Medieval Welsh Manuscripts 0708316026, 9780708316023

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5 adef nguneb eeIpiei

nam st a

H ugieasseobi tsoua e i nirbebo E a ec uct eedapr canbdsi apyr ai c.

เ ส# -Courb l ogicanaipunbcorr. w w.a h r/ onogit.uenjc.a ur C pe ripenof lab er a h e cit f ue.

โ ร น ะ o r t te o S u bet a ae

M e d i e v a lW e l s h

Manuscripts D A N I E LH U W S

Medieval Welsh

Manuscripts DANIEL HUWS

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS and

F WALES T H E NATIONAL LIBRARY O 2000

© Daniel Huws, 2000

Contents

First published 2000 Reprinted 2002

www.wales.ac.uk/press

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Acatalogue record for this book si available from the British Library. ISBN 0-7083-1602-6

Preface

vi xi

List of plates Abbreviations Acknowledgements

xi V X

General

1 The medieval manuscript ni Wales The medieval codex: with reference ot hte Welsh lawbooks 4 Table of Welsh vernacular medieval manuscripts 6 The transmission of aWelsh classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

84

3 Welsh vernacular books 1250-1400

1 42 63

LS

Al rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored ni a retrieval system, or transmitted, ni any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

5 Fvie ancient books of Wales

Studies of single manuscripts e natura rerum 7 AWelsh manuscript of Bede's D 8 9

The making of Liber Landavensis The Tintern abbey Bible

01 Leges Howelda at Canterbury

11 The earliest version of Llyfr Iorwerth

21 The Hendregadredd Manuscript 31 Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch 41 The earliest Bangor missal

104 123 158 169

17 193

227

269

Collectors

51 Robert Vaughan

61 Sri Thomas Mostyn and hte Mostyn manuscripts Appendix: other publications on Welsh medieval manuscripts

Typeset at the University of Wales Press

Printed ni Wales yb Cambrian Printers, Aberystwyth

Index of manuscripts

General index

287

303 330

33 39

Preface The articles and lectures ni this volume are reprinted as they first appeared, apart from a few retrospective comments and bibliographical references introduced here and there ni square brackets, and an added note at the end

of chapters where that seemed called for. Two chapters, 3and 12, are here

translated from their original Welsh into English. The only new work ni

the volume wil eb found ni the expanded version of the table ni chapter 4

and ni the expanded article on Robert Vaughan in chapter 15. While

offering nothing new, the analytical entries ni the General Index under the

words Codicology, Decoration and Script may serve as a rather inarticulate guide ni matters for which, ni Wales, no manual exists. Plates which illustrated the original articles are reproduced ni the corresponding chapters. To these, twelve new plates have been added ni chapters ,1 ,3 5 and 6, ni order o t provide a better representation of the handwriting of Welsh books from the ninth to the sixteenth century. Preference has been given to some of the best-known manuscripts, even though a few of those

chosen receive barely more than mention in the text. To please

palaeographers, reproductions of script are all given in their actual size, at

the price of crude chopping of some pages.

The five general articles in the first part of the book were all intended in the first place for particular non-specialist audiences and make different

assumptions. Here and there, ti has ot be said, they feed off each other; there si repetition. Brought into their present close proximity, the repetition may eb irritating. Removal of the overlapping material would have had ot be at the cost of disjointing the individual chapters. For better or worse, they have been left as they were. They wil emerge ni the best light if not read ni quick succession. Publication of this book owes its origin ot a suggestion by Professor e yb Dr Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan. I m a Thomas Charles-Edwards put ot m

grateful ot them. Its production has been made easy by hte good wil of Ned Thomas and later of Susan Jenkins at hte University of Wales Press, and by that of Gwyn Jenkins and Huw Ceiriog Jones at the National

a also grateful. Ruth Dennis-Jones Library of Wales ot all of whom I m provided an invaluably judicious editorial hand Daniel Huws

vi

vi

List of Plates 2

S 199, fol. °14 Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coelge, M

6

จ

S ,1 Gospels of S t Chad, .p 141 Lichfield Cathedral, M

Oxford, Bodleian Library, M S Auct.F.4.32, fo.l °73

Cambridge, University Library, M S Add.4543

Oxford, Jesus College, M S 119, fol. °4

8 9

Aberystwyth, NLW, M S Peniarth ,9.p41 Cardif, Central Library, M S 28.1, .p91

Aberystwyth, NLW, M S Peniarth ,1 fol. 2

ะม อ%ง' ม(ง)รม(ง)ง+)

, S M Peniarth 540, fo.l 1' Aberystwyth, NLW

Aberystwyth, NLW, M S Peniarth 540, fols

Aberystwyth, NLW MS 17110, lower cover

and "3

S 17110,fols22' ,48"and°871 Aberysw t yht, NLW M Aberystwyth, NLW M S 17110, fols 5 and 102

12 22

42

62 27 28

03

Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth,

NLW NLW NLW NLW NLW

M S 17110, M S 17110, M S 17110, M S 22631, M S 22631,

fols ,°73 03 and 40° fols 45, 47° and 44 fol. 114 fol. 96 fol. 731

Aberystwyth, NLW, M S Peniarth ,82 fols 8and °03 Aberystwyth, NLW, M S Peniarth 28, fol. *1 S Ail, fols 159° and 180 London, British Library, Cotton M

London, British Library, Cotton M S Aili, fol.189 S 6680, fol. 124* Aberystwyth, NLW M

Aberystwyth, NL W M S 6680, fol. 125

S 6680, fols 78 and 129 Aberystwyth, NLW M Aberystwyth, NLW M S 6680, fol. 121

S Peniarth ,5 fols 93 and 36 Aberystwyth, NLW, M Aberystwyth, NLW, M S Peniarth 5, fol. 118

S Peniarth 4,fol. 5 Aberystwyth, NLW, M

Aberystwyth, NLW, M S Peniarth ,4 fols 12 and 64

S Peniarth ,5 fols 85 and 67 Aberystwyth, NLW, M

53 36

vili

8 4 45 69 73

78 81

10 11 12 13

4

92 94 106

12

136 731 138 139

140 141

161

162 170

174 180

181

202

203

21

223

235 236 236 237

Aberystwyth, NLW, M S Peniarth ,4 fol. 1

238 238

Aberystwyth, NLW, Printed Books, EI Ven 49

279

Aberystwyth, NLW, Printed Books, EI Ven 94

xi

273

Abbreviations Manuscripts

Add. Bangor BL Bodorgan

Boston Card.

Corpus Cotton

Harl.

Hunter

London, B L , Additional Bangor, University foWales, Bangor British Library

Bodorgan, Anglesey, Plas Bodorgan Boston, USA, Massachusetts Historical Society

Cambrdie, cal is Chsri Ceolge

London, B,Coetn

Jesus List. NLW

Pen.

Rawl. Rylands

di is Liary, ampay foPhalideplhai P itors, B Manchester, Rylands Library

Sotheby Trinity

Cambridge, Trinity Colege

Philadelphia

Shrewsbury

Wynnstay

w e usyr chool Steway, N Aberystwyth, NLW, Wynnstay

Printed works

C A

L A

G Bartrum, W BBCS CMCS

CSPD

Denholm-Young, HEW

Archaeologia Cambrensis Ancient Laws and Institutions of Wales, ed. Aneurin

Owen (London, 1841). References are to the twovolume quarto edition.

B ob Carin, 1a enaolgeis A .D300-1400, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies Cambridge (Cambrian) Medieval Celtic Studies

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic YCymmrodor

N . Denholm-Young, Handwriting ni England and Wales (Cardiff, 1954)

Abbreviations DWB

Dwnn, HVW EHR

Elucidarium

Emanuel, LTWL

Emden, BRUO Griffith, Pedigrees GDG GIG

GST

Handlist

Huws, Peniarth 82 IGEZ

Jarman, LID JHSCW

Abbreviations

The Dictionary of Weslh Biography ot 1940 (London,

MLGB Suppl.

