THE MEDIEVAL WELSH IDEA OF

by

DAFYDD JENKINS (Aberystwyth)*

I. Introductory remarks

Medieval continued to be applied, to a degree varying, greatly from place to place and from subject to subject, after the 'Edwardian Conquest' of 1282 (which was followed by the Statute of of 1284, under which many rules of and procedure were introduced to that part of Wales which came to be known as the Principality), until the Act of Union (now officially the in Wales Act 1535) made the whole body of English law operative through- out Wales in 1536. Our knowledge of the native system is derived almost exclu- sively from the surviving manuscript lawbooks, prepared either for practition- ers' use or as library volumes for the authorities of church or state; of these some forty (six in Latin, the rest in Welsh) were written while Welsh law was still in force to some extent. All the manuscripts differ at least slightly from each other, and the work of es- tablishing the relation of those in Welsh is still unfinished. There are a few col- lections of miscellaneous legal material without any apparent overall plan, but the great majority of the manuscripts can be fitted without much distortion into one of three groups. These three groups have been recognised since Aneurin Owen used them as the basis for the first volume of his excellent Record Com- mission edition, The Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales (1841), and gave them the names 'Venedotian Code', 'Dimetian Code', and 'Gwentian Code'; these names have now been generally discarded as likely to mislead, and replaced respectively by 'Book of Iorwerth', 'Book of Blegywryd' and 'Book of Cyfnerth'. The latter names can also mislead if they are regarded as much more than labels, and it is partly for this reason that there is a tendency to use expres- sions like 'the Iorwerth tradition' or abbreviations like lor, perhaps without any 324 exactly definable meaning. 'Colan' and Col are names for a 'revised edition' of the Book of Iorwerth, found in a single manuscript, Peniarth 30 at the National Library of Wales, which was given its name by a seventeenth-century antiquary because it is in double columns. Llyfr Blegywryd, Llyfr Colan and Llyfr Ior- werth are the names of printed editions. The Books of Cyfnerth, Blegywryd, and Iorwerth all seem to have a core which aims at presenting a comprehensive statement of the law, but nearly all manuscripts have added other material to the main 'Book'. Cyfn seems to have taken shape earliest of the three; Bleg is now regarded as a translation from the Latin and has undergone ecclesiastical influence; lor (which has the oldest sur- viving manuscripts) is the youngest and most sophisticated, having been pro- duced in Gwynedd in the reign of (ob. 1240), whose political success is reflected in the development of the 'classical law'. For that classical law we turn to the Iorwerth and Colan texts, and also to the rather untidy Llyfr y Damweiniau, 'the Book of Case Law', which is found in slightly varying forms, appended to texts of all three comprehensive books.

II. The 'Law of Hywel'

To those who lived under it, the indigenous law of medieval Wales was Cyf- raith Hywel, 'the Law of Hywel'. Contemporaries writing in Latin might refer to Leges Howelda, and later writers in English and Welsh have also used plural forms, but the singular is much to be preferred, for the plural lends support to the erroneous view that the whole corpus of Welsh medieval law is a code pro- mulgated by 'Hywel the Good, king of all Wales', who died in 950. Hywel cer- tainly had some connection with the growth of Welsh law: 'the Welsh lawbooks, despite the differences between the various recensions, seem to go back to one common ancestor - in my opinion a work compiled in the reign of and issued under his authority about the middle of the tenth century'', - but it would be very rash to suppose that this 'Hywelian' work was more than a com- paratively small nucleus, which has been augmented and modified by later gene- rations ; for the medieval law texts which now survive were put together for teaching and practising lawyers, who have added a great deal to whatever came down to them from Hywel. This has practical consequences for students of the lawbooks. It still happens too often that a passage from a Welsh lawbook is cited as evidence for the legal thought or practice, or the economy, or the politics, or the social condition, of tenth-century Wales, because of the law's association with the tenth-century king. But lawbook evidence can be cited as authority for tenth-century condi- tions only if there is reason to believe that the evidence concerned was to be