"Not addicted to gluttony or drunkenness, this people who incur no expense in food or dress, and whose minds are always bent upon the defence of their country, and on the means of plunder, are wholly employed in the care of their horses and furniture"
About this Quote
There is praise in this description, but it comes lacquered with clerical suspicion. Giraldus Cambrensis sketches a people who are, on paper, morally impressive: not given to gluttony or drunkenness, uninterested in costly food or dress, disciplined by constant readiness. For a medieval churchman, restraint is virtue, and he grants it with one hand. With the other, he frames that restraint as the enabling condition for violence. Their minds are "always bent" on defense and plunder, a pairing that collapses moral distinction: protection and predation become two faces of the same habit.
The sentence works because it reads like an inventory, not an argument. Giraldus piles clauses the way an administrator might list resources, turning human life into logistics: expenses, minds, horses, furniture. That bureaucratic cadence is its own subtext. These people are legible to him primarily as a military economy. Even their frugality isn't spiritual; it's tactical, the savings redirected into mobility and gear. "Furniture" here doesn't mean tasteful interiors but the hard kit of a mounted culture - saddles, harness, arms - a reminder that identity is organized around the horse.
Context matters: Giraldus is writing at the hinge of Norman expansion into Ireland and Wales, when ethnography is rarely neutral and often a tool. He depicts an adversary (or subject) as simultaneously admirable and dangerous, a population whose temperance doesn't civilize them but sharpens them. It's a cleric's way of saying: do not mistake simplicity for innocence.
The sentence works because it reads like an inventory, not an argument. Giraldus piles clauses the way an administrator might list resources, turning human life into logistics: expenses, minds, horses, furniture. That bureaucratic cadence is its own subtext. These people are legible to him primarily as a military economy. Even their frugality isn't spiritual; it's tactical, the savings redirected into mobility and gear. "Furniture" here doesn't mean tasteful interiors but the hard kit of a mounted culture - saddles, harness, arms - a reminder that identity is organized around the horse.
Context matters: Giraldus is writing at the hinge of Norman expansion into Ireland and Wales, when ethnography is rarely neutral and often a tool. He depicts an adversary (or subject) as simultaneously admirable and dangerous, a population whose temperance doesn't civilize them but sharpens them. It's a cleric's way of saying: do not mistake simplicity for innocence.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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