptiveness. For instance, his remarks in the Expugnatio concerning the military tactics appropriate to waging war against the Irish (a subject which he discussed with respect to the Welsh in the Descripto Cambriae and his proposals for the government of occupied Ireland imply the author's intelligence, considerable powers of observation, and, for a cleric, his breadth of interest.⁴ Despite his fascination with Merlin's prophecies, it should be remembered that he once expressed skepticism concerning Geoffrey of Monmouth's vision of British history.⁵ Viewing Gerald's literary career as a whole, he seems to fall within that humanistic, encyclopedic, moralizing, and thoroughly Augustinian tradition, which also produced such English scholars as John of Salisbury and Alexander Neckham before it succumbed to new dialecticism of the Paris schools. His strong historical bent reflected the revival of historiography, which prompted William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh to compose their chronicles. Gerald's Pembrokeshire origins and his ancestry—a mixture of Welsh royalty and marcher aristocracy—endowed him with the potential ability to understand the cultural schizophrenia of societies such as Wales and Ireland where Celt and Norman had met. But his view of Celtic society was almost invariably that of the suspicious outsider rather than the sympathetic participant. Like so many English visitors to Ireland after him, the shock of confronting an alien civilization was too great to permit Gerald to be either objective or dispassionate. Accordingly, the long-range significance of both the Topographia and the Expugnatio derived from the support they lent to anti-Irish prejudice.

Gerald seemed to have considered the Topographia his masterpiece. Although we still do not have an authoritative text of it nor a clear account of the manuscript tradition, the editor of the Rolls Series edition was probably correct in tracing its passage through several versions—the product of the author's pride in his work.⁶ Divided into three parts or “distinctions,” the Topographia described the physical geography, marvels, and native culture of Ireland. It served as an introduction to his second Irish book, the Expugnatio, in the same way that the Descriptio Cambriae set the scene for his narrative of Archbishop Baldwin's journey through Wales in the Itinerarium Cambriae. For Irish readers, the most objectionable part of the Topographia has been the third distinctio's account of the manners, morals, and religion of the native population. “The Irish are a rude people,” Gerald explained, “subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts—a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life.”⁷ They do not live in towns; and they are unacquainted with agriculture, commerce, and the mechanical arts. Whereas other peoples had progressed from savagery to civilization by way of farming and town-dwelling, the Irish had remained rooted in a poor and primitive pastoralism. Their “barbarous” condition, he insisted, was as evident with respect to their nurture, dress, and even their coiffure (barbarus tamen tam barbarum quam vestium) as with their crude social customs, their technological backwardness, and their corrupt religious life.⁸ Irish “barbarism,” which “clung to them like a second nature (alteram naturam),” was the product of the island's geographical isolation from more advanced societies; and it manifested itself in both material poverty and moral depravity: “Thus, this people is a barbarous race, and trully barbarous … and all their customs are barbarisms.”⁹

In addition to this general denunciation of Irish society, the Topographia publicized several specific criticisms of Irish life, which caught the attention of later commentators on Ireland. For example, Gerald complained that Irish marriage customs and their reluctance to be baptized or pay tithes showed their ignorance of the basic principles of Christianity and the “filthiness” of the race.¹⁰ He stressed the “treachery” of the Irish and attacked the brutish way in which they allegedly sealed personal pacts by drinking human blood and invidious effects of the Irish custom of fosterage on both the natives and the newcomers.¹¹ Characterizing them as warlike and unpredictable—“an inconstant race, a fickle race, a crafty and cunning race”—Gerald warned that Irish “treachery” was contagious and could rub off on the unwary stranger. At times his invective became almost racist: “The pestilence of treachery has increased here to such an extent, as though it had sent down roots, that long abuse has caused it to turn into a vicious custom.”¹² Gerald's discussion of the reputedly high incidence of birth defects among the Irish led him to the conclusion that nature had been corrupted and that the Irish suffered the judgment of God for their sins: “It is not wonder that, among an adulterous people, an incestuous people, a people beyond the law, nature itself should be foully corrupted by invidious and hateful habits, with the result that nature sometimes produces such things contrary to nature's law.”¹³ Gerald's description of the Irishman's dependence on his cattle, his listing of the genetic oddities and mutants supposedly abounding in Ireland, and his pejorative assessment of native sexuality—all combine to convey the impression that the Celt was as “bestial” as he was “barbarous.”

