Welsh Journals

STUDIES IN THE WELSH LAWS SINCE 1928 THE year 1928 was the year of the millenary celebrations in honour of Hywel Dda. It has presumably been set as a terminus a quo for this evening's discussion, not in any literal sense, but merely as a convenient way of indicating that our concern is to be with more recent studies, as contrasted with the older studies, in the Welsh laws. Speaking broadly, studies in the Welsh laws are of two kinds. (i) Before there can be any study of them for any scholarly purposes, the texts of the Welsh lawbooks must be available in satisfactorily edited forms. The business of making satisfactory editions involves not only the production of a proper text, but also the work of determining how the particular text that is being edited is related to other texts, and of inquiring what can be learned of the authorship of the text. All these matters belong to what may be called broadly the critical field. (ii) As satisfactory texts of the lawbooks become available, they can be studied by a variety of scholars for a variety of purposes. But in this context the scholar par excellence will be the scholar who will study the lawbooks as evidence for the history of Welsh law, using the term 'history of law' in the wide sense in which Maitland taught us to use it: 'the history of law', he said, 'must be a history of ideas; it must represent not only what men have done and said but what they have thought, in bygone ages'.1 For convenience we might perhaps call these studies historical studies, by way of disting- uishing them from what I have called, equally broadly, critical studies. What I shall try to say will relate rather to the critical than to the historical side of our study. There are at least two reasons for my taking this line. The critical studies are an essential preliminary to the historical studies, and they are not even in sight of being completed so far as the Welsh lawbooks are concerned-indeed, in a very real sense they are only just beginning. I believe also that it will be con- venient if my remarks relate only to those studies in the Welsh laws which have been published, and which therefore we have all had equal opportunities of becoming acquainted with: important work has been and is being done that is not yet published, but I believe that unpublished work is best brought into discussion by its authors themselves, or at any rate with their prior co-operation. If then we 1 Domesday Book and Beyond. p. 356.