no other contemporary writer does, we may accept as such. This treatise is, in fact, except some small part from his own acquaintance with St. Hugh, a simple compilation of what he was told and found recorded at Lincoln. It has none of his usual classical and scholastic vagaries; it seems to have been penned without his heart or scholarly labour in it. He was not the man really to appreciate such a man as St. Hugh, notwithstanding his expressed admiration and reverence of him; and this life seems to me to have been the work of a man who was doing a task set him, not the work of a labour of love. [At this point Mr. Dimock's own manuscript ends. On the historical value of Giraldus' Life of St. Hugh, and on the pieces which he has printed in the Appendix, he has left no materials, except where some of them are incidentally spoken of when he is treating of Giraldus' Lives of the other bishops of Lincoln. From this point therefore I have to go on with such notices of them as I am able to put together, which from the nature of the case must be of a strictly historical kind.-E. A. F.] General character In estimating the historical value of of Giraldus and his any work of Giraldus Cambrensis, we writings. must remember the twofold character of the man with whom we are dealing. We are dealing with one who was vain, garrulous, careless as to minute accuracy, even so far careless as to truth as to be, to say the least, ready to accept statements which told against an enemy without carefully weighing the evidence for them. We are dealing with one who was not very scrupulous as to consistency, and who felt no special shame at contradicting himself. But we are also dealing with one of the most learned men of a learned age, with one who, whatever we say as to the soundness of his judgement, came behind few in the sharpness of his witswith one who looked with a keen, if not an impartial, eye on all the events and controversies of his own time-with one, above all, who had mastered more languages than most men of his time, and who had looked at them with an approach to a scientific view which still fewer men of his time shared with him. I have elsewhere ventured to call him "the father of comparative philology,"1 and I see no reason to withdraw the title. A work of Giraldus then has a twofold value, or rather, even if it is worthless on one side, it is sure to be precious on the other. He may be telling a spiteful tale or repeating a frivolous legend; but in the way of telling it he is sure to use some incidental expression, to bring in some incidental illustration, which adds to our knowledge, very often of facts, always of the way in which men looked at facts. In this way, though the substance of a writing of Giraldus may be of very little historical value, there is always something to be learned from the form into which he throws its substance. In the present Life of But Character of his St. Hugh we see Giraldus at once at Life of St. Hugh. his best and at his worst. He is at his worst because he is at his best. Because he was telling sober truth, or what he received as such-because he was simply setting down what he had heard and read and, to some extent, seen-his work is, in one sense, of higher historical value than most of his works. because he wrote in this way, he wrote, to repeat Mr. Dimock's phrase, "without heart or scholarly labour." Had he been praising himself or reviling somebody else, the heart and the scholarly labour would have been given, and we should have had a work, morally far less creditable to its author, far less to be trusted by his readers, but which would have been far richer in those incidental touches and references which in his other writings set the man and his age before us in such a living way. Giraldus seems to have found at Lincoln only friends 1 See Norman Conquest, vol. v., p. 579. I think that I have made good his claim to the title in Comparative Politics, 486. and just men, dead or alive. Here he had no one to abuse, no wrongs or grievances to complain of. For this in one way we suffer. Giraldus in a good fit, writing soberly, is comparatively dull, comparatively uninstructive. Had the church of Lincoln contained any of those monsters of wickedness which he found in other churches, had he suffered at Lincoln the wrongs which he conceived himself to have suffered at other places, we should have been gainers, not in the truth of the actual narrative, but in the stores of incidental information which would have been thrown out at random. It is sad to have to say it; but Giraldus was far less in his element in setting forth the undoubted virtues and good deeds of Hugh of Lincolu than he was in setting forth the real or alleged vices and evil deeds of William of Ely. The Life of St. Hugh then is, in the Value of the Life. strictly historical part, sober and trustworthy enough. The miraculous stories stand on the same ground as other miraculous stories. Giraldus simply reports what he heard or read; there is no sign of invention or exaggeration. For this reason, while there is much that is true in the Life, there is little that is new; the main facts of St. Hugh's life, and many of the smaller anecdotes, are to be found in the other writers who used the same materials. But Giraldus, even when dullest and most virtuous, could not altogether cease to be both characteristic and instructive. Many of his mere expressions are worthy of notice. Giraldus, inaccurate in many things, and specially inaccurate in his dates, had still a kind of accuracy of his He had the accuracy of a wide and keen observation, a kind of accuracy consistent with not a few slips, or even worse than slips, in narrative statement. He is a geographer, marking physical points, and careful in his geographical terminology. In p. 6 of the Introduction to the Life of Remigius, own. His geography. the description of Lindesey as stretching "ab Humbro "marino usque Witheman fluvium, qui Lincolniam per"meat and penetrat," sets well before us the great estuary on one side, and on the other the stream which divides the older colony of Lindum from the new town which contains the towers of Coleswegen and the crowning-place of Henry of Anjou.1 But far more striking is the geographical accuracy of the first sentence of the actual Life of Hugh. It is worth while to compare the words of Giraldus with those of other writers who used the same materials. John of Schalby no doubt preserves to us the words of the local record which he had before him, and which Giraldus had before him also. He simply records Hugh's birth in Burgundy, without stopping to explain which of the many uses of that ambiguous name was to be understood. The author of the Magna Vita either assumed that all the world knew what Hugh meant when he spoke of the "territorium Gratianopolitanum," or else he was himself careless on 4 (1362), but it does not seem that William of Newburgh mentions it himself. See i. 8, 13. 2" Vir igitur hic, virorum vir "perpaucorum, de remotis im"perialis Burgundiæ finibus haud "procul ad Alpibus originem "duxit." 3 P. 199. He is here simply "Hugo de Aveloni de Burgundia "natus." 4 The author of the Magna Vita nowhere directly mentions Hugh's birthplace. He twice (iii. 14; v. 14) incidentally speaks of Avalon as the castle of Hugh's brother, and he makes St. Hugh say (i. 1) that the "ecclesia in territorio Gratianopolitano," where he first studied, was near to his father's lands and castles. 66 the point. But Giraldus, as if foreseeing the confusions of later times, enlarged the record before him, so as to describe the native land of the saint with the minutest accuracy. Hugh came "de remotis imperialis Burgundiæ "finibus, haud procul ab Alpibus." This accurate description is followed in the Legenda,1 and swells into the really fine verses of the Metrical Life. The scholar His notices of too comes out in one or two of those language. occasional notices of language of which Giraldus is fond. In p. 96 he shows that either himself or his hero had picked up Hebrew enough to know that the name John "Dei gratia sonat." Giraldus knew English well; but he had somewhat of a Welsh-born Norman's contempt for the tongue of the Saxon, a feeling which is hardly to be found among English-born Normans, or rather Norman-descended Englishmen, of his generation. When Hugh is sent to Witham, he adds, "cui loco vel a candore Witham, vel a sapientia "Witham (littera geminata), barbara quondam lingua nomen imposuit." In another place he mentions Infra, 134. one of the sick persons cured at Hugh's tomb using the English tongue; but he unluckily does not give us, as he does in some other parts of his writings, the exact English words. It is not however very hard to translate "Deo gratias et Sanctæ Mariæ et Sancto Hugoni." The person thus speaking was a boy who had been brought up among the chief citizens of Lincoln, men bearing Norman and scriptural names ("Edu as "Illa colore Litent, set mille The panegyric goes on through "Inter tot flores "Inter gramina flos, inter flores "rosa." |