One important strand in historical writing on the peoples of the medieval British Isles has been the image that those peoples had of each other. A particular focus has been on the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when ecclesiastical authors such as Gerald of Wales propagated an overwhelmingly disparaging view of the Welsh, Irish and Scots. The ‘Celtic’ neighbours of the English, according to this view, still needed to be taught how to make the most of the economic potential of their countries; they led a largely pastoral existence; they were intensely warlike societies of freemen given to violent feuding and atrocities; they disregarded the directives of the reformed church; in short, to writers like Gerald of Wales, they wore ‘the face of the barbarian’. Once the stereotypes have been identified and treated as they deserve, there is much of great historical value to be gleaned from what Gerald of Wales wrote on the Welsh and the Irish. But it needs to be constantly borne in mind that elements of Gerald's image of the Welsh and Irish are paralleled in the writings of ecclesiastics throughout eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, in Adam of Bremen's remarks on the Norwegians and the Icelanders, say, or in Helmold of Bosau's description of the Slavs.

The image of the barbarian did not simply disappear in thirteenth-century England. Several of the surviving copies of Gerald of Wales's ethnographic works date to that period.