Welsh Journals

LEGAL AND COMPARATIVE ASPECTS OF THE WELSH LAWS OVER eighty years ago, in a paper which is still full of value for any student of Welsh medieval law, F. W. Maitland provided a text for this address: Clearly the first qualification which should be required of any one who would deal with these materials thoroughly and scientifically must be a very competent knowledge of the Welsh language, its dialects, and its history, and the second must be a large acquaintance with other old systems of law, for it is at once apparent that this mass of Welsh rules has many and strong resemblances to other masses of ancient law, and in such other masses a sound criticism would find many of its best weapons. The text is a frightening one: even though today a lawyer working in the field can rely with confidence on other men's competent knowledge of the language, it is still necessary that he should himself be able to handle the original texts. But whereas when Maitland wrote, and indeed for more than half a century afterwards, there was no material in fit condition to be compared with other masses of ancient law, we have now enough well-edited texts to justify us in beginning to study them as texts of law. Moreover, we have now a fairly clear idea of what our texts are, and of the broad relations between them. There is still plenty of textual work to be done, but it can be better done if some legal-historical work is being done at the same time on the texts which have been edited. When we come to plan that legal-historical work, we can start from the agreed position that different lawbooks present the law at different stages of development; it is equally important to remember that any-or almost any-manuscript is made up of different elements. It is of course well recognized that we cannot say of any manuscript that it represents the law as it existed in the time of Hywel Dda; it must be emphasized also that we cannot say of any manuscript that it represents the law as it existed when the manuscript was written. Our work is thus twofold: we have to sort out the different elements in the lawbooks, and we have to interpret the rules of law-to say what they mean. Different workers will naturally tend to approach this work from different starting-points: the man who comes to Welsh law after 14The Laws of Wales: the Kindred and the Blood Feud', Collected Papers. I. 202 ff.. at pp. 204-5.