Daily Inspiration Quote by Giraldus Cambrensis

A medieval cleric describing borders like a bookkeeper is never just doing geography. Giraldus Cambrensis slips a quiet ideology into a seemingly neutral administrative note: Wales, he implies, is legible, divisible, and therefore governable. The killer phrase is "consideration having been paid ... more to the value than to the just quantity". That is the language of appraisal, not belonging. Land becomes an asset whose worth can outweigh fairness, custom, or even proportionality. In a single stroke, he normalizes an economic logic of rule that feels strikingly modern.

The subtext is also a critique disguised as reportage. "Just quantity or proportion" gestures toward an ideal of equitable division, only to concede it was ignored. Giraldus is not cheering injustice so much as revealing how power actually carves territory: not by geometry, but by revenue, pasture, ports, and strategic corridors. It is a cleric's version of cynicism, wrapped in the polite grammar of scholarship.

Context sharpens the edge. Giraldus wrote about Wales from the uneasy position of a churchman entwined with Anglo-Norman authority yet fascinated by Welsh life and lineage. The 12th century was an era when Norman expansion, ecclesiastical reform, and bureaucratic record-keeping were tightening their grip. His sentence performs that tightening. By framing "ancient times" as a precedent for value-driven partition, he supplies history as a tool of legitimacy: if the past already divided Wales by worth, present-day reordering can pose as continuity rather than conquest.