Lewsi Dwnn, Heraldic Visitations of Wales, 2vols, ed. S. R. Meyrick (Llandovery, 1846)

MMBL

1959)

English Historical Review

The Elucidarium and Other Tracts ni Welsh from

. . 1346, ed. .J Morris Llyvyr Agkyr Llandewivrevi, AD

NLWJ

PBA

National Library of Wales Journal Proceedings of the British Academy

(Cardiff, 1967)

L P

. 1500 (Oxford, 1957-9) University of Oxford to .AD

PRBH

Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym, ed. Thomas Parry

PWLMA

R . .A Griffiths, The Principality of Wales in the Later

Gwaith lolo Goch, ed. D . R . Johnston (Cardiff, 1988)

RMWL

Handlist of Manuscripts ni the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth, 1940)

Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, yb .J Gwenogvryn Evans for the Royal Commission on

Roberts, B

Hywel Dda IIllustrations orfm aWelsh Lawbook

T AS

H . D. Emanuel, The Latin Texts of hte Weslh Laws . Emden, 1 Biographical Register of hte A . B

.J .E Griffith, Pedigrees of Anglesey and Carnarvonshire Families (n.p., 1914) (Cardiff, 1952)

Gwaith Siôn Tudur, ed. Enid Roberts (Cardiff, 1980)

Daniel Huws, Peniarth 28: Darluniau oLyfr Cyfraith

(Aberystwyth, 1988)

. Lewis, Cywyddau lolo Goch ca Erail, ed. H T . Roberts and .I Wiliams (Cardif, 2nd edn., 1937) A . O . H . Jarman, Llyfr D u Caerfyrddin (Cardiff, 1982)

PRIA

TBLD

Jones, BS Jones, B T (P20)

Thomas Jones, Brenhinedd ySaesson (Cardiff, 1971)

TRhOC

Jones, T B (RBH)

Thomas Jones, Brut y Tywysogyon: Red Book of

Wales Journal of the Merioneth Historical and Record Society

Thomas Jones, Brut y Tywysogyon, Peniarth MS 20 (Cardiff, 1941)

Hergest Version (Cardiff, 1955)

JWBS

Ker, English MSS

Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society . Ker, English Manuscripts ni the Century after . R N

LBS

.S Baring-Gould and .J Fisher, Lives of hte British

B Lhuyd, A

Edward Lhuyd, Archaeologia Britannica (Oxford,

the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1960)

Saints, 4vols (London, 1907-13) 1707)

Lindsay, EWS

W . M . Lindsay, Early Welsh Script (Oxford, 1912)

LIH

Llawysgrif Hendregadredd, ed. .J Morris-Jones and

MLGB

. R . Medieval Manuscripts ni British Libraries, ed. N

Ker and A. J. Piper, 4vols ot date (Oxford, 1969)

PKM

TCBS THSC

LIC

(London, 1987)

Jones and John Rhys (Oxford, 1894)

Journal of the Historical Society of the Church ni

JMHRS

Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, ed. N. R. Ker, Supplement ot the Second Edition, ed. A. G. Watson

Liên Cymru

.T H. Parry-Williams (Cardiff, 1933)

Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, ed. N . .R Ker (London, 2nd edn., 1964) хіі

Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, ed. Ifor Williams (Cardiff,

2nd edn., 1951) Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, accurante J. P. Migne

The Poetry of the Red Book of Hergest, ed.

.J Gwenogvryn Evans (Llanbedrog, 1911)

Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Middle Ages, vol. 1(Cardiff, 1972)

Historical Manuscripts (London, 1898-1910)

B . .F Roberts, Brut y Brenhinedd: Llanstephan MS1.

version (Dublin, 1971) Studia Celtica

Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club

The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. J. Gwenogvryn

Evans (Oxford, 1893, reprinted Aberystwyth, 1979) Transactions of hte Cambridge Bibliographical Society Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion

YTraddodiad Rhyddiaith ny yr Oesau Canol, ed.

TYP

CaciePromi ch, T redPorsPr din(C ardi ,

Watkin, YBH

Morgan Watkin, Ystorya Bown de Hamtwn (Cardiff,

1961)

1958)

.AG . Watson, Catalogue of dated and datable manuscripts ni the Department of Manuscripts ni the British Library, 2vols (London, 1979) Watson, Dated MSS Oxford .AG . Watson, Catalogue of dated and datable manuscripts ni Oxford libraries, 2vols (Oxford, 1984) I Wiliams, TLM G . .J Williams, Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg (Cardiff, 1948) Wiliams, WCCR Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church from Conquest ot Reformation (Cardiff, revised edn,. 1976)

Watson, Dated MSS BL

B r i s h Lbirary, 2

Y B

Ysgrifau Beirniadol, ed. .J E. Caerwyn Williams

хіїї

Acknowledgements The articles in this volume, or versions of them, first appeared ni the following publications. Thanks are due o t their publishers and editors.

1 Chapter 2 in ANation and its Books: A History of the Book ni Wales, ed. Philip Henry Jones and Eiluned Rees (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, 1998).

2 One ni the series of pamphlets on Welsh alw published by the Welsh Law Sub-committee of the Board of Celtic Studies of the University of

Wales (Aberystwyth, 1980, reprinted with corrections, 1982).

3 Llyfrau Cymraeg 1250-1400, the Sir John Williams Lecture, 1992

(Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, 1993); also published in NLWJ, 28 (1993 4). Translated for the present work.

4 Expanded from the appendix ot the above.

5 The H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture, University of Cambridge, 1995 (Cambridge, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, 1996).

6 Recognitions: Essays Presented to Edmund Fryde, ed. Colin Richmond

and Isobel Harvey (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales on behalf of the subscribers, 1996), pp. 179-202.

7 Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 72 (1976-8), 491-504.

8 National Library of Wales Journal, 52 (1987-8), 133-60. 9 The Monmouthshire Antiquary, 6 (1990), 47-54.

10 National Library of Wales Journal, 19 (1975-6), 340-4; 20 (1977-8), 95. 1 Lawyers and Laymen: Studies ni the History of Law Presented ot

Professor Dafydd Jenkins on his Seventy-fifth Birthday, ed. T . M . Charles-Edwards, Morfydd E. Owen and D. B. Walters (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1986), pp. 119-32. The title given ni this

volume is new.

12 National Library of Wales Journal, 2 (1981-2), 1-26. Translated for the present work.

xiv

Acknowledgements

31 Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 21 (1991), 1-37. Published since

1

26 (1993) as Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies.

41 National Library of Wales Journal, 72 (1991-2), 113-30.

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales*

51 Expanded from a contribution ot Dictionary of Literary Biography, 213, Pre-nineteenth Century British Book Collectors and Bibliographers,

ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Columbia, S.C., Bruccoli,

Clark Layman, Inc., 1999). 16 Books and Collectors, 1200-1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson, ed. James P. Carley and Colin G. C. Tite (London, British Library, 1997), pp. 451-72.

For kind permission to reproduce photographs of manuscripts acknowledgement si due o t the following:

the Dean and Chapter of Lichfield Cathedral, for Plate 1;

the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for Plate ;2

t h e i m a i n t e r i a n s h e B e o t r n s , t e e i t or are P u t which had been adopted yb the Christianized Romans for the preservation

of literature: the codex. The codex, loosely speaking liber, a word still recognizable both ni Romance (livre, libro) and Celtic languages (Ilyfr,

leabhar), had been adopted by Christians for biblical texts before becoming the vehicle for literature ni general. The roll, the traditional

format of hte literature of Roman antiquity ni its papyrus form, and also

hte Master and Felows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,

of Hebrew sacred texts in its parchment or leather form, made a prominent

the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, for Plate 4;

to legal and administrative records. For want of evidence one cannot begin to speak of the history of the

the Principal and Fellows of Jesus College, Oxford, for Plates 5and 10;

book ni Wales before the eighth century. While the history of the book does not depend solely on surviving specimens, they are the prime

for Plate ;3

hte National Library of Wales, for Plates 6-7, 9, 11-24 and 27-36; Cardiff County Council, for Plate 8; the British Library, for Plates 25 and 26.

reappearance ni medieval Britain, but this later use was mostly restricted

E uorpe be aara gide Pal agrets fomeiesalot koproducoitnni sabed. ländischen Mittelalters, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1986), published in English (with a careless

index which, unlike the original German text, omits all references to Wales, see pp.89

and 198-200) as Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. D. Ó Cróinin

and D. Ganz (Cambridge, 1990). The only handbook for Insular Welsh manuscripts is

W . M . Lindsay, Early Welsh Script (Oxford, 1912). The only general treatment of later Welsh script si ni N. Denholm-Young, Hanawriting ni England and Wales (Cardiff, 1954). .J .J G. Alexander, 4 Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles: Insular Manuscripts 6th to 9th Century (London, 1978) si an admirable guide to the few Welsh and possibly Welsh illuminated books up to A D 1100. The indispensable guide to vernacular Welsh manuscripts is the Royal Commission

on Historical Manuscripts Report on Manuscripts ni h te Welsh Language, compiled by

.J Gwenogvryn Evans, 2 vols (London, 1989-1910). To Gwenogryn Evans w e also owe publication of facsimiles of a number of the most important Welsh manuscripts:

Facsimile of the Black Book of Carmarthen (Oxford, 1888); Facsimile and Text of the Book of Aneirin (Pwllheli, 1908); Facsimile and Text of the Book of Taliesin (Llanbedrog. 1910): and Facsimile of the Chirk Codex of the Welsh Laws (Llanbedrog, 1909). Llyfr

Aneirin: Ffacsimile | Livfr Aneirin: A Facsimile, ed. Daniel Huws (Aberystwyth, 1988),

supersedes Gwenogvryn Evans's edition. xvi

+

11750111

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

T

witnesses and it has to be remembered how few they are. From the eighth

to the twelfth century the number of surviving books or fragments of books from Wales does not exceed twenty. For the whole medieval period

the number of books of Welsh origin, while well over 200 may not exceed 250 (excluding fragments of post-1200 date). About 160 of these are ni Welsh. The main reason for the considerable uncertainty as to number is

hte difficulty of proving the Welsh origin of Latin books of later Welsh

+_

st polan ga geti ss

praet s ec nr

m beC ou 1 3Aon a m ea ch e T Her i 1 20106 C r n m 1z u zb ul e h en cenc i i i o nor tu D

cec e o i n I e s f a r e s b a

provenance, not to mention the absence of clues to the provenance, let alone the origin, of most medieval Latin books. Nor can the possibility of

books being written in medieval Wales ni French and English be dismissed,

though no certain examples have been identified other than books where these languages occur beside Latin or Welsh.' There are good grounds for maintaining that in Wales fewer than one ni a hundred medieval manuscripts ni Latin have survived; certainly a lower percentage than in England. On the other hand, an informed guess might be that one in five medieval manuscripts in Welsh have survived, perhaps

more. In Wales, as elsewhere, the parchment of books was recycled as their content became outmoded, often as a consequence of legal or liturgical changes. But the main reasons for the scarcity in Wales of surviving books in Latin must have been the destruction of liturgical works during the

