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Who Was Rhain the Irishman?

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Who Was Rhain the Irishman? STUDIA CELTICA, XXXIV (2000), 131—148 Who was Rhain the Irishman? DAVID E. THORNTON Department of History, Bil/tent University, Ankara According to the medieval Welsh chronicles, a pretender called Reyn Scotus or Rein Yscot, that is ‘Reyn. the Irishman’, appeared in south Wales in 1022 claiming to be the son of king Maredudd ab Owain (d. 999), and for a time succeeded in establishing himself in the kingship of Deheubarth, apparently with the approval of the southern Welsh, until he was defeated at Abergwili by Llywelyn ap Seisyll of Gwynedd later in the same year. Scholarly opinion among Welsh historians regarding the claims made by Reyn. have varied somewhat, though to my knowledge no one has accepted them in their entirety. J. E. Lloyd, for example, referred to Reyn simply as an ‘Irish pretender . who claimed to be son of Maredudd’,1 whereas others have been less certain, suggesting, for exam- ple, that he was perhaps of ‘a mixed Welsh, Irish and Hiberno-Scandinavian descent’.2 However, recently, and approaching the problem from the Irish side of the equation, Sean Duffy has tentatively posited the ‘possibility’ that Rein. Yscot may be identical with the Irish dynast Roen (or Raen), king of Meath, who died in 1027.3 In this article, I shall argue that a detailed reading of the Welsh sources indicates that there are strong grounds for arguing quite the contrary: that this enigmatic ‘Rhain the Irishman’ was in fact a Welsh dynast and may very well have been the son of Maredudd ab Owain, as he claimed to be. The starting-point for any consideration ofReyn Scotus must be the five extant medieval accounts of his deeds — two Cambro-Latin and three Middle Welsh — in the light of an analysis of the textual history of the relevant chronicles. The two surviving versions of the Annales Cambriae (=AC) describe the events of 1022 as follows:4 AC (B): Reyn Scotus mentitus est se esse filium Mareduc qui optinuit Dextrales Britones; quem Seisil rex Venedocie in Hostio Guili expugnauit, et occisus est Reyn. Eilaf uastauit Demetiam. Meneuia fracta est. 1 J. E. Lloyd, A History of Walesfi‘om the Earliest Times Ancient Manuscripts, ed. Owen Jones et al., 2nd edn. to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vols., 3rd edn. (London, (Denbigh, 1870), 718. 1939), i, 347; cf. A. H. Williams, An Introduction to the 3 Sean Duffy, ‘Ostmen, Irish and Welsh in the History of Wales, 2 vols. (Cardiff, 1941—8), i, 167. eleventh century’, Peritia: journal of the Medieval 2 David Moore, ‘Grulfudd ap Cynan and the Academy of Ireland, 9 (1995), 378—96 (p. 383). medieval Welsh polity’, in K. L. Maund (ed.), Gruffudd 4 London, PRO, E164/1, p. 11 (=B-text); London, a]; Cynan: A Collaborative Biography (Woodbridge, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A.1, f0. 141" 1997), 1—59 (p. 29); note also K. L. Maund, Ireland, (=C-text). For a conflated and imperfect edn. of the Wales, and England in the Eleventh. Century relevant texts, see Annales Canzbriae, ed. J. Williams ab (Woodbridge, 1991), 160. Thus, the author (1010 Ithel (London, 1860), 23 and n. 2; in addition, the Morganwg?) of the dubious Brut leuan. Breolzfa repre— two annals were also printed in Thomas Jones, sented ‘ln' as son of Maredudd ab Owain by an ‘Historical writing in medieval Welsh’, Scottish Studies, Irish concubine (‘0 Ysgottes a fu’n oi‘dderch iddaw’): 12 (1968), 15—27 (1). 26). The h/vyrian Arehaiology of Wales: Collected out of 132 DAVID E. THORNTON AC (C): Leuuelin filius Seisill rex Venedocie pugnauit contra Reyn, qui se dicebat esse filium Maredut; et deuictus est Reyn in Ostilo Guili. Eilaph uenit in Britanniam et uastauit Dyuet et Meneuiam. The annal for 1022 falls into two parts: first, the deeds of Reyn and the battle of Ostimn Guili (confluence of the Gwili); and secondly, the raid by Eilaf against Dyfed and (pos— sibly) also St David’s. Neither text gives us any reason to assume that these two (or maybe three) episodes were connected in any way, and 1 am inclined therefore to regard them as separate events during the single year.5 At first glance, the wording of the two accounts seems quite different, but there are a few verbal echoes which maybe indicate a com— mon source.6 There are some important differences between these two short accounts of the deeds of Reyn. The version in the B—text reads rather clumsily: for instance it is not clear whether the grammatical subject of the phrase qui optimtit Dextmles Britones (for which, it should be noted, there is no equivalent in C) is meant to be Reyn. or Mmeclm. More obviously we have the statement in the B-text