Welsh Journals

NATIVE LAW AND THE CHURCH IN MEDIEVAL WALES. By Huw Pryce. Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii, 292. 2 maps. 2 tables. £ 35.00. The texts of native Welsh law, cyfraith Hywel, are an exceptionally rich and suggestive source for the study of medieval Welsh society, not least because of the great paucity of other sources especially for the pre-1284 period. But they are a notoriously difficult source to evaluate and use. During the last half-century or so scholars have concentrated on the essential, but highly technical, task of establishing reliable texts of the various redactions of the laws and of trying to determine, in so far as possible, their relative chronology, probable provenance and likely relationships. This strictly textual approach was, and remains, an essential preliminary: but for the historian at least, it is only a means to an end-that of exploiting the texts to reveal to us what they can of medieval Welsh juristic assumptions and, above all, to open a badly needed window onto medieval Welsh society, or at least aspects of it. This is precisely what Dr. Huw Pryce does in this exceptionally scholarly monograph. The topic that he has chosen to address is a very important one, even if it does not loom large in the law-texts themselves. Churches, church land and church men enjoyed a distinctive position and status in Welsh society; some of the fundamental procedures of Welsh law relied heavily on the guarantees of God and the Church in the form of oaths and relics; on certain key issues, notably marriage, divorce and the status of illegitimate children, the differences between customary Welsh law and canon law were well publicized, while some of the better-documented aspects of native Wales in the thirteenth century relate to the boundaries between princely and episcopal powers. For these reasons alone, to name but a few, Dr. Pryce's subject is one which commands great interest. He has tackled it with scholarly scrupulousness and historical assurance. His study is grounded in a detailed, indeed arguably on occasion over-elaborate, consideration of the dicta of the law-texts on ecclesiastical issues and in teasing out the possible significance of the differences between the wording of the various redactions. The well-known contrast between the almost defiantly lay flavour of the northern (Iorwerth) redactions and the more ecclesiastically sympathetic southern texts stands out in even sharper contrast than before. Such close textual work, however, is tested throughout by thorough and imaginative use of every possible scrap of documentary evidence by which the theorems of the law texts might be tested. Dr. Pryce has also cast his net further afield by deploying analogues and insights from England and Europe to try to make good the deficiences of the Welsh evidence. He has thereby advanced our knowledge and understanding of the medieval Welsh Church and society in many directions-be it on technical issues such as the procedure known as dogn fanag (sufficient information) or the suretyship known as briduw (the honour of God) or a whole list of more general matters such as sanctuary, marriage, the legal status of clerics or the role of churchmen in the composition, or at least the copying, of the law- texts themselves. For the general historian there is also much of interest in the book, all the more interesting and convincing for being so modestly advanced. There is much here, for