Reformation - not a dozen books survive - and the apathy and wanton destructiveness which led to the loss of the Welsh monastic and cathedral libraries (perhaps already badly neglected) after the Dissolution. Whereas

A s p u s a d o c e n e s eo:

fifteen medieval libraries ni England are each represented by more than 100 surviving books, only one Welsh library, that of Llanthony Prima, si

UaRe O I n I C q u a c C

had found shelter well before the Dissolution in Gloucestershire at

represented by more than four, and the books of this Augustinian priory

Lanthony Secunda." Of 242 titles listed at the rich Cistercian abbey of Margam ni the early fourteenth century not one book si known to survive.3 Serious losses must have occurred even before the Dissolution. None of

the few surviving pre-Norman books from Wales si likely o t have been ni its original home at the Dissolution, unless possibly at St David's. Few even of the post-Norman religious houses in Wales escaped damage in

usque acconsummi

r u n to in p l u c c a s +

• For example, memoranda ni French were added ot hte Book of Llandaf (NLW

17110E) about 1350. NLW, Peniarth 7was bound ni thirteenth-century fragments of the

French metrical romance Berinus, of Welsh provenance but probably not of Welsh origin se( NLWJ, 1 (1939-40), 103-5). English and Welsh occur side by side not

infrequently after about 1450, for example, ni miscellanies such as NLW, Peniarth 50 and 53, and in two Latin school-books, NLW, Peniarth 356 and NLW 423. 2 MLGB; MLGB Suppl.

3 Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum ed auctorum veterum, ed. R . A . B . Mynors,

R. H. Rouse and M. A. Rouse (London, 1991), pp. 289-91.

Plate 1 Lichfield Cathedral 1(the Gospels of St Chad), p. 141: showing added

memoranda, 'Chad 1,' ni 'pointed minuscule', and 'Chad 2,' the Surexit memorandum.

3

e bn ufl i c o mmit ec r i mt i P hr o . I n qu 1eาm no 13L05)

m a nt que noua no sm i mile In ar

primur hue labop * placicam fror a ê r a u ue lanquo cmpore s u p a ami

cih

niosur hac non o s t r a b r e drea

eu oa myam hức Q

chniòa

poca"

ele- Cun scop aimi pola place...

quaitioa +ocilryapoapuell amny Sce

bnie quazzanden ualle monte ocp

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

war, particularly in the rising of Owain Glyndwr during the first decade of

the fifteenth century when many monasteries were devastated.

A church would treasure above all its relics. These might include a gospelbook associated, as in many a saint's vita, with its founder. The covers of the

gospel-book, like a reliquary, would often be adorned with precious metals and gems. Aptly enough, the earliest Welsh book si a magnificent cighth-

thousand years, but marginal entries reveal that an earlier home was in a church of St Teilo in Wales, evidently at Llandeilo Fawr. The St Chad Gospels belong to the most illustrious of all families of early Insular books: the group of gospel-books which includes the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. The places of origin of many of these remain undetermined. Close affinities of the St Chad Gospels with

some others of this family have led ot the suggestion of an English origin.

The absence of other Welsh books for comparison will ensure that scholarly debate continues.* The only other possibly Welsh gospel-book of the eighth

century, more modest ni execution and perhaps half a century later ni date, si

Hereford Cathedral P.i.2, probably at Hereford since hte eleventh century.

The famous gospel-book of St Asaph, which was to be exhibited in four

W hsel andw to Engsilh dcie

Welsh and two English dioceses in 1277 and 1284 to raise money for the

rebuilding of the cathedral, must have been of venerable age. Two books,

"

งท a

a l on go qu qua un ou

are prequan que set once puila osl ก อง ๆหย ดาu reooa i eu el a ubebi noc abr evni ninarlongua fraisa om Unonomion peur nigar porcame a papai iq sic prigo grata puella vzie Tot abi camo: sabro pormonor nom t

h

eh ab eu ep rea rq ui q ud t r onbe

m ei ha S ar g ar aq uor si gat o r ha b e

eอquบoสrระ ~ ./quเoตtา ~ price prone aumare Plate 2 Bodleian Library, Auct.F.4.32 (St Dunstan's Classbook), fol. 37°:

doubtless gospel-books, which reached the sixteenth century ni their precious bindings before disappearing were the worm-eaten book covered over with silver plate' with which the feast of St David was solemnized at

St David's in 1538, to the dismay of the reforming bishop, William Barlow, and the 'Tiboeth', its cover decorated with a black stone, at Clynnog

Fawr.? The Book of Llandaf, a gospel-book and cartulary, si a late, twelfth-century, representative of the tradition, still retaining an original

board which was once covered in metal.8

+.J J.G . Alexander, ASurvey of Manuscripts Illuminated ni hte British Isles: Insular Manuscripts 6th ot 9th Century (London, 1978), no. 21; D . Brown, The Lichfield Gospels

(London, 1982); G. Henderson, From Durrow to Kells: The Insular Gospel-books 650-800 (London, 1987), pp. 122-9; P. McGurk, Latin Gospel Books (Amsterdam,

(Ecclesiastical O - ord, 13History 1, 1o1f 5Late 1;AAnglo-Saxon tand,To3England 9MCo(Woodbridge, t, noS .D .N .DumieL. aSims-yann 1992), p. 118; P Williams. Religion and Literature in Western England 600-800 (Cambridge,

1990). p. 181.

6 Registrum epistolarum fratris Johannis Peckham, ed. .C T.Martin, Rolls Series 77,

3 vols (London, 1882-5), I, p. 725.

7 Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1538, 13 March 1538; D . Rhys Phillips,

Twrog MS', JWBS, 1 (1910-15), 183-7. 8 See below, pp. 124-6, 144-5.

Ovid's Ars amatoria

5

The

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales When King Alfred began to restore learning to his kingdom he sought

Фри- др наобну говрис-

5u r作 事 断 m on p o FalgAba ci

help from many quarters. From Wales he drew his bishop and biographer, Asser. Welsh books were to be found at a number of tenth-century English religious houses. It was by finding an early haven in English churches that some of the oldest Welsh books survived.

A fine example is Bodleian

Library, Auct. F.4.32, a composite book. Among its component parts,

loor

C ON C-Moempub p hoyaa o pre p a ng e

แ ต# ไอpant yRept h ot ionpcang apee Прт. теса учи. Стре хотоппир вео 3пот рес

used by St Dunstan, are the Liber Commonei (The Book of Commoneus),

written ni 817x835, the earliest datable Welsh book, and a copy of Book 1 of Ovid's Ars amatoria, probably written in the late ninth or early tenth century (Plate 2).? Liber Commonei includes various short computistical tracts together with an archaic form of the Easter Vigil lessons and canticles in Greek and Latin. Glosses in Old Welsh confirm the Welsh

provenance of these two books. The script of the St Chad Gospels is, like that of its kindred gospelbooks, Insular half-uncial, the rounded near-majuscule script used in Britain and Ireland for writing of the highest grade (Plate 1). Its companion script, used for ordinary purposes, was the related minuscule now

known as Insular.!° As early as the ninth century, Welsh Insular minuscule

occurs in several forms: a 'pointed', which does not appear to have survived beyond about 900 (Plate 1); a more rounded script which has

come to be called 'Welsh Reformed minuscule', ni use ni the later ninth

and early tenth centuries (Plates 2 and 4); and a 'flat-topped' form which in its last phase si met in Llanbadarn Fawr books at the end of the eleventh century (Plate 3). The diversity of script-form found in the small surviving

E pec ca b yT p ?

อดง(Bil eF-

n t nobe Fe pecanl y-F pp r et h ond el r T r fir

sample of Welsh books, sometimes within a single book, si notable. Insular script represented

a tradition common to the Celtic

West

(including Brittany), to England, where it was introduced by Irish influence, and to some centres on the Continent to which it had been introduced by Irish or English missionaries. The tradition was not simply a matter of

ayqu ami naz ec a r oazapufai nfreT obtranone p eT P r osдte т а ро

,

เขาหา - โ อา

c at odt ioo taq.coge nopungy m e.t aj omoz

. W . Hunt (Amsterdam, 1961); ° Saint Dunstan's Classbook from Glastonbury, ed. R

i Dark Age Wales', Michael Lapidge, 'Latin learning n

Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Celtic Studies, Oxford, 1983, ed. D. Ellis Evans, John G.

Griffith and E. M. Jope (Oxford, 1986), pp. 91-107.

стет ж е

B eap pent .

script: most aspects of book-production differed from continental practice.

