1 - Travel, Discovery, and Ethnography in Early Modern Britain

Summary

Llandaff cathedral stands inside a green oasis on the banks of the River Taff, sheltered from the busy routine of Cardiff, Wales’ modern capital. Here on 15 March 1188, Baldwin of Forde, the archbishop of Canterbury, preached the cross to an assembly of English and Welsh subjects. The devout Baldwin was well into a six-week mission through Wales to inflame the soldiers of Christ to take the cross and join the crusaders in the Holy Land. Baldwin's entourage of Welsh princes and clerics included Alexander, archdeacon of Bangor and Gerald, the canon of St David’s, perhaps ‘the most talented scholar and churchman in Wales’. Alexander fulfilled a vital role. Baldwin knew no Welsh and it fell to Alexander to translate. At Llandaff, the task required double translation: Latin to Welsh and Latin to English. The task on that spring day in March may have been made easier by a feature of the assembly Gerald noted in his narrative account, a Journey Through Wales. The Welsh and English stood on opposite sides of Baldwin, yet ‘from each Nation many took the cross’.

Gerald recorded Baldwin's tour in his diary. He set to work almost immediately upon returning home to compose a narrative account. He finished the Journey Through Wales in 1191 and began work on a second account in 1193. This became the Description of Wales. Where the first book recorded Gerald's encounters with Wales and its mix of peoples – Welsh, English, Normans, Flemings – the Description stands as one of the finest ethnographies between Herodotus and the end of the seventeenth century. Gerald's accounts stand out for their quality, but they are remarkable for another reason. Almost no travel narrative that describes encounters among the peoples of Britain in such depth, detail, or ethnographic precision can be found until the Tudor and Stuart period. This chapter explains how the legacies of medieval travel, European voyages in the Atlantic, and the drive to study humanity propelled British travellers into a discovery and rediscovery of multicultural Britain in the Tudor and Stuart centuries.

Medieval travellers

Britons always travelled. For all the later talk of a safe sceptr’d isle, war hardly spared a generation in medieval Britain. Soldiers impressed throughout the Isles turned the North of England and lowland Scotland into killing zones in the fourteenth century.