Of the Senseless Devotion of Welshmen
Walter Map - The Courtier's Trifles
Bodl. MS. 851
II.viii.
IN every nation,’ as hath been said elsewhere, ‘he that feareth God is received of Him.’
Among our Welshmen, the fear of God is seldom ‘according to knowledge.’ With Lord William de Braose, a man well skilled in arms, was, as he himself told me, a Welshman of noble race, with such zest for goodness that every night at the first cockcrow he rose from his bed and, kneeling naked upon the naked ground, persisted in prayer until morning light. Moreover, he was so temperate and kept such a strict guard over himself that any one who knew him would think him above men and little lower than the angels. But if you saw how senseless he was in hostile encounters, how thirsty for blood, how careless of his own safety, how greedy for the death of others, how glad at the doing of any crime or murder, you would never doubt that he was inwardly given up to iniquity. So constant and characteristic is this lack of finer feeling in Weishmen, that if in one respect they seem temperate, in many they appear tempestuous and savage.
SOURCE:
Map, Walter. Master Walter Map's book, De nugis curialium (Courtier's trifles). trans. Frederick Tupper and Marbury Bladen Ogle. London: Chatto & Windus, 1924.