Giraldus Cambrensis, the usual literary name of the historian and ecclesiastic, Girald de Barri, who flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries, and was born about 1147 in Pembrokeshire, son of a Norman noble who had married into a princely Welsh family. He was brought up by his uncle, the Bishop of St Davids, was sent to the university of Paris in his twentieth year, and after his return entered into holy orders in 1172, and was appointed archdeacon of St Davids. He was from the first a zealous churchman, strenuous in the enforcement of discipline, and especially of clerical celibacy, and was the chief agent in establishing the payment of tithes within the principality. On the death of his uncle, the chapter of St Davids elected him bishop, but, as the election was made without the royal license, Girald renounced it. King Henry II. directed a new election; and, on the chapter's persisting in their choice of Girald, the king refused the neck is such that the head can be easily thrown back until it is in the same line with the neck, thus giving the animal additional power of reaching its appropriate food. The skull has empty cavities, which give lightness to the head, along with sufficient extent of surface for the insertion of the ligament which supports it. The legs are long and slender; the feet have cloven hoofs, but are destitute of the small lateral toes or spurious hoofs which occur in other ruminants. The head is long; to confirm the selection, and another bishop was appointed. Girald withdrew for a time to the university of Paris, and on his return was required by the Archbishop of Canterbury to take the administration of the diocese of St Davids, which had utterly failed in the hands of the bishop. He held it for four years. Being appointed a royal chaplain, and afterwards preceptor to Prince John, he accompanied that prince in 1185 in his expedition to Ireland, where he remained after John's return, in order to complete the well-known descriptive account of the natural history, the miracles, and the inhabitants of that country—his Topographia Hibernice. His Expugnatio Hibernice is an account of the conquest of that country under Henry II. Both are works of very great merit—this latter Brewer describes as 'a noble specimen of historical narration, of which the author's age furnished very rare examples.' In 1188 he attended Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his progress through Wales to preach a crusade, and worked up his observations into the Itinerarium Cambriæ. His later years were darkened by disappointment. On the sce of St Davids again becoming vacant, he was again unanimously elected by the chapter; but Archbishop Hubert of Canterbury interposed, and Girald, spite of three different journeys to Rome, failed to get the nomination confirmed. He devoted the remainder of his life to study, and died at St Davids in 1222. The writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, although disfigured by credulity and by excessive personal vanity, are of great value as materials for the history and for the social condition of his age. A translation of the Itinerarium Cambriæ was published in 1806 (2 vols.); the complete works have been edited by J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner (8 vols., Rolls series, 1861-91). See Owen, Gerard the Welshman (1889).