It was, however, against Gerald's critique of the Irish church and clergy that both contemporary and later Irish apologists most bitterly complained. His few kind words about the chastity of Irish monks were counterbalanced by a sharp attack on Irish Christianity for the superficiality of the people's faith, its failure to produce martyrs, the absence of archbishops in the pre-conquest church, the neglect by Irish prelates of their pastoral duties, and even the alleged “vindictiveness” of Irish saints.¹⁴ Such remarks as the following outraged Irish apologists of the seventeenth century:¹⁵

I find it especially worthy of reproach in the bishops and prelates, that they are very slothful and negligent in their duty of correcting a people guilty of such enormous delinquencies. …

It is extraordinary, therefore, that in a nation so cruel and bloodthirsty … there should be no crown of martyrdom for the church of Christ … there was none to do this service; no, not one. …

Thus the prelates of this country … are usually content to indulge themselves in the contemplative life. … Hence it happens that they neither preach to the people the word of the Lord, nor tell them of their sins; neither extirpate vices nor implant virtues in the flock committed to their charge.

And it was Gerald's opinion that the “superstitiousness” and “brutishness” of the native Irish were clearly demonstrated by the pagan coronation ceremony of the old kings of Tyconnell, whose inauguration entailed a ritual bath in a broth of horsemeat.¹⁶ Later English commentators on Irish life relished recounting this tidbit of Celtic folklore and religious anthropology.

Although English critics of the Irish often based their unfavorable assessments of Irish culture on their own experiences or impressions, for centuries the Topographia constituted one of the oldest, most available, and most authoritative sources of information on this land and its people. Gerald's diatribe against the reputed sloth, immorality, fractiousness, and superstitiousness of the Irish seemed to justify the institutionalized bigotry of generations of Englishmen, who enacted laws against the Gaelic language and dress, excluded natives from the religious orders, and expelled Irish students from English universities.¹⁷ The Topographia's hostile description of Irish society provided a rhetoric for anti-Irish propaganda; and its specific complaints were frequently quoted by later English authors.

The English crown's claim to the lordship of Ireland, which had been briefly stated in the Topographia, was argued in historical context in the Expugnatio Hibernica. This account of the English conquest of Ireland has been aptly characterized as a sort of heroic “epic,” wherein the author's sympathies obviously lay with the English invaders.¹⁸ Their victories over the Irish were portrayed as marking the triumph of civilization over barbarism, of true religion over heresy, and also as the fulfillment of ancient British prophecy. The Expugnatio's most important contribution to Anglo-Irish political relations was its detailed defense of the legitimacy of English rule; and it performed a unique service for later historians by preserving the only surviving copy of the papal bull, Laudabiliter, by means of which Pope Adrian IV had commissioned Henry II of England to conquer Ireland. Gerald's exposition of the famous “fivefold” title of the English kings to Ireland based their claim on: first, Geoffrey of Monmouth's story of the gift of Ireland by Gurguntius, king of Britain, to a roving band of Basques; second, the submission of the Irish kings to Arthur of Britain; third, the “Bayonne title,” which derived from the fact that Henry II had ruled the original Irish homeland in the Basque part of Glasgony; fourth, the submission of the Irish chiefs to Henry II at Waterford in 1171; and, fifth, Pope Adrian IV's bull, which granted Ireland to the English king by virtue of the sovereignty over all islands given the pope by the Donation of Constantine.¹⁹

The Expugnatio's pseudo-historical defense of the lordship of Ireland, especially its quotation of Laudabiliter, has long been viewed as an affront to Irish national pride and their right of self-determination. In 1317 the Irish chiefs argued in the “Remonstrance” addressed to Pope John XXII that English misrule had quashed the right conveyed to the English crown by the papal mandate.²⁰ But Gerald's arguments continued to count for something in later Anglo-Irish political theory. The bill of attainder passed by the Irish parliament in 1569 against the rebel, Shane O'Neill, cited both the legend of King Gurguntius and the “Bayonne title” as justifying Elizabeth I's claim to rule Ireland.²¹ By this late date the implications of Laudabiliter were as offensive to English Protestants as to Irish Catholics; and the bill against Shane avoided mentioning either the papal bull or the Donation of Constantine. Gerald was obviously the source of these arguments, which were communicated to the bill's authors by James Stanyhurst, Recorder of Dublin and Speaker of the Commons in this parliament, who owned a copy of the Topographia.²²

The number of surviving manuscript copies of Gerald's Irish books indicate that both works were popular during the later Middle Ages. A Latin abridgment of the Topographia, which incorporated Gerald's description of Ireland's natural wonders and its saints, was made in the first half of the fourteenth century.²³ This shortened Latin version was translated into the Provençal by the Irish Dominican, Philip of Slane, who dedicated his work to Pope John XXII (1316-34).²⁴ Similarly, the Expugnatio, which was always the principal source of information for the history of the English conquest, continued to be read and quoted during the late medieval and Tudor periods. It was translated into English, probably for Anglo-Irish readers, toward the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century.²⁵ Both of Gerald's books were familiar to later English chroniclers such as Ranulph Higden and John Brompton, who perpetuated his anti-Irish prejudices.²⁶ Higden's Polychronicon, for instance, was clearly indebted to Gerald for its description of Irish fickleness, sloth, and belligerence and for its observations concerning their distance for agriculture, commerce, and technology.²⁷ At a later period Higden was even viewed as a major authority, ancillary to Gerald and the ancient geographers, for research in Irish history and culture.

