Professor Sir John Baker, in his Introduction to English Legal History, devoted a chapter to ‘Legal Literature’, examining surviving examples from England such as the important treatises called Glanville and Bracton, formularies, reports of cases, and studies of law in the early modern period. If the field of Cyfraith Hywel is subjected to the test that Baker proposed, it comes out of this very well, rich as it is in written sources. This is not the place to discuss the differences between the English Common Law that Baker considered and the law of medieval Wales, but the ‘character and limitations’ of the manuscripts of Cyfraith Hywel have been the subject of intense study for at least 200 years, starting with the earliest published editions of the lawtexts.

There has been much discussion of the nature of the genesis of Cyfraith Hywel in scholarly publications, and whether Hywel Dda himself wrote or created any part of the legal texts as they stand today. But, as Baker states, such evidence as there is will have to come from the extant written sources. We may be able to acknowledge now-lost exemplars, or trace the origins of the texts to an earlier period, but for solid evidence, the focus must be placed on the manuscripts that we have today. This chapter will therefore look at those texts and what they tell us about the growth of law in medieval Wales – the hints we are given about the people behind their creation, where they drew their material from, the way the texts were constructed, and why they take the form they have today. Only by taking that view will it be possible to move away from the constraints and constructs imposed on the subject area by the editors of the early publications of texts.

In the past, it was traditional to describe Cyfraith Hywel as a volksrecht system, a ‘law of the people’: Dafydd Jenkins states that ‘the law they [the lawbooks] contain is Volksrecht, not Kaiserrecht’, contrasting one with the other.