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49 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 323 (1981)
The Medieval Welsh Idea of Law

handle is hein.journals/tijvrec49 and id is 323 raw text is: THE MEDIEVAL WELSH IDEA OF LAW by DAFYDD JENKINS (Aberystwyth)* I. Introductory remarks Medieval Welsh Law 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 Wales of 1284, under which many rules of English law 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 Laws 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 Ior, perhaps without any * This paper is a revised version of the O'Donnell Lecture given at five centres in the University of Wales in March 1979. The lecture was established under the will (made in 1934) of C.J. O'Donnell; it is expected to deal with a subject in the field of 'the British or Celtic element in the English language and the dialects of English Counties; the special terms and words used in agriculture and handicrafts; the British or Celtic element in the existing population of England'. Lecturers have usually given a liberal interpretation to their terms of reference, and have been very conscious of the belief attributed to the testa- tor, that all the good features of English life were derived from the Celts. In preparing the paper I have taken much advantage of discussion with colleagues and other friends; in particular I thank Professor Desmond Slay for his help with the Anglo- Saxon comparisons. I alone, of course, am responsible for the use made of all help. For the abbreviations used in the notes see the list of abbreviations at the end of this paper.

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