Medieval Wales had its own system of law, separate from the Common Law in England, and from Canon Law. The law is attributed to King Hywel ap Cadell, or Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good), d. 949 or 950. There is very little concrete evidence to connect the tenth-century ruler with the existing manuscripts of Welsh law, but Hywel may have developed some aspects of legal activity in Wales in order to gain the (possibly later) attribution as lawmaker. The story of his legal activity in the prologues to the Welsh law manuscripts was probably created to give the law a royal and ecclesiastical basis, a defence against the criticisms of Norman clerics.

Cyfraith Hywel (‘the law of Hywel’) survives in over 40 manuscripts, which separate into groups with common attributes. The lengthy manuscripts were intended to present the law in its entirety – this was a codified legal system. The law texts all follow the same basic structure, arranged into subject-specific sections or ‘tractates’. Dating the law is problematic due to the disparity between the text and the manuscripts. The tractates, and even material within them, can be a mixture of early and late additions, as the law was an ever-evolving entity. However, it can be said that Cyfraith Hywel reached its pinnacle in Gwynedd, north-west Wales, during the thirteenth century, particularly during the reigns of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The earliest copies of the laws date from this period, and it is no accident that the golden age for the law and the existence of these earliest copies coincide chronologically.

With the conquest of Wales by Edward I in 1282, aspects of the law were abolished – according to the Statute of Wales in 1284, English law was to be followed in criminal cases, but Cyfraith Hywel could remain in use in other matters. But this was not to be the end of Cyfraith Hywel, as it continued in use in particular regions, including in south Wales in territories that were not conquered by Edward I, where Welsh law remained in use albeit in the context of a different legal process.

There are several approaches to looking at the growth of law in medieval Wales. Often there is an emphasis on examining the texts for signs of antiquity, to attempt to recreate the earliest recoverable stage of the law. This tended to be the method used in early scholarly work on the laws, and is still an approach followed today. While Aneurin Owen focused on attempting to trace the laws back to the original book purported to have been created by Hywel ap Cadell, scholars today work on determining whether some parts of the law can be fitted into a concept of a ‘Model Lawbook’. Seeking to recover pre-Norman Welsh law is a valid and important goal. It is pursued today without assuming a concrete link to Hywel Dda and without imposing particular frameworks on the lawtexts as we have them. However, examining sections of law to discover the earliest material does not mean that the earliest texts are more valid, more valuable, or more important than law that is not early. Later law has its importance too, and while it may not fit into a concept of a ‘Model Lawbook’, it may reveal a great deal about other things – the development of the law, the use of the texts, the practice of law in post-conquest Wales. That is what this volume has sought to do. Rather than looking backwards and focusing on Hywel Dda and the pre-Norman origins of the lawtexts, this volume asserts the importance of examining all of the lawtexts, and in their own contexts. It does not aim to dismiss the earlier law, or the three traditional redactions of Cyfraith Hywel, but instead looks at the neglected sections of law and considers how these fit in with the sections that have received more attention.

Approaching the lawtexts with fixed presuppositions presents many problems. This is not to dismiss Aneurin Owen's great work of examining Cyfraith Hywel in its entirety and published as Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales. Owen's was an immense work of scholarship, with far-reaching consequences. Indeed, there is great value to be had in examining the historiography of the Welsh lawtexts. However, assumptions of early editors often have a serious effect on the development of academic fields and, in the case of the Welsh lawtexts, they have caused certain aspects of the laws to be treated in particular ways.

The arguments in this work have led to a rejection of the possibility that material found towards the end of certain Blegywryd manuscripts is ‘additional’ or forms a ‘tail’. It argues instead for a flexible interpretation of what constituted a lawbook. The emphasis here is on the textual history, not dealing with the status of the text as law but its status within the textual tradition; the approach is to view the material on its own terms – as material derived from various exemplars, sometimes shared with other manuscripts, sometimes not – and to consider its nature and its context. This means looking at each text as a text, rather than separating out ‘additional material’ which is not related to the first portion of the material in the same manuscript. Both the material and its textual history have their own value, and the reoccurrence of the material in other manuscripts (if not in the same precise location) warns us not to let it be overshadowed by the ‘additional’ designation, or to submerge it into a ‘tail’.

The law manuscripts contained law, and the compilers treated all law in the same way, regardless of its origin or nature. This may explain the problems that the early editors of Welsh legal texts had in trying to create a uniform basic text of Welsh law. This is not something that can be easily solved – Welsh law manuscripts do have considerable variation in order and content, and it is not the purpose of this work to redraw the ‘core text’ of medieval Welsh law; rather, it is to reject the notion of the basic code with anything deviating from that text being dismissed as ‘additional’.

