Hywel ap Cadell

“ It would be difficult to find a story more clear and simple in its main outlines than the growth of modern Wales from its earliest conscious beginnings in the fifth and sixth centuries, where we discern a number of small patriotic communities gradually cohering as they become more and more conscious of their common life. But when for all this there is substituted a golden age wherein Britannia is converted into the Isle of Britain and the Britons masters of the same from end to end ”

“ On the canghellor's left he sits at a banquet. He has the skin of a hart from the chief huntsman in October to make him gloves and jesses. He drinks three times only in the hall lest there be neglect of the hawks. A horse always in attendance he receives from the king, and two shares of the provender for it. If the falconer kills his horse in hunting or if it should die by chance, he has another from the king. He has every male hawk. He has every sparrowhawk's nest which shall be found on the land of the court. He has a mess of food and a hornful of mead for his provision in his lodging. ”

“ Gwlad implies both the definite territory which is held by a ' people ' and also the ' people ' itself organized into a polity. Pre-Norman Wales (or Britannia as it was called) was not itself a gwlad, but a group of gwlads, somewhat like Germany before 1870. Dyved, Gwynedd, Powys, Morgannwg, &c. (which now make up the single gwlad or patria of Wales) , would be as distinct from one another as Wessex, Kent, Mercia, and the rest of the gwlads or patrias which formerly made up what is now the single gwlad or patria of England. ”

“ The obstacles in the way of the unity of Wales were stupendous, such as no bare coercion could overcome. We have seen their like on a modern and larger scale in the story of Italian and German unity. In the Dark Age the difficulty was accentuated by the fact that, even given a unity achieved by a capable ruler, the mind of the age as reflected in the Leges Barbarorum, of which the Laws of Howel are the Welsh exemplar, compelled that unity to be divided after his death among his sons. Charlemagne himself had so to divide his empire ; the same necessity rested on Rhodri the Great. ”

“ In reading the earlier and more reliable texts of the laws, one must carefully avoid limiting its application to ' the superior chief of a district '. In such a phrase as bradwr arglwydd for example, the arglwydd would vary according to the status of the bradwr (traitor) . Given that the latter was one of the officers of the Court of Dinevwr, the arglwydd no doubt would be the powerful territorial chief known in later history as King of Deheubarth. Were he on the other hand a monk or the serf of a breyr, his arglwydd would be the abbot or the breyr as the case might be. ”

“ When the law of distress is applied in the case of a marwdy or any other suit, the household and the maer are to have the heifers and the bullocks and the yearlings and the sheep and the goats, and they are to have everything in the house except horses and oxen and large cattle and gold and silver and furred clothes ; and if there is anything which is worth a pound, a king has it. ”

“ Remembering that it represents a late thirteenth-century form of Howel's codification of Welsh law and custom in the tenth century, he will enter safely into the midst of the social and political conditions of pre-Norman Wales. It befits him, however, to be wary, for he treads enchanted ground, and it will not be long before he meets Cadwaladr and Arthur and all the heroes of the Mabinogion and kindred tales. Many are they who have boldly entered here only to succumb to the charm of this realm of phantasy and illusion. ”

“ Every king in the Deheubarth having fallen, with the exception of the King of Ystrad Tywi and Ceredigion, it is only natural that his curia principalis should assume a unique position in Welsh eyes. Dinevwr does not become historic until it stands alone as the stronghold of the last great native princes of South Wales. ”

“ Let every one choose his status, whether by the status of his chief of kindred or by the status of his father or by the status of his office. [164] A pound and a half is the worth of a well-formed bondman, if he originates from beyond the sea. If however he be maimed or too old or too young, that is, less than twenty years, he is one pound in value. ”

“ There was a legend current in later times that Rhodri the Great, erroneously regarded as king of all Wales, damaged the Welsh cause irretrievably by sharing his kingdom among his three sons, giving, according to one version, Gwynedd to Mervyn, Powys to Anarawd, and Deheubarth to Cadell. [86] Nothing can be further from the truth than the impression left by this tale. For as we have seen, Rhodri's aim was to consolidate Wales by substituting the rule of his own family for that of many families. Princes of the blood of Rhodri alone were to govern the land directly from one end to the other. ”

“ The term Deheubarth at no time stood for the whole of modern South Wales as signifying a definite patria under one king, like Gwynedd, Buallt, or Morgannwg. Deheubarth was used as a general term for that group of South Welsh patrias whose inhabitants might be described as Deheubarthwyr or Britonnes dexterales or simply Dextrales, [25] in contradistinction to those of Gwynedd and Powys. The Deheubarth was never a gwlad, but only a district which comprised many gwlads. ”

“ Whoever shall waylay pays twofold, because it is a violence against a person to kill him, and a theft to conceal ; and that is the one place in law where violence and theft become connected. And it is to be thus denied ; the oaths of fifty men to deny wood and field, and three of them under vow to abstain from flesh and woman and horse riding. The measure in denying wood and field is a legal rhandir between open and tangled, and wood and field, and wet and dry ; and such as cannot lawfully deny a rhandir, cannot deny wood and field. ”

“ In the second place, by substituting romance for history, it has surreptitiously concealed the steady and unbroken development of Cymric nationality from the day that Cunedda and his Sons established themselves in Wales at the commencement of the fifth century. Not only have authentic traditions been distorted to make them fit with the romance, not only has the memory of important historic events been for ever lost, but the very idea of the evolution of Wales from the primitive little kingdoms of the fifth century has been blurred in the national consciousness. ”

“ Trev-names meet us frequently in Wales, as names ending in -ton or -ham do in England. Trev in modern Welsh is used for town, the modern trev being to the medieval trev what the modern town is to old -ton.
trevtad, patrimony, represented in the Latin Peniarth MS. 28 by hereditas. It is the trev which descends to the sons through the father, the word trev in this case not bearing the rigid sense of an area of four rhandirs, &c., but rather that of a definite plot of habitable ground on which the sons might continue to live. ”

“ He has the bull which shall come among the spoil. When the apparitor shall die, his possessions are at the king's mercy. If the apparitor suffer sarhad while sitting during the pleas of the king, let there be paid to him a sieve full of chaff and an addle egg. The summons of an apparitor, with witnesses or striking the post three times, cannot be denied except by objecting. When however it shall be denied, the oath of the person summoned, with that of two men of the same status as himself, denies it. ”