In Light of Another's Word. Shirin A. Khanmohamadi

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 By 1300, the British Isles constituted a world increasingly subsumed under a single economic orbit and a single currency, constituting, in R. R. Davies’s estimation, a “world in which Anglo-French cultural, architectural and ecclesiastical norms increasingly dominated, and even threatened, indigenous and local traditions.”²⁵ Scholars of medieval Scotland have recently begun to unearth and examine the region’s cultural losses with respect to Gaelic law, language, and the very memory of the Gaelic past.²⁶ Likewise, first in marcher Welsh and then native Wales over the course of the twelfth century, Anglo-Norman literary culture penetrated indigenous literary traditions, transforming them such that in Wales too it would be possible to discover “the themes, topoi, and literary sentiments common throughout the court circles of the Anglo-Norman world,” in Welsh scriptoria, the insular scribal tradition became edged out by Anglo-Norman script, and native Welsh church buildings began to reflect Romanesque patterns.²⁷

      A close reading of the Descriptio Kambriae suggests that these processes of social and cultural accommodation, well under way in the period in which Gerald wrote, may have motivated his composition of the novel treatise. For just as in the nineteenth-century European incursion into Asia, Africa, and the Americas gave rise to the widespread appeal to anthropological “salvage”—the call to preserve traditional cultures from the ravages of modernity and acculturation—so too in the medieval era’s greatest period of expansion, we find that same call in the work of the twelfth century’s most accomplished ethnographer of the Far West. In the “First Preface” of the Descriptio, Gerald speaks of “my own native land”²⁸ with the romantic sentimentality proper to salvage work: “Nos, ob patriae favorem et posteritatis, finium nostrorum abdita quidem evolvere, et inclite gesta, necdum tamen in memoriam luculento labore digesta, tenebris exuere, humilemque stilo materiam efferre, nec inutile quidem nec illaudabile reputavimus” (my italics) (I have been inspired to think that it may be a useful and praiseworthy service to those who come after me if I can set down in full some of the secrets of my own native land. By writing about such humdrum matters I can rescue from oblivion those deeds so nobly done which have not yet been fully recorded). And in the “Second Preface,” similarly, “et posteritati consulens, inclita nostri temporis acta sub silentio perire [perish] non permisi” (my italics) (For the benefit of those who will come after, I have also rescued from oblivion some of the remarkable events of our own times). Given that Gerald—whose attitude generally displays the realism and lack of nostalgia characteristic of Cambro-Norman society—nowhere else characterizes the processes of accommodation that were proceeding all around him as forms of loss, instead setting about to fix and record soberly such