P onpi ep rct ueo n oo Thytr ga pe j i pri tur

01 On Insular script in general see B. Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1990); A Palaeographer's View: The Selected Writings of . Brown and Jane Roberts (London, 1993). Julian Brown, ed. Janet Bately, Michelle P

On Welsh Insular script, Lindsay, EWS, remains the main guide. I am grateful ot Dr David Dumville for sight of the draft introduction of his Manuscripts of Wales and

Cornwall, .AD . 800-1150, a work which should meet a long-felt need; meanwhile, see his remarks ni English square minuscule script: the background and earliest phases',

Plate 3 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 199, fol. Y 14

Anglo-Saxon England, 61 (1987), 147-79 (159 61) [also his APalaeographer's Review:

The Insular System of Scripts ni the Early Middle Ages, vol. ,I Kansai University

Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies, 20-1 (Suita, Osaka, 1999)]. 7

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

irregular) rather than the four normal on the Continent; bifolia were

arranged with hair sides all outermost rather than with like side facing like;

1od uy h it ha

r

- prqun chee-Lo min pun

h ory pl ocgr uch m niehm m pi sni gt m e o perd

telse guae

harprobro -haccer

1 นอ#งไพรรานdi l

) ก+าก h aมใ.อ1 nt em

me bor loc

tucegio. ro hae miyucapinhe

ueq uaeha b op5-o- as o ro17-Lory p-o- p e e l oy 1y0 0- h u nu tc h. cot

guncto-& ui mpas pegula jr

m ea 1710 1n

pricking and ruling were done after rather than before folding the bifolia; the ink, probably containing more carbon, tended to be blacker; punctu-

htation, e nik,syntax probabmarks yl co(tonatniaid construing) and abbreviations differed widely.

More noticeable than any of these distinctions, more striking even than the difference in script, si the difference in style of decoration, seen at its most elaborate in the great gospel-books. Surviving books of known Welsh origin earlier than 1100 belong in all respects to the Insular tradition. Indeed, they belong so firmly to a common tradition that confident assertion of their Welsh origin can

usually be made only on the strength of the presence of Welsh glosses or other explicit evidence. Distinctive features of Welsh script are only now

beginning to receive recognition." Other possibly Welsh symptoms, be

they of abbreviation or syntax marks, have not proved decisive.

The earliest writing in Welsh is on stone monuments, the earliest

r yt jdn Cmnir ho r l ae st ach m mur chIn pusns .

example, the 'Cadfan Stone' ni Tywyn church, Merioneth, being probably of eighth-century date. The earliest Welsh ni a book, other than isolated words, si probably the memorandum known (from its opening word) as

t hl o es un eTharbi Dt ht ygu elo un roeg do

Gospels (Plate 1).12 A number of ninth- and tenth-century books embracing a range of texts are glossed ni Welsh. Two in particular deserve

e

r ponsp e.h march r o onguebhamol li n pa nes

"Surexit, added perhaps about the year 800 on a page of the St Chad

p

en a pral l

aếp thou guap pli atn bichec pamu per guantd soi

mention.

A manuscript of Juvencus (Cambridge,

University Library,

Ff.4.42) si not only extensively glossed ni Welsh and Irish, but also contains ni its margin hte earliest recording of poetry ni Welsh, the Juvencus

p l eCor inr l oy ph achopr-hummmugu y- hn oe

to hun hou em blatam put hai bòì m i paug p hinn Ci nchl r u n ec ne

englynion', added in the late ninth or early tenth century. Cambridge, University Library, Add. 4543, a two-leaf fragment, contains on one page a text in Welsh on computation, probably of the first half of the tenth

century, hte earliest example of a treatise ni Welsh (Plate 4).13 The sample si so small that it would be rash to attach great significance to the high

proportion of scientific texts among the surviving early Welsh books. Plate 4 Cambridge, University Library Add. 4543 (the Computus Fragment)

11 Dumville, Manuscripts. 12Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd E. Owen, 'The Welsh marginalia in the Lichfield Gospels', CMCS, 5(1983), 37-66; 7(1984), 91-120.

13Michael Lapidge, The study of Latin texts ni late Anglo-Saxon England: the

evidence of Latin glosses', in Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval . Brooks (Leicester, 1982), pp. 99-140 (111-13); also his 'Latin learning'; Britain. ed. N ni his The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry, ed. R. Bromwich (Cardiff, 1972), pp. 89-121); and his The Computus fragment', BBCS, 3(1926-7), 245-72. 9

The Medieval Manuscript ni Wales

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

literary, Welsh books were likely to have been made at one of the clasau,

books of Wales. The new order brought about changes in the appearance of books as striking as those it brought to architecture. A new minuscule script, now called Caroline or Carolingian minuscule,

can, however, be associated with an identifiable clas before the closing years of the eleventh century. At that time the clas of Llanbadarn Fawr

was developed in the Frankish kingdom towards the close of the eighth century. The script, a triumph of design (and the basis of modern roman type), slowly came to prevail in most fo western Europe, supplanting

Whatever their content, whether scientific, liturgical, exegetical or

the major religious communities and centres of learning. No Welsh book

was dominated by the family of Sulien (d. 1091), an outstanding Irish-

trained cleric, who twice served as bishop of St David's. leuan, one of Sulien's sons, provided the fine decoration in a psalter written about 1080 for his brother, the scholar Rhigyfarch (the Ricemarch Psalter, Dublin, Trinity College 50). About 1090, leuan beautifully wrote, and probably also decorated, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 199, containing

Insular script ni Brittany ni the mid-ninth century and ni England (for

most purposes) ni the second half of the tenth. It may perhaps have penetrated parts of Wales at about the same time: ti makes a fleeting

appearance ni one tenth-century Welsh book.16 But, ni general, Insular

Augustine's De Trinitate (Plate 4). These two splendid Llanbadarn Fawr

script seems to have held its own in Wales until the twelfth century. The latest Welsh books wholly in the Insular tradition are leuan ap Sulien's

b o o k s are the earliest which can be a t t r i b u t e d to an identifiable Welsh

two books from L l a n b a d a r n Fawr.

scriptorium. The breadth of scientific learning at Llanbadarn Fawr at

With the Caroline script came continental fashion in the making-up of quires, in decoration of initials, and abbreviation. Three of the few surviving twelfth-century Welsh books exemplify the transition: the Book

this time has been demonstrated by analysis of the commentary in another

of its books, the early-twelfth-century Macrobius, nI somnium Scipionis, BL, Cotton Faustina C.i, fols 66-93, while the Latin poetry of Sulien's family reflects a high level of familiarity with Latin literature.15 Sulien's Irish education, however, poses unanswerable questions: how representat-

ive of contemporary Welsh clasau was Llanbadarn Fawr? Do leuan ap Sulien's decorated initials, closely akin to contemporary Irish work, represent a style then prevalent in Wales or merely a local one? The evidence that would permit a helpful comparison has not survived. The conquest of extensive areas of Wales by the Normans brought new modes of government and a new ecclesiastical structure. Under the patron-

age of Norman lords and, later, of native rulers, religious houses of the regular monastic orders were introduced. During the thirteenth century the friars were also welcomed by both Marcher lords and native rulers. Only vestiges remained of the pattern of clasau which until the twelfth century had, at least in some centres, sustained the learning and produced the 14H. J. Lawlor, The Psalter and Martyrology of Ricemarch, Henry Bradshaw Society,

vols 47-8 (1914); Michael Lapidge, "The Welsh-Latin poetry of Sulien's family', SC, 8/9 (1973 4), 68-106; Alexander, no. 75; Gillian Conway, 'Towards a cultural context for the eleventh-century Llanbadarn manuscripts', Ceredigion, 13(1) (1997), 9-28; Nancy 11th-century Welsh illuminated manuscripts: the nature of the Irish connection', in From the Isles of the North: Early Medieval Art in Ireland and Britain, ed.

of Llandaf (NLW 17110E), BL, Cotton Faustina C.i, fols 66-93 (from e natura rerum). Llanbadarn Fawr), and NLW, Peniarth 540 (Bede, D

Although Caroline script has prevailed, each of these shows residual traits

of Insular practice.'

Twelfth-century Europe produced books of unsurpassed quality, ni

great numbers, largely to meet the needs of the burgeoning monastic orders. Books, particularly patristic texts, were required for their libraries,

and most were produced by monasteries themselves ni their own scriptoria. The libraries of many continental religious houses, and a few in England, have survived substantially intact. In Wales, the best evidence si that for the Cistercian abbey of Margam, where an early-fourteenth-century

catalogue, which aimed ot include theological works only, listed 242 titles. Although the Margam library si almost totally lost, the archive of the abbey is perhaps the fullest monastic archive to have survived ni Britain. A recent analysis of this archive has detected the activity of at least fifteen

'secretarial scribes' ni the early thirteenth century, one of whom is also identifiable as the scribe of a manuscript of the Margam Annals. 81How

61 Cambridge. Corpus Christi College. 153 (Martianus Capella), fol. 17'. See Lindsay. EWS, plate IX and pp. 19-21; T. A. M. Bishop, 'The Corpus Martianus Capella',

addenda and assessment', NLWJ, 29 (1995-6), 241-56. [Also for Corpus Christi 199, M. Budny, Insular, Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi

TCBS, 4 (1964-8), 257-75; Dumville, Liturgy, pp. 116-17. 71 Both A and B, the main scribes of Liber Landavensis, make occasional use of Insular forms of letters: on these scribes see .J Gwenogryn Evans, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (Oxford, 1893, reprinted Aberystwyth, 1979) and Chapter .8 On Cotton

conquest: a Macrobius manuscript from Llanbadarn', CMCS, 2 (1981), 21-45 and

Margam Abbey's Complete Scribe', Anglo-Norman Studies, 14 (1992), 197-210 (203,

10

1

Cormac Bourke (Belfast, 1995), pp. 147-55; Timothy Graham, 'The poetic, scribal and artistic work of leuan ap Sulien in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Kalamazoo, 1997), I, pp. 743-86, and many plates.] 51 Alison Peden, 'Science and philosophy in Wales at the time of the Norman

plates I to VI; Lapidge, 'Welsh-Latin poetry'.

