Politics & Power Quote by Giraldus Cambrensis

A medieval cleric marveling at a society without begging is never just reporting local color; he is staging a moral comparison. Giraldus Cambrensis writes as a Norman-Welsh churchman watching Ireland with the double vision of ethnographer and prosecutor, and the sentence tilts between admiration and instrumentalization. “No one...ever begs” reads like praise, but it also functions as a rebuke to his own feudal world, where poverty is both visible and spiritually managed. If Ireland can supposedly make begging unnecessary through shared resources, what does that say about Christian Europe’s comfort with want?

The subtext lives in his absolutes. “No one” and “all are common to all” are totalizing claims, the kind that turn complex economies into moral tableaux. Giraldus is less interested in the messy mechanics of land, kinship, and obligation than in the rhetorical usefulness of a people who can be cast as naturally virtuous. He elevates “liberality and hospitality” as “first virtues,” echoing Christian ideals while quietly relocating their origin: not in church discipline, but in customary practice. That’s flattering, and also destabilizing.

Context matters: Giraldus wrote in the age of Anglo-Norman expansion into Ireland, when describing the Irish as either admirable primitives or defective barbarians served colonial ends. This line is the “noble” half of that oscillation. By idealizing communal hospitality, he makes Ireland legible to his readers through a Christian virtue lens, while keeping the authority to define, and later judge, what counts as civilization.