that it was not Llywelyn ap Seisyll who fought Reyn but a Seisyll: given what we know of the rule of Llywelyn ap Seisyll (d. 1023), this looks to be an accidental scribal omission rather than a firm belief that Reyn’s opponent was called Seisyll. Other differences look less like mere errors during copy— ing. The B—text, for example, stresses that the claim of this Reyn. Scams to be son of Maredudd was false and states that he was killed; whereas the C—text, which omits the epithet Scams and any reference to Deheubarth, states that Reyn said he was the son of Maredudd (without commenting on the truth of this claim) and simply has him being defeated, but not necessarily killed, by Llywelyn. These differences no doubt reflect the wider textual variations between these two later versions of the A'neialesz7 though both derive ultimately from the annals kept at St David’s since the late eighth century, the B—text (probably copied in the early fourteenth century at Neath) was not based on the ‘Annals of St Davids’ directly but rather on a (now lost) version of these annals drawn up at Strata Florida 0. 1202 (the so-called ‘Annals of Strata Florida’) and that additions to the text were made during transmission, possibly before and/or after 1202. Furthermore, while the C-text was indeed redacted at St David’s c. 1288, to what extent it represents a complete version of the ‘Annals of St Davids’ at that date is not clear. 5 The Eilaf named here is not, as some have sug— 7 See Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain. in. the Early gested, Olaf Sihtricson of Dublin (and therefore a pos— Middle Ages: Studies in. Scottish and Welsh Sources, ed. sible Hiberno—Scandinavian ally of Reyn) but rather D. N. Dumville (VVoodl)ridge, 1980), and discussed in the Anglo—Scandinavian Eilifi‘ borgilsson, earl of part David N. Dumville, Histories and Pseudo-Histories of the of Mercia under Cnut, who would become involved Insular Middle Ages (Aldershot, 1990), essay 111. The in the coalition against Cnut in 1026: see Simon work of Hughes and Dumville 0n the chronicles is Keynes, ‘Cnut’s earls’, in A. R. Rumble (ed), The Reign currently undergoing some revision by julian of Cnut: King of England, Denmark (”Ml Nam/(1y Harrison. I am very grateful to Mr Harrison for dis- (Leicester, 1994), 43—88 (esp. pp. 58—60). Eilaf is also cussing his research with me, some of which was pre- mentioned in the Welsh chronicles s.a. 1035, when he sented in a paper, ‘The origins of Brut. y Tywysogyonfi is said to have departed for Gei’iiitlxizia following the delivered at Jesus College, Oxford, on 1 February death of Cnut in that year. 1996; for now, see Julian Harrison, ‘A note on Gerald 6 The phrase se . esse filium Maredut and the use of Wales and Avixnales Cambriue’, WHR, 17 (1994—5), of the verbs expugno (overcome, defeat) and [mgno 252~55 (pp. 25443). (fight, disagree) may indicate that the two texts are in some way related. WHO WAS RHAIN THE IRISHMAN? 133 Consequently, notable differences between the texts (such as those outlined above for 1022) may either represent additions made to the ‘Annals of St Davids’ during the process of transmission which culminated in the B—text, or may be due to losses incurred during the compilation of the C—text. These and other textual points are crucial to how we interpret of the events of 1022, and I shall return to them below. Additional accounts of the events of 1022 are to be found in the two extant versions of Brut y Tywysogyon (=ByT) and the related Brenhinecld y Saesson. (=ByS).8 The accounts of 1022 in these three Middle Welsh chronicles are notable for their length (not only when compared with the Latin equivalents, but also with other annal—entries at this chronological point in the chronicles); and they possess what has been described as a more ‘literary’ character than the Latin versions of these events.9 (On account of their length, the three texts are therefore given at the end of this article.) Comparison of these vernacular texts demonstrates that, despite certain differences including the slightly shorter length of that in ByS,10 they must all derive ultimately from a single account of 1022. As the late Thomas Jones emphasized,11 despite their greater length, these three vernacular texts do not add much more detail to our knowledge of Reyn but rather embellish the briefer material supplied in the extant Latin chronicles with a eulogy on Llywelyn ap Seisyll (including a rather formulaic description of the prosperity under his rule) and a lengthened account of the battle (though, again, this is shorter in Bren/zinedtl y Saesson), both of which serve to praise Llywelyn and by the same token den— igrate Reyn.
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