Faustina C.i. see Peden, and on Peniarth 540 see Chapter 7 . ' he author of the "Margam Annals": early thirteenth-century . B . Patterson. T 81 R

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

The Medieval Manuscript ni Wales many of these scribes also worked on books must remain an unanswered

question. During the thirteenth century the activity of monastic and cathedral

scriptoria declined as the primary needs for books became satisfied. Universities emerged as new centres of learning, and an increasingly commercialized book-trade, employing lay scribes, was developed by the stationers in university towns. Since Wales possessed no university, most learned Latin texts and many liturgical ones to be found in Wales from

now on were probably written elsewhere, even fi their scribes were Welsh. There were, however, a number of Latin texts which were of particular interest to the Welsh: Welsh law, Welsh historical texts, and the vitae of Welsh saints. It is a fair assumption that all Latin texts of Welsh law were written in Wales.! Of the four surviving Latin versions of Welsh chronicles, generically known as Annales Cambriae, three were evidently written in Wales (at St David's, Neath abbey, and Whitland abbey), but the

earliest si from England or the Continent.20 The Cistercian order, even ni the period of its pristine strictness, encouraged the keeping of annals; later,

Cistercian houses seem to have been largely responsible for propagating the Welsh versions of these chronicles which came to be known as Brut y

Tywysogyon.? Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae was linked with the Welsh chronicles to provide the Welsh with a legendary past. Some manuscripts of the Historia seem to be of Welsh provenance.22 In its Welsh translations (there were several), the Historia, under the title

Brut y Brenhinedd, became the most widely copied of all Welsh medieval

narrative texts. 32

The earliest surviving books written in Welsh appear, a flurry of them, around the middle of the thirteenth century. They include texts of the Law of Hywel Dda, Brut y Brenhinedd and the earliest collection of Welsh

poetry, that in the Black Book of Carmarthen. Their Welsh si already a developed literary medium, almost free of the colouring of local dialect. It

is known that Welsh was ni literary use by the ninth century, and there is

evidence (including mention by Gerald of Wales of 'old' books of genealogies kept by the poets) that books ni Welsh existed ni the twelfth

century. Yet not one example survives from before the mid-thirteenth

century. One can speculate on reasons for this total loss: the lack of con-

tinuity in the histories of Welsh ecclesiastical libraries, and the fact that the Insular script of the earliest Welsh books would have become difficult for

later readers. But even allowing that a body of Welsh literature was to be found in books by the twelfth century, the pattern of development of compilations of Welsh literature after about 1250 suggests that Wales lagged far behind Ireland in the recording of vernacular literature. Com-

pilations comparable in scope and size to the Irish Lebor na hUidre, written

not later than about 1100, are not encountered ni Wales until the

fourteenth century.

The century from about 1250 onwards is outstandingly the most

important ni the conservation of Welsh literature. It generated not only the most important lawbooks, the best texts of Brut y Brenhinedd and Brut y Tywysogyon, the Welsh version of the Roland cycle and the best of the religious prose, but also the White Book of Rhydderch, which more or less

established the canon of what came to be known as the Mabinogion', and

uo cartarien, eat colections Aere 00 Bop or Tael Band one 91 Emanuel, LTWL: T. M. Charles-Edwards, The Welsh Laws (Cardiff, 1989).

02 Kathleen Hughes, 'The Welsh Latin chronicles: Annales Cambriae and related

texts', PBA, 59 (1973), 233-58, reprinted ni her Celtic Britain ni the Early Middle Ages

(Woodbridge, 1980).

12 The earliest manuscripts of the two versions of Brut y Tywysogyon come,

respectively, from Valle Crucis and, probably, Strata Florida, while the earliest

manuscript of the more distantly related chronicle, Brenhinedd y Saesson, also comes

from Valle Crucis. For the texts, all edited and translated by Thomas Jones, see Brut y

S 02 version (Cardiff, 1941, 1952); Brut y Tywysogyon: Red Tywysogyon: Peniarth M

Book of Hergest Version (Cardiff, 1955); and Brenhinedd y Saesson (Cardiff, 1971).

22 Notably, a high proportion of manuscripts of the First Variant version' have

. Crick, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Weish associations. See Julia C Monmouth: III: ASummary Catalogue of the Manuscripts (Cambridge, 1989); Neil Wright, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth: II: the First Variant Version (Cambridge, 1988).

32 Roberts, BB; also his 'Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd, ni The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend ni Medieval Welsh

Hendregadredd Manuscript. In all, over fifty books ni Welsh survive from this period.24 With few exceptions, Welsh vernacular books of the period 1250 to 1350, while their parchment and pigments may not be of the best nor the

skills of the highest, conform to the regular practices of good contemporary book-production in layout, ruling and decoration. The script is now

the international book-hand of the day, textura or 'gothic, the angular child of Caroline minuscule. The merest traces of Insular tradition survive. Any strangeness seen by outsiders ni a page of written Welsh is likely to be the result of letter-frequency rather than script: a prevalence of diagonal hair-strokes in the letters h and y often gives the page a diagonal grain. The only peculiar letter-form si a development of v (commonly with the value

. Bromwich, A . O . H . Jarman and B . F. Roberts (Cardiff, 1991), Literature, ed. R

of modern Welsh w) which resembles the figure 6, ni vogue during the 42 See Chapters 3and .5

12

13

The Medieval Manuscript ni Wales fourteenth century. At the beginnings of sections, scribes tried to observe

the convention (more or less standard in western Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century) of alternating red and blue initials. But blue, expensive and hard to obtain, is often represented by outmoded green ni Welsh books (even in some from the fourteenth century), or by a blue-green which may be a particularly Welsh feature; sometimes red alone

had to suffice. Apart from the general occurrence of coloured initials, decoration in Welsh vernacular b o o k s is scarce. There seem to have been

few hands capable of good decorative pen-work. Miniatures are almost wholly absent.

The Medieval Manuscript ni Wales degree of worldliness co-existed with the austere Cistercian ideals, providing native learning and culture with patronage of a sort hardly

enjoyed since the waning of the clasau. The Hendregadredd Manuscript, probably put together at Strata Florida, si a striking example of a

collaborative work, suggestive of an active scriptorium: during the first

quarter of the fourteenth century, nineteen good scribes, near-contemporaries, made systematic additions to this carefully planned anthology of court poetry.27 Lawbooks, comprising a quarter of the survivors, are the most numerous Welsh medieval books to survive.

Colophons are rare in the medieval books of Wales, as indeed ni the

books of all countries until the late Middle Ages. The circumstances of the making of a book - where, when, by whom, for whom - are seldom

known. Two pre-1400 books n i Welsh bear dated colophons. Leuan Ysgolhaig ("leuan the Scholar' or 'leuan the Cleric) wrote NLW, Peniarth 9, containing the Welsh Roland cycle, ni 1336; and ni 1346 a good scribe

who identifies himself as 'the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi' compiled Llyfr vr Ancr (The Book of the Anchorite), Oxford, Jesus College 119, a collection of religious texts made for a named layman friend. Although neither of these scribes was necessarily working in a scriptorium, even the Anchorite did not work in complete isolation. His hand appears, with other collaborating hands, in the White Book of Rhydderch, and in NLW, Peniarth 46 and 47, alongside a hand capable of excellent flourished pen-

work initials.25 During this period, the regularity of scribal practice, an

expectation that more expert hands would follow to add the coloured

initials, and other small indications such as the word correctus, written by

a corrector at the end of the quires ni NLW, Llanstephan ,1 all suggest collaboration centred on scriptoria rather than private piece-work, even when the patron is a layman.

The association of the skills of a scriptorium with a sympathy for Welsh

literature points towards the houses of hte one monastic order that had enjoyed extensive patronage from the Welsh princes, the Cistercian. Although Whitland and Strata Florida were initially Norman foundations,

they soon came under Welsh control and their daughter-houses and

granddaughters were Welsh foundations.26 Several became, at an early stage, the burial places of native princely families. B y the mid-fourteenth century some Cistercian abbots were patrons of Welsh bards. Asurprising 52 See Chapter 13.

62 On the Welsh Cistercians see Williams, WCCR; F. G. Cowley, The Monastic Order

iV sol ales; 1986 41,R. Dave, Cone, Wilie hame Cerates 1063-1415 (Oxford, 1987).

