Welsh Journals

CELTIC LAW PAPERS: INTRODUCTORY TO WELSH MEDIEVAL LAW AND GOVERNMENT. Edited by Dafydd Jenkins. Les Editions de la Librairie Encyclopedique, Bruxelles, 1973. (Studies Presented to the Inter- national Commission for the History of Representative and Parlia- mentary Institutions, XLII.) Pp. 212. £ 7.00. Few people have done as much as Mr. Jenkins in recent years to promote the study of legal history in Britain, and he puts legal historians further in his debt with this collection of eight papers, all but one long out of print and some originally published in Welsh or German. The exception is Jenkins's own paper on 'Law and Government in Wales before the Act of Union' (1970), which stands first presumably because the other papers are concerned with the origins of the relatively well- evidenced society described here. The second paper, Rudolf Thumeysen's 'Celtic Law' (1934), takes us back from the Welsh to the earliest Irish law; and D. A. Binchy in 'The Linguistic and Historical Value of the Irish Law Tracts' (a well-known British Academy lecture of 1943) and 'Linguistic and Legal Archaisms in the Celtic Law-Books' (1959) follows Thurneysen's lead in pushing back the date of the earliest Irish tracts to perhaps the end of the sixth century and the more archaic law they contain to much earlier still, arguing that they preserve unique traces of 'many primitive "Indo-European" institutions'. With paper five (Jenkins, 1953 and 1968) we move from the study, by obviously very difficult philology, of the jurist-made law of the Irish to the study, by painstaking genealogy, of the family of lorwerth ap Madog, the jurist whose opinions in the Welsh lawbooks were 'evidently regarded as particularly authori- tative'. The next paper is that in which J. G. Edwards, at the celebration of the millenary of Hywel Dda in 1928, showed the good king's repre- sentative assembly of clerks and laymen from which the lawbooks supposedly originated to have been a legend, continually embellished, of the thirteenth century, its purpose being to give the laws respectability in the eyes of the church. The seventh paper presents the late H. D. Emanuel's demonstration (of 1960) that Llyfr Blegywryd is the Welsh translation of an originally Latin text of the Laws. Finally, in the oldest paper of the collection, 'Ireland and Wales in the History of Juris- prudence', E6in MacNeill brings us back to the implications of the law for social history in the process of reviewing T. P. Ellis's Welsh Tribal Law and Custom in the Middle Ages. Back in 1927, MacNeill championed the claim that Celtic law, transmitted by druids, reflects the life of the Indo-European peoples, and at the same time vigorously attacked the 'primitivists' such as Maine, who seemed to argue from the fact that it was 'jurist-made' law and not legislation that the early Irish community was a 'tribal' extension of the kindred rather than a truly political unit, and ruled over by patriarchs, not kings. It would be absurd to argue with papers as old as most of these are, on points of substance. The book is really an account of the historiography of Celtic law, sometimes little short of heroic (the struggle with the