solitary people content to live in the woods, a seminomadic existence implied in the description of their huts as usibus annuis sufficientia (strong enough to last a year or so). That the passage describes the Welsh almost solely on the basis of what they do not do—“non urbe, non vico, non castris … non palatial magna, non sumptuosas”—suggests the extent to which Gerald is enacting an implicit comparison with contemporary Anglo-Norman life, which as we know from abundant contemporary evidence was indeed town oriented, and built around stone palaces and castles, those symbols of Norman conquest throughout England and Wales. Gerald’s description of Welsh forest dwelling is far from value free: as we know both from Ciceronian developmental anthropology and from stock medieval encyclopedic sources such as those of Pliny and Solinus, a people content to live in the woods win themselves the label of silvester (pl: silvestres, literally savages), from the Latin for forest, silva.
Welsh political life constitutes a final, major category of ethnographic interest to Gerald and other writers of Celtic custom. Anglo-Norman writers were here, too, most struck by the differences from the political organization of their own realm. Gerald is not alone in noticing the lack of centralized authority or single kingship in Celtic lands, though he is unusual for recommending against it as he does at the end of book 2. Observers found in Wales and Ireland, particularly the upland and western regions out of reach of the Anglo-Norman orbit, political organization more kin based than lord based.15 The overriding significance of kinship structures in Welsh life is not lost on Gerald, as we see at the end of the Descriptio when he notes the fractious effects of the “antiquus in hac gente mos” or ancient Welsh custom of “brothers dividing between them the property which they have” (2.4), that is, of Welsh partible inheritance. Similarly, he describes Welsh kinship: “Genus itaque super omnia diligent; et damna sanguinis atque dedecus acriter ulciscuntur. Vindicis enim animi sunt, et irae cruentae; nec solum novas et recentes injuries, verum etiam veteres et antiques velut instantes vindicare parati” (As they have this intense interest in their family descent, they avenge with great ferocity any wrong or insult done to their relations. They are vindictive by nature, bloodthirsty and violent. Not only are they ready to avenge new and recent injuries, but old ones too, as if they had only just received them) (1.17). Here Gerald refers to the practice of blood feud, in effect throughout the twelfth century in Wales and phased out gradually a century later when Wales began to assume the centralized organization of a feudal state.16 To Anglo-Normans, whose king had achieved a near-exclusive claim on war making and “had taken homicide out of the realm of private compensation and feud and subjected it to the processes of royal justice,”17 the blood feud, though subject to intricate laws, signaled utter disorder and violence.
The Descriptio Kambriae, then, arguably functions as a work of colonial ethnography. Through his widespread application of developmental anthropology in the text, Gerald may have provided the Anglo-Normans with a cultural profile of their conquered subjects that buttressed their preexisting assumptions about their cultural superiority in relation to them. That Gerald had a primarily Anglo-Norman audience in mind for the Descriptio Kambriae is suggested by its Latin-language composition, as well as his dedication of it to an English ecclesiast, Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury.18 Gerald, moreover, notoriously ends his ethnography of the Welsh by offering military advice to the Normans on “How the Welsh can be conquered” and “How Wales should be governed once it has been conquered.” These combined textual features appear to place the dual-affiliated, Cambro-Norman Gerald in the uneasy position of playing “native informant” to the colonizer. Other features of the text, however, overtly challenge the Anglo-Norman viewpoint and champion Welsh ones. That Gerald’s military advice to the conquering Normans is immediately countered by advice to the Welsh on resisting the Normans—suggesting that at times, Gerald had a native Welsh audience in mind as well—is altogether typical of his ambivalence and duality of perspective. These alternative perspectives sit uncomfortably together in Gerald’s treatise on the Welsh, just as they reside uneasily in his own hybrid body, forcing him to occupy what Jeffrey Cohen has aptly called a “difficult middle” between two seemingly opposing states.19
Uneasy though it may be, the hybridity of the Descriptio Kambriae is pervasive, extending from its deployment of contradictory language to its unfixed functions and even audience. To begin with its doubled discourse, Gerald’s lengthy Anglo-Norman viewpoint on native Welsh life and customs is countered in the Descriptio with a radically different voice emerging out of the Welsh’s own mythic narratives of resistance and redemption. Having dismissively waved away the “remarkable” and “completely wrong” prophecies of Merlin (2.7), Gerald reconjures their essential content soon thereafter in the words of another prophet, an old Briton living in Pencader,20 with whose prophetic voice he ends the Descriptio. The old man of Pencader, not unlike Gerald, is of mixed affiliation, having sided with Henry II against his own people in the expedition of 1163 against South Wales. But when asked by King Henry “what he thought of the royal army, whether it could withstand the rebel troops and what the outcome of the war would be,”
respondit, “Gravari quidem, plurimaque ex parte destrui et debilitari vestris, rex, aliorumque viribus, nunc ut olim et pluries, meritorum exigentia, gens ista valebit. Ad plenum autem, proper hominis iram, nisi et ira Dei concurrerit, non delebitur. Nec alia, ut arbitror, gens quam haec Kambrica, aliave lingua, in die districti examinis coram Judice supremo, quicquid de ampliori contingat, pro hac terrarum angulo respondebit.”
(“My Lord, King,” he replied, “this nation may now be harassed, weakened and decimated by your soldiery, as it has so often been by others in former times; but it will never be totally destroyed by the wrath of man, unless at the same time it is punished by the wrath of God. Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgment any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all for this small corner of the earth.”) (2.10)
The old man of Pencader answers in the language of Welsh political redemption, announcing the return of the not-to be-repressed colonial remnant of the British Isles, its mythic, native Welsh. While the resistance sounded by this Welsh voice finds striking context as a final note for the Descriptio Kambriae, it is otherwise in no way unusual or atypical as Welsh expression: throughout the twelfth century, such prophecies figured prominently in contemporary Welsh narratives as the means for Welsh deliverance from foreign domination, forming the “cardinal axiom” of Welsh historical mythology that Britain would one day be reunified and returned to the rule of the Welsh.21 Gerald has, then, concluded his ethnographic treatise by speaking in a characteristically native Welsh idiom.
But Gerald’s advocacy of the Welsh is, I believe, discoverable at an even deeper textual level of the Descriptio. Just as his choice to close his text with a paradigmatically Welsh voice disrupts the colonial ethnographic perspective of the Descriptio’s previous pages, so Gerald’s very composition of the Descriptio itself may be seen as an intervention in the colonialist agenda with respect to the Welsh: an improvised, textual response to the perceived need for cultural salvage against colonial incursion into local Welsh culture. For such widespread incursion and acculturation in the direction of the self-styled more “advanced” Anglo-Normans was precisely what Wales was undergoing within Gerald’s lifetime. In the span of the late eleventh through fourteenth centuries, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish societies underwent changes much like southern and midland England had undergone from the ninth through twelfth centuries, an “Anglicization” of the British Isles or “penetration of English peoples, institutions, norms, and culture (broadly defined) into the outer, non-English parts of the British Isles.”22 In Wales and Ireland, Anglicization proceeded through the establishment of English settlements, which aggressively asserted their own societal and cultural norms along with the English language in southern Wales and southern and eastern Ireland.23 The impact of Anglo-Norman colonization expressed itself increasingly all over twelfth-century Wales, but especially in the south, through the changing of place names, the exploitation of native forest and fishery resources, the spread of arable cultivation, and the development of markets and gradually even of small towns.24
