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One may almost say that Wales is Wales to-day in spite of her political history. Wales owes far more to her poets and men of letters than to her princes and their politics. Giraldus Cambrensis laid his finger on the spot, when he said: "Happy would Wales be if it had one prince, and that a good one."
They burnt their suburbs, consisting doubtless of rude wooden huts; shut the gates, and upon the first two assaults drove back the assailants. So violently were they repelled, "that they withdrew," Giraldus tells us, "in all great haste from the walls."
He further informs his readers that, owing to their presumably marine origin, "bishops and clergymen in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the time of fasting, because they are not flesh, nor born of flesh," although for certain other and theological reasons, not specially requiring to be discussed in the present instance, Giraldus disputes the legality of this practice of the Hibernian clerics.
These were all inhumanly massacred, according to Giraldus, the eulogist of all the Geraldines, by the order of Herve, contrary to the entreaties of Raymond. Their legs were first violently broken, and they were then hurled down the rocks into the tide.
In the meanwhile Henry was established in Dublin, where he kept Christmas in high state, occupying a palace built in the native fashion of painted wicker-work, set up just outside the walls. Here he entertained the chiefs, who were naturally astonished at the splendour of his entertainments. "They learnt," Giraldus observes with satisfaction, "to eat cranes" does this mean herons?
I saw no reason to suppose that it had not. 'If crocodiles, thought I, 'ever existed in Britain, and who shall say they have not? seeing that their remains have been discovered, why should they not have haunted this pool? If beavers ever existed in Britain, and do not tradition and Giraldus say that they have? why should they not have existed in this pool?
Giraldus continues by telling us that the natives called the place Patrick's purgatory, and that it was said that the saint had obtained from God this public manifestation of the punishments and rewards of the other world, in order to convince his incredulous hearers.
These things which might have happened anywhere did, in fact, happen in Ireland. Out of the footprints of the invaders there sprang up a legion of fictionists, professional cooks of history. Beginning with Giraldus Cambrensis they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, did not end with Froude.
He is represented to have been a busy, meddling and troublesome man, which was the reason, as it is supposed, why he never rose to higher Dignities in the Church. He was buried at St. David's about 70 years of age. Jones's Musical Relicks of the Welsh Bards, and the Life of Giraldus drawn up by Leland and Bale from his writings, which is prefixed to his Itinerary. Purchas's Pilgrimage p. 779.
That common religion which might be expected to form a strong bond between them had itself to adopt a twofold organization. Distinctions of nationality were carried into the Sanctuary and into the Cloister. The historian Giraldus, in preaching at Dublin against the alleged vices of the native Clergy, sounded the first note of a long and bitter controversy.
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