The preachers clearly worked hard and had some trying experiences, and kept up their spirits by little jokes, which Gerald retails. They nearly came to grief in quicksands at the mouth of the river Neath. "Terrible hard country this," said one of the monks next day in the castle at Swansea. "Some people are never satisfied," retorted his companion; "you were complaining of its being too soft in the quicksand yesterday." The mountains were trying to men no longer in their youth; after toiling up one the archbishop sank exhausted on a fallen tree and said to his panting companions, "Can any one enliven the company by whistling a tune?" "Which," adds Gerald, "is not very easily done by people out of breath." From whistling the conversation passed to nightingales, which some one said were never found in Wales. "Wise bird, the nightingale," remarked the archbishop.
One serious difficulty they had was that none of them, not even Gerald, knew Welsh sufficiently well to preach in it, though they generally had interpreters. The archbishop, who would sometimes preach away for hours without result, felt this much more than Gerald. He declares he moved crowds to tears though they did not understand a word of what he was saying. But one may take the words of Prince Rhys's fool as evidence (if any were needed) that ignorance of Welsh weakened the effect. "You owe a great debt, Rhys, to your kinsman the archdeacon, who has taken a hundred or so of your men to serve the Lord; if he had only spoken in Welsh, you wouldn't have had a soul left."
In all about three thousand took the cross; but the Crusade was delayed, zeal cooled, and it is probable that comparatively few went. The _Itinerarium Regis Ricardi_ mentions, I think, only one exploit by a Welshman in the Third Crusade; he was an archer, and so a South Walian.
This brings me to one of the incidental notes of great value scattered about the Itinerary. Speaking of the siege of Abergavenny (1182), Gerald tells us that the men of Gwent and Glamorgan excelled all others in the use of the bow, and gives curious evidence of the strength of their shooting. Thus the arrows pierced an oak door four inches thick; they had been left there as a curiosity, and Gerald saw them with their iron points coming through on the inner side. He describes these bows as "made of elm--ugly, unfinished-looking weapons, but astonishingly stiff, large, and strong, and equally useful for long and short shooting." Add to this that the longbow was not a characteristic English weapon till the latter part of the thirteenth century, that the first battle in which an English king made effective use of archery (at Falkirk, 1298), his infantry consisted mainly of Welshmen; and there can be little doubt that the famous longbow of England, which won the victories of Creçy and Poitiers and Agincourt, and indirectly did much to destroy feudalism and villenage, had its home in South Wales.