Gerald's Irish books seemed to have had a ready audience among the Anglo-Irish intelligentsia of the Pale, whose aversion to the “mere Irish” outside coincided with Gerald's own prejudices. In the second half of the sixteenth-century the English visitor, Edmund Campion, was able to acquire Latin editions, together with English translations, of both Gerald's works from two learned gentlemen of the Pale—James Stanyhurst and Francis Agarde.²⁸ Although in his Historie of Irelande Campion cautioned against imputing the vices of their ancestors to the present-day Irish, he propagated Gerald's notions of the debasement of Irish Christianity after St. Patrick; the contaminating effects on English colonists of native customs; the “faitheles and perjured” behavior and “bestiall” appearance of the “wild Irish”, and their “superstitiousness” as shown by the abominable coronation rite of the kings of Tyrconnell.²⁹ Anglo-Irish commentators on Ireland such as John Derricke, whose Image of Ireland appeared in 1581, used Gerald as a source both for the substantive history of the English conquest and for descriptions of Irish life.³⁰ Edmund Spenser was rather unique in that his famous dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, made little direct use of Gerald, although it drew the distinction between English “civilization” and Irish “barbarism.”³¹

Tudor politics and religion increased interest in Gerald's Irish books; and it was another Anglo-Irish scholar who further publicized their value as historical sources. In 1577 Richard Stanyhurst, the son of the Anglo-Irish official, James Stanyhurst, contributed a “Description of Ireland” and an account of Irish history during Henry VIII's reign to the first volume of Holinshed's Chronicles.³² Stanyhurst omitted from the “Description,” which was heavily indebted to Campion's history, most of the anti-Irish passages which Campion had drawn from Gerald; but he showed, as did his sources, the prejudices of the Old English of the Pale toward the “wild Irish” beyond by contrasting Irish “rudenes,” “rebellion,” “trecherie,” “savagenesse,” “idlenesse,” and “wickednesse” with English “knowledge,” “obedience,” “honestie,” “civilitie,” “labour,” and “godlinesse.”³³ Stanyhurst's second Irish book, the De rebus in Hibernia gestis (1584), was a history of the Anglo-Norman conquest. In the first part of it, which was more or less a running commentary on Gerald, the author adopted a patriotic position—critical of Gerald's strictures against the medieval Irish.³⁴ Yet underlying Stanyhurst's defense of Ireland was the assumption that the progress of civilization there required the triumph of English manners, dress, and language over the native culture. Later editions of Holinshed's Chronicles further publicized the importance of Gerald as a source for Irish history. John Hooker, the editor of Holinshed for 1586-87, provided the Chronicles with an English translation of the Expugnatio, prefaced with an introduction extolling Gerald's work.³⁵ Associated with the renewed interest in Gerald's Irish books was the desire to read his other works on Celtic subjects. In 1585 the Welsh antiquary, Dr. David Powel, published the Descriptio Cambriae and the Itinerarium Cambriae.³⁶ The latter was republished in 1602, and, as Lambeth Palace MS. 263 shows, was once translated into English by a certain George Owen.³⁷ At this late date, of course, Welsh nationalism was mainly a matter of literary and linguistic nostalgia—hardly to be taken seriously—whereas the debate over Ireland was vigorous and heated. And Gerald's unfavorable view of Irish civilization was widely quoted in England and abroad as a standard estimate of traditional Gaelic culture.³⁸

The controversy over the validity and value of Gerald's Irish books erupted in full force in 1602, when the English historian, William Camden, published the complete Latin texts of the Topographia and the Expugnatio in his Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica a veteribus scriptis. In addition to making available to new generations of English and Irish readers the original statements of Gerald on Irish history and culture, Camden promoted their circulation and acceptance by incorporating them into his masterpiece, the Britannia.³⁹ Later Irish apologists recognized the true author of these calumnies and tried to attack them at their source; and developments of a political and religious nature encouraged them in the task.

The efforts of successive English governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries to cope with the Irish problem by the expropriation of Irish lands, the plantation of English colonies, the repression of the Roman Catholic religion, and, occasionally, by the deliberate extermination of the native population kept Anglo-Irish relations at the boiling point. The publication of Gerald's Irish books by Camden coincided with the period of Irish political history extending from the defeat of the Irish-Spanish cause at Kinsale in 1601 to the collapse of the Catholic Confederacy in 1652—an era characterized by bitter frustration over the failure of Ireland to achieve political and religious identity.⁴⁰ This was also the period which witnessed the inauguration of a vehemently self-conscious cultural nationalism, especially among exiled Irish intellectuals abroad. Irish historians such as Geoffrey Keating and John Lynch and Irish hagiographers such as Luke Wadding and John Colgan searched the materials of Gaelic history for a reassuring and usuable past. At Louvain, Salamanca, and Rome émigré Irish scholars created a rich tradition of native scholarship and historiography; and several patriotic Irish authors, outraged by the high esteem in which Gerald was held, launched an attack on this most famous (or infamous) of anti-Irish propagandists.

