nd it is singular that he does not notice any
place of learning in Wales in all his writings. He studied at
Gloucester, and then at Paris, the greatest mediaeval university. We
have it on his own authority that he was a model student. "So entirely
devoted was he to study, having in his acts and in his mind, no sort
of levity or coarseness, that whenever the Masters of Arts wished to
select a pattern from among the good scholars, they would name Gerald
before all others." Later he lectured at Paris on canon law and
theology; his lectures, he tells us, were very popular. He returned
thence in 1172, two years after the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, whose
example and struggle for the rights of the Church made a deep and
lasting impression on him. Gerald soon obtained preferment: he held
three livings in Pembroke, one in Oxfordshire, and canonries at
Hereford and St. David's. His energy soon made itself felt. He
excommunicated the Welshmen and Flemings who would not pay tithes; and
then attacked the sins of the clergy. Most of the Welsh clergy were
married, contrary to the laws of the Church. Gerald hated a married
priest even more than he hated a monk. The Welsh priest, he says, was
wont to keep in his house a female (_focaria_) "to light his fire but
extinguish his virtue." "How can such a man practice frugality and
self-denial with a house full of brawling brats, and a woman for ever
extracting money to buy costly robes with long skirts trailing in the
dust?" Gerald hated women--the origin of all evil since the world
began: observing that in birds of prey the females are stronger than
the males, he remarks that this signifies "the female sex is more
resolute in all evil than the male." Among the married clergy he
attacked was the Archdeacon of Brecon; and the old man, being forced
to choose between his wife and his archdeaconry, preferred his wife.
Gerald was made Archdeacon of Brecon. In later years he had qualms of
conscience about the part he took in this business.

Between 1180 and 1194 he was often at Court and employed in the
king's affairs. Henry II. selected him as a suitable person to
accompany the young prince John to Ireland in 1185, and the result was
his two great works--"The Topography," and "The Conquest of Ireland,"
which are the chief and almost the only authorities for Irish history
in the Middle Ages. The former work he read publicly at Oxford on his
return; it was a great occasion: we must tell it in his