However, it cannot be denied that there are some manuscripts that are completely different in form to the other manuscripts. Some of the manuscripts in this class start with a recognisable text of one of the law redactions (usually Blegywryd, but also Cyfnerth in one example), which has a close affinity to other texts from the same redaction, but the manuscript then continues with different material not found in other manuscripts.

Several academic disciplines benefit from the rich and extensive corpus of lawtexts of medieval Wales. Manuscripts of Welsh law occur among the earliest Welsh manuscripts, dating from the mid-thirteenth century. The lengthy prose texts of Welsh law are important sources for the study of the Middle Welsh language. The manuscripts themselves are important evidence for the field of medieval Welsh codicology, and the scripts and their scribes illuminate the development of medieval Welsh palaeography. The law contained within these books is crucial for legal historians and legal scholars, and historians refer to the legal texts as a source on medieval society, politics and intellectual thought. The study of the medieval Welsh lawtexts is central to many aspects of studies on medieval Wales.

Despite its importance, the field of medieval Welsh law has however suffered somewhat from an image problem, and detailed study of the texts is confined to a small group of specialists. A highly accomplished scholar once joked to me that Seminar Cyfraith Hywel, the academic group focusing on the study of the Welsh lawtexts, was like a secret society that spoke in code, with the inner circle referring to ‘Q’ and ‘J’, which outsiders could not follow. Another academic with an expertise in the extremely complex twelfth- and thirteenth-century Gogynfeirdd praise poetry described the field of Welsh law as ‘very difficult’. While it is pleasing to imagine that my own subject area is the rocket science of medieval Wales, the reality is that the topic itself is straightforward. This may not necessarily seem to be the case for a scholar whose expertise is in Middle Welsh narrative prose or poetry, as they confront a different situation: unlike Welsh law, those areas of study do not tend to have to deal with numerous manuscripts with many significant differences in the texts, but this is a matter of acquiring familiarity with a certain working procedure. Getting to the actual material is trickier, requiring a study of the manuscripts and texts and their relationships to each other. The aim of this chapter is to provide such an overview, offering a brief history and context for the Welsh laws in general, and then discussing the different manuscripts and texts, thus setting the scene for the textual studies that follow.

The laws of medieval Wales are a rich and valuable historical source. With more than 40 manuscripts containing lengthy texts, there is plenty of material upon which the historian can draw – as can lawyers, legal historians and those interested in linguistics or literature. R. R. Davies declared that ‘whatever their shortcomings and pitfalls … the historian neglects the legal texts at his peril’. Davies's summary of the problems of dealing with the legal texts for historians stemmed from the problems in dating the texts, which ‘contain, pell-mell, tractates and individual dicta drawn from widely differing periods and contexts. Such chronological uncertainty is the despair of the historian.’

Davies goes on to emphasise the purpose of the lawtexts. Giving the surprising and amusing example of a husband's right to reclaim his ex-wife if he could catch her before she had finished climbing into bed with her next husband, he states that the section

Davies's critical point about the purpose of the lawtexts is central to my study. The same ‘constricting fundamentalism’ may account for how surprisingly few published editions or studies of law manuscripts there are, especially when set against the large number of extant manuscripts.

The textual work on the Welsh lawtexts, and in particular the work of early editors, has coloured the subject area in a very specific way. The aim of the studies was usually to understand the way the legal texts worked as texts, and to present the material in a usable way, but the editors were, on the whole, working with certain presuppositions – demonstrating Davies's ‘constricting fundamentalism’ – which led to certain parts of the texts being treated differently. Large sections of legal texts were separated and accorded a different status by editors having preconceived ideas about the genesis of the texts, and formulating a framework for some aspects.

In Part I, much attention was given to the historiography of the lawtexts. The working methods of the medieval lawyers were shown to have had a major effect on the way the texts were being produced. But a second, huge, influence on the way the lawtexts are viewed has its origin in Aneurin Owen's work, Ancient Laws. That work was shown to introduce a division of the material which may not necessarily reflect the organisation of the material at the time of creating the lawtexts.