The first Irish apologist to write specifically against Gerald was the Anglo-Irish scholar, Stephen White, whose Apologia pro Hibernia, printed only in 1662, may have been written as early as 1615.⁴¹ Later Irish apologists tended to view him as the father of anti-Gerald scholarship. White was an exiled Jesuit, who held professorships at various German universities until his death about 1647.⁴² His book against Gerald, the Apologia, was principally concerned with defending the Irish Church against what it claimed were Gerald's mistakes and misrepresentations. White denounced Gerald's superstitiousness and gullibility, pointing out that his works had first been publicized by English heretics.⁴³ White bitterly resented Gerald's contemptuous view of Irish Christianity, his assertion that there were no Irish martyrs among the early Christians, and the Topographia's claim that there had been a dearth of good bishops and no archbishops at all in pre-conquest Ireland.⁴⁴ As did other apologists for the Irish, White expressed dismay that Gerald's odious judgments had infiltrated the works of later historians; he flatly rejected what he characterized as the fictitious claims of the English to rule Ireland; and he disputed the authenticity of Laudabiliter.⁴⁵

The learned Irish layman, Philip O'Sullivan Beare, an exile in Spain and an officer in the Spanish navy, was an expert in Irish ecclesiastical history and an ardent defender of his country against English detractors. In 1621 he published a complimentary history of Ireland entitled Historiae catholicae Iberniae compendium.⁴⁶ A few years later, in 1624-26, he wrote the Zoilomastix (“A Whip for Detractors”) against the twin enemies of Ireland—Giraldus Cambrensis and Richard Stanyhurst.⁴⁷ Although not the first to write against Gerald, O'Sullivan took pride in being the first Irish apologist to attempt the refutation of Gerald's modern disciple, Stanyhurst. The first four books of the Zoilomastix, which is still unpublished in its entirety, consist of a number of “retaliations” aimed against particular statements by Gerald. Adopting a point by point approach, O'Sullivan quoted Gerald on such subjects as Ireland's topography, flora and fauna, Irish church history and hagiology, and native kingship and politics, and then proceeded to rebut these judgments by assembling contrary arguments drawn from other historians and from his own knowledge of Irish history and life. The form and structure of the Zoilomastix were determined by what its author thought to be most erroneous and offensive in Gerald's works.⁴⁸ For example, O'Sullivan rejected Gerald's characterization of the Irish as a “barbarous” race by arguing, as did other Irish apologists, that only false belief was truly “barbarous.”⁴⁹ Because of the unblemished orthodoxy of the Irish as contrasted with the proliferation of heretical sects in contemporary England, it was O'Sullivan's conclusion that the English themselves were the real “barbarians.” In the third book of the Zoilomastix he took up the Topographia's slighting remarks concerning Irish customs, dress, and religion. He denied that the pastoral ways or sylvan habitat of the Irish reflected adversely on either their life-style or deportment. Woodlands, he explained, had been considered appropriate residences for ancient Roman gods and early Christian ascetics.⁵⁰ Further, the lowliest Irishman was superior to the noblest Englishman in probity, magnimity, and piety. He extolled the antiquity and purity of Irish Christianity and the piety and learning of the native clergy, especially their missionary efforts. Against Gerald's disparaging remarks concerning the absence of martyrs among the ancient Irish and the nonexistence of archbishops in the pre-conquest Irish church, O'Sullivan listed a large number of ancient and modern heroes of the Catholic faith in Ireland and defended the antiquity of the Irish metropolitanates.⁵¹ Finally, O'Sullivan countered the Topographia's racist slur against the Irish, whose vices had reputedly produced a high rate of physical deformity, by contrasting native beauty, strength, and agility with English “effiminacy.”⁵² The entire fifth book of the Zoilomastix consists of a rebuttal of Richard Stanyhurst's judgments on Irish learning, native kingship, the Gaelic language, Brehon law, and Irish medicine. In this section of his treatise O'Sullivan rejected Stanyhurst's distinction (which, he confesses, he himself had once drawn) between the Old English of the Pale and the “wild Irish” of the bogs. And he returned to the issue of the alleged “barbarousness” of the Irish by arguing syllogistically that the Irish, who are noted for their hospitality, civility, and especially their orthodoxy, exemplify the finest traits of “civilization” and run the risk of becoming savage only to the extent that they succumb to the “barbarism” of English heretics.⁵³