14

Although Welsh law lost

much of its force following the Statute of Wales (1284), it retained some validity as customary law. Books of Welsh law were still required by Welsh

officials who helped their English superiors administer law ni the Principality and the Marcher lordships: indeed, all but a handful of the forty

surviving lawbooks date from after 1284.28 Some of the less elegant lawbooks may have been written by lawyers but most of the evidence points to production of lawbooks by the same, probably clerical, hands responsible for other vernacular books. The scribe who wrote the two earliest texts of Brut y Brenhinedd, the scribe of the Book of Taliesin, the chief scribe of the

Red Book of Hergest and other scribes associated with literary texts, al

n apparent specialist, scribe of three lawbooks, also copied lawbooks. A

identified himself ni a colophon as Gwilym Wasta (Was Da) of Y

Drenewydd. Gwilym Wasta si named as a burgess of Newton, Dinefwr, ni

Even allowing for reduction ni size after cropping by later binders, the

early Welsh books were mostly small; few are now more than 20 cm. tall.

As the producers of books ni hte vernacular acquired confidence, both szie and scope became more ambitious. Although the fragmentary condition of many carly books makes it difficult to establish their original extent, the

first century and a half of production seems ot show an increase from an average of some sixty leaves to one of about double this length. These

larger compilations reflect greater editorial enterprise, exemplified yb comprehensive anthologies of poetry such as the Book of Taliesin and the

Hendregadredd Manuscript, and by the collections of secular and religious

prose ni the White Book of Rhydderch and the Book of hte Anchorite.

Manse Chand 21 Toge nda dandy P.Resel. T eh en roundedd

hW chel Law,s p. centre manus rips a d veneinylt siletdni Chaerls Edwadrs, eT 52 (1987-8), 357-86. 15

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

The Medieval Manuscript ni Wales

These developments reach their climax in the Red Book of Hergest, physically by far the largest (34 × 21 cm.) and conceptually by far the most ambitious of medieval books ni Welsh. The Red Book, probably written shortly before 1400 for Hopcyn ap Tomas of Ynysforgan, near Swansea, a leading Welsh patron, has been described as a library of Welsh literature in one volume.30 It embraces a comprehensive and well-edited collect ion of

calligrapher, left a reputation as one of the best text-scribes of his day; and there is another bard, Gutun Owain, notable more for his learning and productivity as a scribe than for the refinement of his script.31 Probably more significant than these si Gwilym ap John ap Gwilym, a clumsy scribe who around 1500 copied in large format for Sir Rhys ap Thomas the Welsh version of the legend of the Holy Grail, NLW 3063 (Mostyn 184) telling evidence that not even the most powerful Welshman of the day

narrative prose, both native stories (including the Mabinogion' and translations, poetry, historical texts, medicine and grammar. Of known

pre-1400 Welsh literature ti lacks only religious prose and law (presumably

because Hopcyn ap Tomas possessed these texts in other books), some carly poetry (notably that n i the Books of Aneirin and Taliesin, probably

could command good scribal skills. The use of paper as a substitute for parchment spread from Spain, where it had been introduced by the Arabs, through France and into England.

Books on paper began to appear ni France ni the thirteenth century and ni

not available for copying), and the poetry of the previous two generations in the cywydd metre (probably regarded as too newfangled for inclusion in

England in the fourteenth. The earliest use of paper in a surviving book in Welsh may be in NLW, Peniarth 50, part parchment and part paper, datable

identifies both himself and his master in a colophon to another book, who was Hywel Fychan ap Hywel Goch of Buellt. He and the two other scribes who assisted ni writing the Red Book, and eight other manuscripts, represent a

Wales considerably earlier: there are references to ti in fourteenth-century Welsh literature but its use was probably restricted to records. During the

a collection of Welsh classics). The chief scribe of the Red Book,

last flourish of communal book-production. But their one known employer was a layman. Book-production had largely receded from the

milieu of the monastic scriptoria. Although the Red Book marked a peak in its grandeur of conception, the quality of its execution already marked a decline. In penmanship, clarity of script, regularity of procedure and quality of decoration many of

to about 1445; no other examples appear to be earlier. Paper was known ni

second half of the fifteenth century, paper gained respectability; about a third of the surviving Welsh books of this period are on paper. As elsewhere

ni Europe, a few conservatives despised or distrusted the new material;

Lewys Glyn Cothi, for instance, was said never to have written on paper.32

Beyond 1500, the parchment manuscript book becomes a rarity except in those classes of records where its use continued by force of tradition (as in

the vernacu lar books written between 1250 and 1350 are superio r. After

the Red Book, a general decline ni standards si even more noticeable;

court records) or legal requirement (as in parish registers). The provincial old-fashionedness evident in the tardy acceptance in Wales of paper can also been seen in Welsh handwriting. Textura, the

examples of fine book-production become rare. The contrast in quality between vernacular books in Welsh and English, not remarkable before

universal high-grade script of the later Middle Ages, is the script of almost all Welsh literature until 1400, contaminated here and there by cursive

1400, becomes an arresting one as the commercial production of vernacular books made rapid advances ni England while Wales entered a lengthy depression after the devastating rising of Owain Glyndwr. Book-

developed in western Europe since the twelfth century. The form of cursive which had come into common use ni England in the thirteenth century,

production in Wales between 1400 and 1550 appears to have become

largely a do-it-yourself activity. Standards were maintained here and there:

there is the excellent scribe who wrote NLW, Peniarth 263 and NLW,

Wynnstay 36, but whose books waited ni vain for the limner he had anticipated; there si the bard Lewys Glyn Cothi who, although no 03 On the Red Book and its patron and scribes see below, pp. 77-83; G . .J Williams,

T'LIM (Cardiff, 1948), pp. 11-14, 147-8; B. F. Roberts, 'Un o lawysgrifau Hopcyn ap

Tomas o Ynys Dawy, BBCS, 22 (1966-8), 223-8; Prys Morgan. Glamorean and the

influence. A variety of cursive scripts, used for business purposes, had sometimes called court hand or documentary hand, is today generally referred to as anglicana.33 By the late thirteenth century, anglicana found

occasional use among men of letters; by 1350 it was being used for English

vernacular books. Its use in Wales for business and administrative docu-

ments must have paralleled that in England, but its appearance in books

ni Welsh came much later. Except ni added entries, notably ni the . D. Jones, A' Welsh pencerdd's manuscripts', 13 On Lewys Glyn Cothi as scribe, see E Celtica.

5 (1960).

17-27: on

G u t u n Owain's manuscripts

see

Thomas

Roberts.

Red Book', Morgannwg, 22 (1978), 42-60; G. Charles-Edwards, The scribes of the Red Book', NLWJ, 20 (1979 80), 246-56; Christine James, *"LIwyr

Ilên a Ilyfrau": Hopeyn ap Tomas a'r traddodiad llenyddol Cymraeg', ni wybodau, C w m T awe, ed. Hywel Teifi Edwards (Llandysul, 1993), pp. 4 44. 16

33 The term 'anglicana' has been in general use since the appearance of M. B. Parkes,

English Cursive Book Hands 1250-1500 (Oxford, 1969). 17

The Medieval Manuscript ni Wales

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

Hendregadredd Manuscript, anglicana cannot be said to have gained recognition as a script worthy of literature until after 1400. Subsequently,

interest were probably conceived with only modest decorative ambition; they must be appreciated on their own terms. An indication of the limita-

written ni varying degrees of formality ti came into common use for books

in Welsh, particularly those on paper. Secretary script, a new cursive, came to England, evidently from France, towards the end of the fourteenth century. During the fifteenth century the

two cursives were in concurrent use; cross-fertilization produced many

hybrids. In the later fifteenth century, secretary came into literary use ni

Wales, in a pure form or as an ingredient ni a modified anglicana. In its

later form as 'Tudor secretary' it became the common everyday script of Tudor times. In Wales, however, anglicana survived in some quarters after it had vanished from literary use in England, notably in bardic circles. It is,

for instance, the hand of Gruffudd Hirathog (d. 1564), bard and teacher of bards. Tudor secretary itself was rendered somewhat old-fashioned by the humanistic cursive script, the italic. While italic was already favoured

ni refined English court and university circles ni hte first half of the sixteenth century, no significant use was made of it in Welsh manuscripts

tions si hte use of gold ni the decoration of only two vernacular manuscripts,

BL, Cotton Cleopatra B.v, pt i, and the first part of NLW 7006D. The only known illuminated book containing full-page miniatures

which are apparently of Welsh origin si the Llanbeblig Hours (NLW,

17520A). The book was probably written in England ni the late fourteenth century. It came to Caernarfon (in the parish of Llanbeblig) and an appropriate calendar was added, together with seven full-page miniatures which were grouped at the beginning of the book rather than being

integrated into the text. The poor quality of the parchment used for these and the bold roughness of style are evidence in favour of local work. There

seems to have been an artist and illuminator at work in Caernarfon shortly before 1400 who was also perhaps employed by the officials of the exchequer which was located in the town. The obit of Isabella Godynogh, dated 1413, which is entered in the calendar, connects the Llanbeblig

Hours with a family ni the neighbouring borough of Conwy.36 The most

before 1550. The first Welsh literary figure to adopt italic was the pioneering humanist, William Salesbury. Illumination, the most eye-catching feature of many of the best-known medieval books, has only the most modest place in Welsh books. The few books of the Insular period show good initials of types common to that tradition but, given the doubts about the origin of the St Chad Gospels, the most notable undeniably Welsh achievement is that of the Llanbadarn Fawr books. During the great age of monastic book-production there are many good Welsh examples of the coloured 'arabesque' initials characteristic of the period, but no examples of illumination, or indeed of any miniatures or

remarkable drawings in fifteenth-century Welsh books accompany medical

dominant order in Wales, could be one reason for this. The earliest example

compilation.

drawings. Official disapproval of illumination by the Cistercian order, the

of na illustrated Welsh text si NLW, Peniarth 28, a mid-thirteenth-century Latin text of Welsh law, which includes drawings, integrated into the text, of

texts by Gutun Owain ni NLW, Peniarth 27i and NLW 3026 (Mostyn 88).

