Welsh Journals

THE WELSH TEXTS OF THE LAWS IT is with diffidence that I venture to talk about the Welsh lawbooks to students of medieval law, for my lack of training in law and history puts me at a disadvantage. The ideal student, of course, should be well versed in both disciplines and should also have a good grounding in philology, with particular knowledge of Old Irish and Anglo-Saxon, as well as of Welsh and Latin. This perhaps is expecting too much. One must be content to explore the field as thoroughly as possible, in the hope that what is unearthed may be of significance. When I began to study the Welsh lawbooks, only two of the three 'codes' were represented in the critical editions published during the present century: Llyfr Blegywryd of the so-called Dimetian class, and Welsh Medieval Law of the Gwentian, or Cyfnerth, class. The third class of manuscripts (those of the Venedotian code, as it was called) had hardly been studied at all since the time of Aneurin Owen. The amalgam of many manuscripts in his Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales (published by the Commissioners on Public Records in 1841) was a monumental work in many ways, but it cannot be denied that it falls short of modern critical standards and is much too complex. There was an obvious need for simpler editions, for tran- scripts of single manuscripts; yet very little had been done. Only one manuscript of the Venedotian class had been published -namely, the Black Book of Chirk (Peniarth MS. 29), which is MS. A in the classification of Aneurin Owen. Orthographically and textually, this was the worst possible exemplar that could have been selected. Unfortunately, the prestige of the publisher, Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans, seems to have been so great that nobody appears to have thought it worth while to search for a better text. Indeed, the only other work on the Venedotian code was that of Mr. Timothy Lewis, who published a transcript of the Black Book of Chirk in vol. XX of the Zeitschrift fur celtische Philologie, and based his Glossary of Medieval Welsh Law on this manuscript. Moreover, Gwenogvryn Evans did students a disservice in his otherwise excellent and indispensable Report on MSS. in the Welsh Language (H.M.C.) by insisting on the superiority of the Black Book over all other Venedotian manuscripts, and by implying that they, as a class, were further removed from the archetype. Misleading, also, is his evaluation of MS. B (Cotton Titus D ii, in the British Museum), for he gave as his opinion that 'quite a false importance