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How he foully wronged the honour of O'Rorke, a chieftain of Connaught; how, for this and other offences, he was upon the accession of Roderick O'Connor driven away from Ireland; how he fled to England to do homage to Henry, and seek his protection; how, finding him gone to Aquitaine, he followed him there, and in return for his vows of allegiance received letters authorizing the king's subjects to enlist if they choose for the Irish service; how armed with these he went to Wales, and there succeeded in recruiting a band of mixed Norman and Norman-Welsh adventurers all this is recorded at large in the histories.
He was a Wexfordman; that is to say, he came from the part of Ireland where if you cross the Channel there is least difference between the land you leave and the land you sail to; where the sea-divided peoples have been always to some extent assimilated. Here in the twelfth century the first Norman-Welsh invaders came across.
Amid all the confusion of a war of pillage and slaughter, surrounded by half-wild Welsh mercenaries, by the lawless Norman-Welsh knights, by savage Brabançons, he learned his lessons for four years with his cousin, the son of Robert, from Master Matthew, afterwards his chancellor and bishop of Angers.
The Norman-Welsh knights of the border had by painful experience learned among their native woods and mountains how to wage such war as was needed in Ireland-a kind of war where armour was worse than useless, where strength was of less account than agility, where days and nights of cold and starvation were followed by impetuous assaults of an enemy who never stood long enough for a decisive battle, a war where no mercy was given and no captives taken.
The philosophic Glanville might suggest that the French at that time had been weakened by previous wars, but Gerald, true to the feudal instincts of a baron of the Norman-Welsh border, spoke of the happy days before dukes had been made into kings, who oppressed the Norman nobles by their overbearing violence, and the English by their insular tyranny; "For there is nothing which so stirs the heart of man as the joy of liberty, and there is nothing which so weakens it as the oppression of slavery," said Gerald, who had himself felt the king's hand heavy on him.
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