Welsh Journals

SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF THE WELSH LAWS A student of comparative jurisprudence approaching the earliest extant texts of Welsh law for the first time, with no knowledge of their historical background, would hardly suspect that Welsh society was passing through a phase of profound and many-sided change during the period (broadly speaking the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) within which, as we have been told, the texts in question were being written. With the advent of the Norman, a society which had possessed a considerable measure of homogeneity was thrown into turmoil and utterly disrupted; and in the reconstruction which followed, sharp breaks in social continuity, it could be shown, had appeared in all parts of Wales, and not merely in those areas where the Norman had secured a permanent foothold, and where, on one view, dislocation would appear to have been less acute than in those districts which managed in the long run to hold back, and compro- mise with, the enemy. The position is strikingly exemplified in the later records of north and south-west Wales, where one comes across a wide diversification in local customs and practices which are clearly of post-Norman origin, and which normally have no shadow of sanction in the lawbooks. Among themes which must be familiar to readers of any commentary on medieval Welsh law and custom is the mode of assessing gwestfa and dawnbwyd-tributes once levied everywhere in Wales on freemen and bondmen respectively. These terms, which with circuit dues or cylch, virtually exhaust the fiscal liabilities dealt with in the texts, are presented in the lawbooks in sharp contrast with one another. In the records, on the other hand, this seeming uniformity, and the clear-cut distinction drawn between the burdens imposed on bond and free, have been replaced by a regionally particularized and an infinitely varied pattern of dues and services, in which dawnbwyd has no place at all, and in which gwestfa appears as a locally restricted and greatly modified due. At least one group of regulations on which stress is laid in the lawbooks (and the example quoted is by no means a singular phenomenon) had vanished, and had ceased to be relevant to the social circumstances of the time in which the texts under review were being copied and edited. Incongruities of this kind commonly emerge, when the evidence of the texts is examined in the light of the records,