In the preface to the Foras Feasa ar Eirinn—the Foundation of Knowledge on Ireland—the Irish Catholic scholar, Dr. Geoffrey Keating, attacked the views of various ancient, medieval, and modern critics of his country.⁵⁴ Keating, who was educated in France, returned to Ireland and served as a clandestine preacher to Catholics in the south until his death about 1644.⁵⁵ His history of Ireland from the earliest times to the English conquest, the Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, was the first extended history of Ireland written in the native language and also “the last book of any importance to circulate in manuscript in the British isles.”⁵⁶ The preface declared the author's intention to clear away the errors and libels of earlier writers on Ireland preparatory to narrating the country's true history. “Never was a nation under heaven so traduced by malice and ignorance as the ancient Irish.”⁵⁷ Although Keating found mistakes in most of the books on Ireland written by previous authors—Strabo, Solinus, Campion, Stanyhurst, Spenser, and even Camden, whom he otherwise admired—nevertheless, he made it very clear that he blamed Gerald above all others for having circulated falsehoods about his homeland. Keating denounced “that ignorant and malicious writer, Giraldus Cambrensis, the great patron of these mercenary and sordid historians,” for having been the chief source of the lies, vilifications, and distortions abounding in the works of later writers, who deliberately misrepresented Irish history and portrayed the native people as “base and servile.”⁵⁸ Claiming to draw fresh evidence from the old Gaelic sources, Keating defended the antiquity and orthodoxy of Irish Christianity, the integrity of Irish civilization, and the veracity of traditional Irish historiography. Specifically, he rejected Gerald's story of the submission of the Irish kings to Arthur of Britain and argued against Laudabiliter that sinister persons had hoodwinked Pope Adrian into authorizing the English invasion.⁵⁹ He denied Gerald's charge that Irish marriage customs promoted “incest” and the natives never paid tithes until the coming of a Roman mission.⁶⁰ Keating characterized as “monstrous and incredible” and as unsubstantiated by other historical reports Gerald's statement that the Irish sealed personal pacts by quaffing human blood. Finally, he offered the testimony of Irish antiquaries to rebut Gerald's description of the heathenish coronation of the kings of Tyrconnell which he said Gerald had evidently fabricated out “of inveterate malice” in order to “traduce” the Irish people.⁶¹

The most extensive critique of Gerald of Wales was the work of the Anglo-Irish priest, John Lynch, who published his Cambrensis eversus under the name, “Gratianus Lucius, Hibernus,” in 1662.⁶² After having been educated abroad, Lynch returned to Ireland, where he spent the next thirty years preaching and teaching, sometimes openly and sometimes covertly, until the defeat of the Catholic Confederacy in 1652.⁶³ Following the triumph of Parliament and the Puritans, Lynch fled to France. It was there that he composed the Cambrensis eversus, probably about 1660, when he was almost sixty years old.⁶⁴ Lynch's book was a detailed attack on Gerald of Wales, with glancing blows aimed at the “herd of scribblers,” who had followed Gerald in distorting Irish history and denigrating Irish culture.⁶⁵ Lynch did not mince words as to his low opinion of the “shameless scribe,” to whom he applied the famous satirical maxim usually reserved to Erasmus and Luther—that the one had laid the egg that others had hatched.⁶⁶ At times he was very vituperative: “Giraldus was not mild but turbulent … not a man of probity, but of infamy … not pure, but corrupt … not a man of sense, but a mere simpleton … not a good but a wicked man … not inoffensive but most offensive … not prudent, but most imprudent. …”⁶⁷ Employing O'Sullivan's method of rebutting Gerald, Lynch quoted the Topographia and the Expugnatio and then proceeded to demolish their arguments by citing evidence collected from other writers or his own considerable knowledge of Irish history and culture. Lynch was well acquainted with English historians from Bede to Camden; and, for an Anglo-Irishman, he showed a remarkable knowledge of the Gaelic materials. He had the advantage, of course, of having read the works of earlier Irish apologists such as Peter Lombard, Stephen White, Philip O'Sullivan Beare, Geoffrey Keating, and Bishop David Rothe of Ossory, the author of Analecta sacra, a critique of English ecclesiastical policy in Ireland, and Hibernia resurgens, a defense of the Irish against the claims of modern Scots to the glories of ancient Scotia.⁶⁸ Accordingly, Cambrensis eversus constitutes the most thoroughly researched and well informed of the apologists for Ireland.

Lynch reinforced his detailed denials of Gerald's familiar criticisms of the medieval Irish—their “barbarous” customs and dress, the “backwardness” of their material existence, the “heathenish” and “heretical” quality of their religion, and their degenerate morals—with his own highly complimentary assessments of native secular culture, spirituality, and ethics. He was expecially outraged by the charge of Irish “barbarousness”:⁶⁹

Against the Irish it is reiterated by Giraldus like an importunate hornet; barbarism is the burden of his drone; barbarism the wound of his envenomed sting—barbarism a thousand times repeated; universal barbarism exhibited in minute detail; that the barbarism of the Irish might be more vividly forced on the eyes of the reader, and more deeply imprinted on their memory—barbarism in mind and morals, in beards and in clothes, is the sum of his savage invective.