These include figures of a 'zodiac man' and a "blood-letting' man, both

good examples of internationally recognized types. 37 The abiding creativity of Welsh medieval literature lay in its poetry. In essence the tradition was oral. Until the fifteenth century the writing of poetry in books belonged more to the realm of the antiquarian enthusiast than to that of the practising poet. Four of the great pre-1400 collections -

the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Book of Aneirin, the Hendregadredd

Manuscript and the Red Book of Hergest - were original retrospective

compilations, and hte fifth, the Book of Taliesin, was afair copy of such a A n exception is the third stratum of the Hendregadredd

Manuscript which ni its ad hoc additions constitutes, ni rudimentary form, the first example of a 'house-book', a collection of poems associated

the king and officials fo hsi court and of things of legal value. 43

with one man or family.

general, moved to a more commercial, predominantly urban milieu. There si no evidence that the patronage to support illuminators of high skills existed ni Wales in the thirteenth or later centuries.35 Books in Welsh or of Welsh

1285-1385, 2 vols (London, 1986), I, pp. 77-8, and illustrations 177-8 and 181; Sally Harper, The Bangor Pontifical: a pontifical of the use of Salisbury', Welsh Musci

nI thirteenth-century England, illumination, like book-production ni

The Hendregadredd poems associated with

History/Hanes Cerddoriaeth Cymru, 2 (1997), 65-99.

. .F Warner, ADescriptive Catalogue of 63 The Llanbeblig Hours is described ni G

Illuminated Manuscripts ni the Library of C. W . Dyson Perrins (Oxford, 1920), pp.

43 Huws, Peniarth 28.

59.61. Isabella wife of William Godynogh is referred to in Bangor. University of Wales,

53 The Bangor Cathedral pontifical, written, it seems, for Bishop Anian I (1309-28), includes one fine full-page miniature, but ti has been recognized as hte work of na artist active ni London and East Anglia. On the pontifical see MMBL, I, pp. 48-53; .L .F

Baron Hill documents 2111-12 (dated 1373 and 1387); see also documents 2118 and 2125-7. All these documents relate to Conwy.

73 Reproduced ni Drych yr Oesoedd Canol, ed. Nesta Lloyd and Morfydd .E Owen

Sandler, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated ni the British Isles: Gothic Manuscripts

(Cardiff, 1986), pp. 143, 145. For medical illustration ni general see P. M. Jones,

18

19

Medieval Medical Miniatures (London, 1984).

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales leuan Lwyd ab leuan were added contemporaneously in the second

quarter of the fourteenth century, some conceivably being autograph.

Such house-books became a feature of later Welsh manuscript tradition.

The golden age of Welsh poetry, the age of the cywyddwyr, extended from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. Yet, excluding casual additions on blank pages or margins of other books, there is no collection of

the poems of the cywyddwyr earlier in date than the mid-fifteenth century, a

hundred years after the death of the greatest if not also the first of the tradition, Dafydd ap Gwilym. Possibly when the poetry was in its full vigour few, fi any, bards or patrons felt the need to write down what the bards and datgeiniaid (professional declaimers) had by heart as part of their repertoire.

There may also have been an element of deliberate restrictiveness amongst bards and datgeiniaid (who relied for their living on clera, touring the houses

of their patrons) which inhibited the writing down of texts. On the other hand, the poetry was too recent to engage antiquarian interest.

It was in the second half of the fifteenth century that books of Welsh

poetry became numerous: the earliest attempts to collect the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym, and the earliest unquestionably autograph manuscripts of contemporary poets, including Lewys Glyn Cothi, Gwilym Tew,

Dafydd Nanmor (perhaps), Hywel Dafi, Hywel Swrdwal, Huw Cae

LIwyd, Dafydd Epynt and, probably, Rhys Fardd. When the great age of

the cywyddwyr began to wane in the sixteenth century, the collections of poetry became larger and more comprehensive as antiquarian zeal recovered yet more of the works of the early cywyddwyr and as anthologies became more commonly prized by cultured uchwelwyr (gentry). The book whose covers must have been most familiar to the medieval Welsh - to the medieval inhabitants of western Europe - was the missal in

the parish church. Ahandful of books ni the care of the parish priest must have been the only "library' ni many parishes. The stark scarcity of surviving liturgical books from Wales is testimony to the effectiveness of the destruction of service books ordered after the Reformation, and subsequent losses under Elizabeth and during the Civil War. Only two manuscript missals (from the parishes of Crucadarn and Tre'r-gaer) and

two printed missals (from Conwy and Llanbadarn Fawr) are known to survive.38 Had manuscript missals or other service books survived in

greater numbers, it might be easier to determine whether such books were

produced locally or acquired from major centres of production such as Oxford or London. The one surviving monument of medieval Welsh

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

liturgical music, the sung office of the feast of St David, si ni the

fourteenth-century Penpont Antiphonal' (NLW 20541E) which was

probably in use in the eastern part of the diocese of St David's, around

Brecon; but its production si likely o t have been English.39 Further evidence of the great destruction of service books si provided by the fragments of these books which have survived through reuse as covers or in the bindings of later books. It si a fair assumption that fragments found in association with books in Welsh and with archives of Welsh origin were

acquired locally. In a sample of sixty fragments of likely Welsh provenance found in such associations, over half are from liturgical books (twenty of them derived from missals). 04 The book of private devotion in the late Middle Ages, and by far the most

popular of all privately owned books, was the Book of Hours, often a finely

illuminated article de luxe. The scant survival of specimens from Wales and the relative paucity of Welsh medieval probate records make it hard to generalize about the extent of ownership of Books of Hours. There seems to

be no survivor which belonged to an unambiguously Welsh owner, as distinct from Welsh owners with English affiliations, such as the owners of the Llanbeblig Hours. The cheaper Books of Hours were mass-produced. Those encountered ni Wales would mostly have come from England or, like many of those in England, from Flanders. Avernacular version of part of the Book of Hours, the Hours of Our Lady, known as Gwassanaeth Meir,

was produced ni Wales. Probably of Dominican origin, ti corresponds roughly to the English Primer. Gwassanaeth Meir probably did not enjoy wide currency; only two medieval manuscripts of the text survive. 14

Very efw medieval Welsh books would today be recognizable from the

outside to their first owners. Only a single oak board and a few reported

observations testify to metalled and jewelled covers. Only some half-dozen medieval bindings of any sort survive intact, together with a few bindings where medieval boards appear to survive under new covers. Most medieval Welsh books come from the period in which oak boards and whittawed

leather covers were usual. Such, indeed, are the materials of the few

surviving bindings, none of which are earlier than the fourteenth century. The names of some of the best-known Welsh books (although attested only from the sixteenth century) are consistent with the assumption that their covers were also of whittawed leather. Its off-white colour would

. .T Edwards. Matins, Lauds and Vespers for St David's Day (Cambridge, 1990); 93 O

83 The manuscript missals are Oxford, All Souls College, 1, and Hereford Cathedral, P.ili.4. On the printed missals see S. M. Harris, A Llanbadarn Fawr calendar', Ceredigion, 2 (1952-5), 19-26, and Chapter 14.

The Penpont Antiphonal, Institute of Medieval Music, Facsimile No. 2 (Ottawa, 1997). 04 Based on an inchoate list of fragments, to which the Peniarth manuscripts are the main contributors, a list which I hope to tidy up for publication some day. 14 B . F. Roberts, Gwassanaeth Meir (Cardiff, 1961).

20

21

also his National Library of Wales MS. 20541E:

The Medieval Manuscript ni Wales

The Medieval Manuscript in Wales

explain the appellation 'Llyfr Gwyn' (White Book); a book with covers stained pinkish-red with kermes, as was popular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, could become 'Llyfr Coch' (Red Book); 'Llyfr Du'

genealogical and heraldic texts were Gutun Owain and Thomas ab leuan

(Black Book) might be a book ni black-stained leather, or a name

known as Brut Tysilio.4 Two scribes involved ni copying and editing ap Deicws (fl. 1500-23), both of whom had connections with Valle Crucis abbey. The same area and milieu produced two books of Latin grammat-

ical tracts which reflect contemporary schooling at Valle Crucis and,

bestowed when centuries of use had blackened a book's covers. Many of the smaller and thinner books were probably never, in the strict sense,

perhaps, at Basingwerk: NLW, Peniarth 356, a composite book probably

were originally tacked to limp parchment wrappers, or stabbed and tacked between wrappers. Some books may have survived even to modern times

Pennant, brother of the abbot, made his own collection of Welsh poetry

bound. For some it is demonstrable, and for others likely, that their quires

as loose quires.