In examining the extant manuscripts, early editors – Owen included – focused on attempting to recreate an original ‘Book of Hywel’, or tracing the texts back to an early archetype. While there is some evidence that there may well have been an early written tradition of Welsh law, attempting to recreate that in the form of a book, working from the law manuscripts that have survived, creates new problems. One of those issues that arose as a result of attempting to refashion an early or original lawbook is that the material that has survived is varied in date. As a response, far more emphasis was placed on ‘early’ sections of the lawtexts, and the ‘later’ sections were disregarded, because they could not be fitted into the imagined form of the ‘original’ lawbook, being later creations. This is not a criticism of looking for early or pre-Norman elements in Welsh law per se. Care must be taken, however, in emphasising, and indeed over-valuing, the early sections of law simply for being early, as may have been done by early editors; this could mean that the passages that are dated to a later period are disregarded as evidence.

Aneurin Owen, as was shown, divided the material in this way. His division was severe, into two parts, the first containing Owen's concept of the three versions of Hywel Dda's book, and the second containing later laws, which are, to this day, seen as ‘additional’, even though Owen himself conceded that they were no less important.

In his description of manuscript S, one of the ‘composite’ manuscripts described in the previous chapter, Aneurin Owen noted that he found in that manuscript material other than the redaction material that made up his ‘Codes’. These unique texts from S were presented in AL XI, and other non-redaction material in S was used for variant readings in AL X. This final chapter will consider several manuscripts that contain large amounts of legal material which is not found ‘elsewhere’, material and texts which do not form part of the redaction texts, some of it unique to individual law manuscripts. As was noted in Chapter 6, the composite manuscripts contain a redaction text as well as other material that defies categorisation into a redaction, and Owen's treatment of these manuscripts was discussed there. The manuscripts under consideration in this chapter were even more problematic for Owen, since many of them do not contain a redaction text at all. Some he assigned into a category of ‘anomalous’ manuscripts; others were used very little in his work. One or two were ‘not collated’ by Owen (although he was clearly aware of their existence), and these were not included in his list of sources in the introduction to his work. To give Aneurin Owen his due, his contribution to the field in general was enormous, and his categorisation of the material was done in part out of a practical necessity, as well as being led by his view of the nature of the law. This makes Ancient Laws a product of its time, but it must be acknowledged that Aneurin Owen made great strides in making the contents of the legal manuscripts accessible in a way in which they had not been before.

Perhaps as a result of this, the manuscripts that will be studied in this chapter have not received much attention from scholars. Of the eight in question, only two have benefitted from a full edition.2 Very few parts, if any, of the remaining six have been edited or published, and very little attention has been paid to them, either individually or as a group. This study, then, will focus on these neglected texts, will look at what is contained within them, and examine the contents without the constraints of attempting to fit them into any scheme.

Presented here are the references to different legal opinions in the Welsh lawbooks. The Welsh texts are from the Iorwerth redaction, and are presented in the order in which they occur in the manuscript, noting the tractate in which they are found. Edited texts are from LlIor and references are to section and sentence number. The translations are from LTMW, references to page numbers. Notes and texts from other manuscripts are my translation unless otherwise stated.

Texts from Llyfr Damweiniau are taken from the stated manuscript and edited. Translations are my own. Cross-references to the texts in AL are given, following the standard form of uppercase Roman numerals for the book, lowercase Roman numerals for the chapter, and Arabic numerals for the sentence number.

See also Table 3.1, above.

Iorwerth

1. Laws of Court. LlIor, §24/4–5, LTMW, p. 29

E navd yv, herwyd rey, hyt ar penguastravt e brenhyn. Ereyll a dyweyt panyv hyt e parhao talym e march kentaf e'r urenhynes, dvyn e den a wnel e kam.

His protection, according to some, is as far as the King's Chief Groom; others say that it is to take the person who commits the offence for as long as the Queen's fastest horse continues to run.

2. Laws of Court. LlIor, §36/3, LTMW, p. 36

Rey a dyweyt e dele llegeyt er anyueyllyeyt a ladher en e llys, ac a dele e dyllat y am y cappan a'e hossaneu.

Some say that he is entitled to the eyes of the animals that are slaughtered in the court; and he is entitled to his clothing, in capes and hose.

3. Law of Women. LlIor, §50/3, LTMW, p. 51

Rey o'r egneyt ny at guat en erbyn henne; e keureyth eyssyoes a dyweyt e deleyr gadu e guat1 mal e dewedassam ny uchot.

1 e keureyth eyssyoes…gadu e guat] niny eissyoes a adỽn wad ual y dywedassam ny uchot E, A

Some of the justices do not allow denial against that: the law however says that it is right to allow denial1 as we have said above.

1 the law however…allow denial] we however allow a denial as we stated above E, A