In reply to Gerald's racist slur concerning the frequency of physical deformity among the Irish, Lynch pointed out how the Topographia contradicted itself by remarking on their beauty and grace on other occasions.⁷⁰ He questioned the validity of Gerald's genetic theory, which associated morals and biology, and he argued that the medieval author had greatly exaggerated the incidence of birth defects among the Irish. “By an arithmetic peculiar to himself, Giraldus found more bear-eyed and blind and lame in Ireland than in any other country.”⁷¹ Against Gerald's assertion that the Irish had always been poor and primitive shepherds, ignorant of trade and manufacturing, he argued that these views were inconsistent with Gerald's own description of Irish textiles and weaponry and the testimony of other, more credible authorities.⁷² Rejecting Gerald's famous pun, which equated Irish beards (barbae) with native “barbarism,” and his contemptuous remarks about their dress, Lynch pointed out that such great peoples of antiquity as the Hebrews and Romans had worn mantles similar to those of the Irish and that it was ridiculous and unfair to make the razor “the great agent of civilization.”⁷³ Lynch was terribly offended, as were other Irish apologists, by Gerald's view of Irish church history and his estimate of pre-conquest Irish Christianity; and he devoted considerable effort to demonstrating how the impressive record of the Irish church in missions, learning, and saintliness contradicted the insinuations and assertions of the Topographia.⁷⁴ He accused Gerald of showing his “immoderate hatred of the Irish and his love of his own countrymen” by exaggerating the number of archbishoprics in England while denying even their existence in Ireland.⁷⁵ Lynch insisted that the blood of the Irish martyrs “was shed copiously by foreign hands, but never or hardly ever by their countrymen.”⁷⁶ And he pointed out how inconsistent it was to believe with Gerald that the spirit of dedication and service which had sustained Irish missionaries abroad had been abandoned by the clergy at home, who neglected “to instruct their countrymen in the ways of perfection.”⁷⁷

Lynch was much more broad-minded in his attitude toward traditional Irish culture than earlier Anglo-Irish writers such as Stanyhurst or Spenser, who propagated the idea of the fundamental difference between the “civilization” of the Pale and the “barbarism” of the “wild Irish.” In the Cambrensis eversus he expressed his approval of the process of Gaelicization, which had brought about the partial acculturation of the English colonists to the native style of life; and he looked forward hopefully to the complete amalgamation of the two races to form a politically and religiously unified community—subject to the English crown and the Roman Catholic faith.⁷⁸ Agreeing with O'Sullivan Beare, Lynch opposed drawing a distinction between the Anglo-Irish and the natives; and in another book, the Alithinologia, he defended the patriotism and the orthodoxy of the residents of the Pale.⁷⁹ Lynch's cultural and political nationalism, which was broad enough to encompass both the Old English and the “mere Irish,” was also shown by his attack on certain pretentious Scottish historians, who, by claiming the accomplishments of ancient Scotia for their own country, had denied the Irish, the true “Scots” of antiquity, their birthright.⁸⁰

Although interest in Gerald's Irish works continued into the eighteenth-century, the controversy which they provoked was centered mainly in the seventeenth.⁸¹ It was the product of the rise of Irish cultural nationalism, which was itself stimulated by political and religious conflict between the English and the Irish. The great reliance placed on Gerald's works by Tudor and Stuart historians, further encouraged by Camden's publication of them in 1602, prompted Irish apologists to attack the views of an author, who for centuries had been esteemed as the principal source of information for their country and its past. The most significant contribution of the critics of Gerald to Irish historiography lay in the encouragement they gave to the investigation of a people, whom the majority of literate Europeans still thought of in terms of the rhetoric and imagery of Gerald of Wales.

Notes

1. For anti-Celtic prejudice in medieval England, see W. R. Jones, “England against the Celtic Fringe: A Study in Cultural Stereotypes,” Cahiers d'histoire mondiale, XIII (1971), 155-71; and for a later period, David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, 1966).

2. The most available printed texts are in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, eds. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock et al., Rolls Series (8 vols.; London, 1861-91), V, 3-204; 207-411. There is an English translation by Thomas Wright, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis (London and New York, 1892), pp. 17-324.

3. The best recent work on Gerald is F. X. Martin, “Gerald of Wales, Norman Reporter on Ireland,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, LVIII (1969), 279-92. Martin states (p. 290) that Gerald made a third visit to Ireland. See also the biography by Maurice Powicke, The Christian Life in the Middle Ages and Other Essays (Oxford, 1935), pp. 107-29; and my characterization of Gerald's work, “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, XIII (1971), 396-97.

