Gerald of Wales, describing his journey through Wales on the archbishop of Canterbury's crusade-preaching mission, paused to explain how greed among invasive religious orders had overrun borders in southern Wales. In his view the victim was Llanddewi Nant Honddu (Llanhonddu), known in ‘corrupt’ English as ‘Llanthony’; the aggressor, the Cistercians. This monastery, almost straddling the Anglo-Welsh border, had a daughter-house in Gloucester in neighbouring England. Gerald, born at Manorbier in Norman-controlled Dyfed, had received his early religious instruction at Gloucester. In keeping the Welsh placename of a place he likely knew from his youth, Gerald clung to the Welsh side of the linguistic divide. When writing, he was living at Llanddew near Brecon, not far from Llanhonddu. He wrote with fervour about this part of Wales because it was his home. Here, he felt oppression deeply. He judged that the greatest danger in forcing boundaries beyond their rightful lease was ending up alone.

After listing the assaults on Llanhonddu, and indicting greed with classical maxims, he shifted to the present tense for the passage quoted above. Here he changed the register of his narrative from a single, sad history, to a tale of general truths about relations between those who take and those who dwell. The biblical language evokes sexual aggression: ‘conjugatis’; ‘copulatis’. Isaiah lamented that the trappings of civilisation – homes and fields – were predatory if born of a desire to have more. Such transgressive force assaulted the integrity of other people's homes and fields.