4. Opera, V, 395-400; and for the discussion of tactics to be employed against the native Welsh, ibid., VI, 218-21.

5. T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), p. 12.

6. See the editor's analysis of the manuscripts in his preface to the Rolls Series edition, Opera, V, xi-xxviii.

7. Ibid., V, 151. See the entire tenth chapter of the third distinctio.

8. Ibid., V, 150.

9. Quotations are from ibid., V, 152, 153.

10. Ibid., V, 164-65.

11. Ibid., V, 165-67.

12. Ibid., V, 168.

13. Ibid., V, 181.

14. Ibid., V, 170-78.

15. Ibid., V, 173, 174, 175. I have altered slightly the translation by Wright, Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, pp. 142-43.

16. Opera, V, 169.

17. For an example of anti-Irish legislation in medieval England, see Irish Historical Documents: 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis and R. B. McDowell (London, 1953), pp. 52-59; also Sir Maurice Powicke, The Thirteenth Century: 1216-1307 (Oxford, 1953), p. 569.

18. Opera, V, preface, lxx, quoting J. S. Brewer.

19. For the Topographia's statement of the English claim, see ibid., V, 148-49; and for the Expugnatio's exposition, ibid., V, 319-20. Laudabiliter is quoted, pp. 317-18.

20. The “Remonstrance” is translated in Irish Historical Documents, eds. Curtis and McDowell, pp. 38-46.

21. Quoted and discussed by the Irish apologist, John Lynch, [Gratianus Lucius], Cambrensis eversus, ed. and trans. Matthew Kelly (3 vols.; Dublin, 1848-51), III, 11, 13, 15. See also Two Bokes of the Histories of Irelande compiled by Edmunde Campion, ed. Alphonsus Franciscus Vossen (Assen, 1963), p. 64; Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors (3 vols.; London, 1885-90), II, 152.

22. Two Bokes of the Histories of Irelande compiled by Edmunde Campion, ed. Vossen, pp. 71, 75.

23. Opera, V, lxxvi. Reference is to British Museum, Additional MS. 19513, fols. 164-88v, entitled “Libellus de descriptione Hybernie.”

24. Opera, V, lxxvi-lxxvii. It was published by Jacques Ulrich, Frère Philippe, Les merveilles de l'Irlande (Leipzig, 1892), from Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 17920, fols. 19vff. Pope John XXII had several opportunities to take notice of events in Ireland: the appeal of Dame Alice Kyteler against the charge of heresy and sorcery pronounced against her by the bishop of Ossory; the complaint of the Irish clergy against discriminatory practices of the English crown; and the request of the Irish chiefs to endorse their effort to withdraw Ireland from English allegiance and establish its independence under Edward Bruce of Scotland. For these episodes, see A Contemporary Narrative of the Proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler, Prosecuted for Sorcery in 1324, by Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, ed. T. Wright, Camden Society (London, 1843), J. A. Watt, “Negotiations between Edward II and John XXII concerning Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies, X (1956-57), 1-20; and n. 20 above.

25. Opera, V, lxxvii.

26. Ibid., V, lxxviii.

27. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis; together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of An Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, eds. Churchill Babington and Joseph Rawson Lumby, Rolls Series (9 vols.; London, 1865-86), I, 352-54, 356.

28. Two Bokes of the Histories of Irelande compiled by Edmunde Campion, ed. Vossen, pp. 71, 75.

29. Ibid., pp. 22, 23 (of the text).

30. Derricke's work was published in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts … of the Late Lord Somers, ed. Walter Scott (13 vols.; London, 1809-15), I, 562, 573-74.

31. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford, 1970), p. 195.

32. Holinshed's Cronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (6 vols; London, 1808), VI, 1-69. For Stanyhurst, see St. John D. Seymour, Anglo-Irish Literature: 1200-1582 (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 145-65.

33. Holinshed's Chronicles, VI 69.

34. See De rebus in Hibernia gestis, libri quattuor (Antuerpiae, 1584), esp. pp. 31, 51-53. The entire fifth book of Philip O'Sullivan Beare's Zoilomastix was devoted to refuting Stanyhurst's views in the De rebus in Hibernia gestis. For the modern edition of O'Sullivan's book, see Selections from the Zoilomastix of Philip O'Sullivan Beare, ed. Thomas J. O'Donnell (Dublin, 1960).

35. Holinshed's Chronicles, VI, 111-232, and p. 109 of the “Epistle Dedicatorie.” For Hooker, see R. Dudley Edwards, “Ireland, Elizabeth I and the Counter-Reformation,” Elizabethan Society and Government, eds. S. T. Bindoff et al. (London, 1961), pp. 326-27.

36. May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1971), pp. 53, 58; and for the acquaintance of Tudor historians with Gerald, pp. 5, 9, 11, 24, 25, 29, 51, 58, 62, 69, etc.

37. Lambeth Palace MS. 263, fols. 3-5, contains a life of Gerald based on the writings of Leland, Bale, and Gerald himself. The translation of the Itinerarium Cambriae runs to fol. 144, and is dated February 6, 1602. Other Lambeth Palace MSS. showing seventeenth-century interest in Gerald's works are MS. 598, fols. 1-31v, “The Conquest of Ireland differing from Gerald by Thomas Bray”; and MS. 585, pp. 55ff., which is a collection of excerpts (in Latin) from his works.

38. See Stephen White [Vitus], Apologia pro Hibernia, ed. Matthew Kelly (Dublin, 1849), p. v.

39. William Camden, Britannia: or A Chorographical Description of Great Britain and Ireland, Together with the Adjacent Islands …, ed. Edmund Gibson (2d. ed.: 2 vols.; London, 1722), II, 1327, 1416, 1422-24.

40. For background, see Thomas L. Coonan, The Irish Confederacy and the Puritan Revolution (Dublin and New York, 1954); Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland: 1625-42 (Ithaca, 1966).

41. For the modern edition of his work, see n. 38 above.

42. For his life, see Dictionary of National Biography [DNB], eds. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee (22 vols.; London, 1921-22), XXI, 75.

43. Apologia pro Hibernia, ed. Kelly, p. 1.

44. Ibid., pp. 19ff.

45. Ibid., pp. 167-68, 182ff.

46. See O'Donnell's excellent introduction, Selections from the Zoilomastix of Philip O'Sullivan Beare, esp. pp. xxii-xxxiv.

47. In the fifth book of the Zoilomastix O'Sullivan quoted those statements of Stanyhurst which he found to be most offensive.

48. Since O'Donnell published only parts of O'Sullivan's work, I have relied on his summary of its contents. See Selections from the Zoilomastix of Philip O'Sullivan Beare, pp. xxii-xxxiv.

49. Ibid., p. xxvi.

50. Ibid., p. xxviii.

51. Ibid., pp. xxix, 15ff.

52. Ibid., p. xxx.

53. Ibid., pp. 73-74. Interestingly, he revived the medieval jibe about the English having tails, p. 55.

54. I have used Dermod O'Connor's English translation, Keating's General History of Ireland (Dublin, n.d.), preface, pp. xv-xxxvi.

55. DNB, X, 1162-63.

56. Ibid., p. 1162.

57. Keating's General History of Ireland, trans. O'Connor, p. xvi.

58. Ibid., p. xvii.

59. Ibid., p. 537.

60. Ibid., p. xviii.

61. Ibid., pp. xix-xx.

62. The modern edition is cited in n. 21 above.

63. For background, see the work of Thomas Coonan cited in n. 40 above.

64. DNB, XII, 335.

65. Cambrensis eversus, ed. Kelly, I, 103.

66. Ibid., II, 521.

67. Ibid., I, 365.

68. The Analecta has been edited by Patrick Moran (Dublin, 1884). For Rothe's defense of the Irish, see. pp. 84-89.

69. Cambrensis eversus, ed. Kelly, II, 199-200.

70. Ibid., II, 141ff.

71. Ibid., II, 147.

72. Ibid., III, 505.

73. Ibid., II, 200ff. and for the remark about the razor, p. 219.

74. For Lynch's defense of Irish religion, see ibid., III 433ff.

75. Ibid., III, 475.

76. Ibid., III, 433.

77. Ibid., III, 513.

78. Ibid., III, 145-203. The Cambrensis eversus was dedicated to Charles II.

79. See Alithinologia sive veridica responsio … Eudoxio Alithinologo authore (1664), esp. pp. 9, 65, 68. This essay was Lynch's contribution to a controversy precipitated by the disclosure of a report to Pope Alexander VII written by the Irish Capuchin, Richard O'Ferrall, a partisan of Cardinal Rinuccini and the Old Irish, who had blamed the Anglo-Irish for the failure of the Catholic Confederacy. See Coonan, The Irish Confederacy and the Puritan Revolution, p. 334.

80. For the “Scotist” controversy, see Selections from the Zoilomastix of Philip O'Sullivan Beare, ed. O'Donnell, pp. xiv-xv; White, Apologia pro Hibernia, ed. Kelly, p. 131; and, for its eighteenth-century continuation, Roderic O'Flaherty, Ogygia, trans. James Hely (2 vols.; Dublin, 1793), II, 250-70; and the same author's Ogygia Vindicated (Dublin, 1775), pp. 42-43. Lynch wrote on the subject to the French literary scholar, Boileau, in a letter published as an appendix to O'Flaherty's Ogygia Vindicated, pp. 281-99.

81. See M. l'Abbé MacGeoghegan, Histoire de l'Irlande ancienne et moderne … (3 vols.; Paris, 1758-63), I, xiii-xxi; and Theophilus O'Flanagan's English translation of the Cambrensis eversus, published as Gratianus Lucius, Cambrensis Refuted: or Rather Historic Credit in the Affairs of Ireland Taken from Giraldus Cambrensis (Dublin, 1795), esp. pp. iii, xiv.