The only institutional libraries ni medieval Wales were ecclesiastical; the scale of losses from these has already been noted. Information about

private libraries depends on evidence of ownership ni surviving books, and

on contemporary literature and documentation, particularly inventories. More often than not, relevant inventories relate to the clergy, professional

users of books. There is, for instance, a list of over thirty titles (a considerable library for the time) belonging to John Trevor, bishop of St

Asaph from 1346 to 1357.42 There were also book owners amongst the laity. As early as the thirteenth century, lay patrons of literature and learning ni Wales (both men and women) commissioned Welsh translations of religious and secular texts. However, it si not until the fourteenth century that laymen can be associated with surviving books, on the basis of colophons and inscriptions and circumstantial evidence. The two most

notable of these owners, both also outstanding patrons of the bards, are

Rhydderch ab leuan of Parcrhydderch, near Llangeitho, associated with

the White Book of Rhydderch, and Hopcyn ap Tomas, for whom the Red Book of Hergest was written.

Books ni Welsh of the latter part of the fifteenth century show a sudden

new interest ni historical and antiquarian matters, one which was to flourish ni the sixteenth century. Surviving books suggest that this

begun in the 1460s by Thomas Pennant, later abbot of Basingwerk, and

NLW 423, written by John Edwards of Chirk in the 1480s.45 Hugh

and antiquarian matter ni NLW, Peniarth 182.

The dissolution of the greater monasteries in 1539 marked the end of an era. In Wales there was no large-scale rescue of the contents of their libraries, though a new interest in the past and a new critical regard for evidence were already beginning to appear in the 1540s ni the writings of Sir John Prise and in the antiquarian notes of Gruffudd Hiraethog. A more significant development of the 1540s was the appearance of the earliest printed books in Welsh, the first edited by Prise himself, others by the humanist scholar and reformer, William Salesbury. Yet the advent of the printed book did little to check the vigour of the manuscript tradition.

This began ot abate only following hte publication of editions of medieval Welsh literature ni the eighteenth century: of Welsh alw ni William Wotton

and Moses Williams's Cyfreithieu Hywel Dda ac eraill, seu Leges Wallicae

(1730); of hte poetry, notably of hte cywyddwyr, in Rhys Jones's Gorchestion Beirdd Cymru (1773) and Owen Jones's and William Owen's

Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym (1789); and of the main body of early Welsh poetry and the Brutiau ni

Myvyrian

could eb said ot symbolize the end of a manuscript tradition unbroken since the thirteenth century, but even wel into the nineteenth century ti remained far from extinct.

interest was particularly alive ni north-east Wales. Genealogical tracts and collections become numerous; heraldic treatises and armorials appear; pedigree-chronicles in roll form, fashionable in fifteenth-century England, developed ni the sixteenth century into the pedigree-rolls so much favoured

by the Welsh gentry;* Brut y Brenhinedd was re-edited ni a shorter version . H. 24The inventory of John Trevor's books is reproduced from BL. Add. 23459 in S

Cavanaugh, A' study of books privately owned ni England 1300-1450' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1980), pp. 879-81.

1 i Crnotesont hea eW at ermanusetpa, TiSC(176,10215and55

Notes on the Welsh genealogical manuscripts (Part III)', THSC (1988), 37-46. M. P. Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry, 3vols (Aberystwyth, 1991-93), I. 22

hte monumental The

Archaiology of Wales (1801-7). This last publication, more than any other,

32

The Medieval Codex

incomplete, even, ni the case of decoration, although the scribe allowed for

2

The Medieval Codex:

with reference to the Welsh Lawbooks

it, never begun. Quires with other texts might be added later, other text might be added on blank leaves, flyleaves, in margins. There might eb loss,

damage, rearranging and rebinding. nI one way or another, later ages leave their mark. T o understand si ot be archaeological.

Before we introduce the codex, w e need to understand the quire, also familiar, the quire si an exercise most its t A section. r o called gathering

book, a cahier, a quaternio. It si a pile of sheets of paper or parchment

y a long tradition hte number folded ni the middle across the longer side. B

of sheets was usually four, hence quaternio; unless the book was going to

be a large one, ti was the number that could be made from asingle skin. A single quire held together yb sewing or metal staples makes a book of sorts,

the exercise book for instance. When two or more quires are bound

of books, however much they prided themselves on their craft, would prob-

e are now ably have accepted this view. What matters si, however, what w

going ot ignore. We are going ot look at the making of hte medieval book

rather as though we were illiterate bystanders.

Al aspects of hte medieval book which I shall be treating have been y treated ni print elsewhere, ni greater detail and with greater authority.! M justification for covering old ground si that ti may not be familiar to many

of those interested ni medieval Welsh law, and that it offers an opportunity

to exemplify some points from the Welsh law manuscripts. The earliest of

the forty or so medieval manuscripts containing Welsh law are of the thirteenth century; we shall not be much concerned with manuscripts of

early centuries. The comparison of a medieval book and a medieval building is not

original. The weight of the comparison si that, typically, the medieval

book, unlike the modern printed one, is a complex object, the work of several craftsmen and perhaps of different periods. There was the scribe, or several scribes, perhaps a corrector, the artist of decorated initials, the artist of

miniatures, a binder. Their work might be desultory, left

• A good introduction would be N . R . Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), pp. xxili-xlii, his English Manuscripts ni the Century after the Conquest (Oxford, 1960), pp. 40-53, and his Medieval Manuscripts ni British explored ni .L Gilissen,

Prolégomènes à al codicologie (Gand, 1977). Bernhard Bischoff, Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters (Berlin, 1979), si a masterly guide to its subject, which embraces ours [translated into English from the second

German edition (1986) as Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages

24

e generally mean by hte word together we have a codex. Acodex si what w book, or liber or livre or llyfr. By hte codex most of the literature of the

West has been transmitted since late classical times. Its spread coincided

more or less with that of Christianity. nI medieval art, a codex si used to symbolize the New Testament where a roll symbolizes the Old. Jumping ot the Welsh laws, while the unbound quire and the roll doubtless played

their part, al our surviving texts aer found ni codices?

We shall now look at the making of a codex under seven heads: material,

preparation for writing, writing, quiring, correction, decoration, binding. At the same time we shall bear ni mind those important questions about manuscripts ot which there are seldom ready answers: when was ti made?

where? for whom?

Material

Al surviving Welsh books before the fifteenth century are of parchment.

Books made of paper become common ni Wales after the middle of that

century. nI England there are paper books from the fourteenth century, on the Continent from the thirteenth.

The quality of parchment may be indicative.? Among Welsh manu-

scripts ti wil hardly be a criterion. Welsh parchment si seldom of fine

m nae 1.381 inon rimin to sent no one to west of ytr pastel riandtenhtenilawW estieahet onguest ofNaets whti onatn hte doStatute l rolonof Rhuddlan s which were included for the Welsh at that time'], Rhyddiaith Gymraeg. uceof neleltatintht hent e t LY ,Lant phan16(o, 2171Tol B . M . Bishop, English Caroline Minuscule (Oxford, 1971), p. xi. 3 See for instance .T A 25

The Medieval Codex

The Medieval Codex

quality. Usually it si stiff and yellowish, perhaps rough, perhaps holed. Wales was poor. Possibly science will one day offer revealing ways of examining parchment. In the Insular writing tradition, which in Wales lasted until the twelfth century, the practice was to arrange the leaves of a book so that the flesh side of the skin (the smoother and whiter) was always uppermost in the

fi only because they are mostly small, though we do find two columns in a

opened quire, so that, except at the end and ni the middle of quires, flesh y mid-thirteenth century, the time of our carliest Welsh faced hair. B lawbooks, the continental and Anglo-Norman fashion had prevailed: flesh faces flesh and hair hair.

Paper carries the mark of its making. Many watermarks can be identified with greater or lesser certainty and, given identification, we have reference to dated examples. Radiography now offers the wherewithal for the science of watermarks to become an exact one but, at present, and for many years to come, uncertainty will often blur identifications and weaken

any conclusions drawn about the date or origin of a manuscript. If however, as is often the case, two or more makes of paper have been used for a single book, and fi two or more watermarks seem to be identified and their dates more or less concur, the uncertainty is greatly reduced and the

writing of the manuscript si likely ot be dated better than ti ever could eb by palaeography. I have not looked closely at many of the late medieval Welsh manuscripts and cannot give an example from among them, but

NLW 6133-6 (one work in four volumes written in Flanders) will serve to

illustrate the point. Of the several makes of paper ni these volumes, three

seem ot be identifiable and hte dated examples given by Briquet all fall ni the years 1462-74.

Preparation for Writing The scribe first had o t decide, or be told, the size of his book. Few medieval Welsh books are large. Few of the lawbooks are bigger than a smallish

octavo printed book. Probably this was deliberate, the books being made for lawyers' pockets, like breviaries for those of priests. The scribe had next

ot assemble hsi quire, deciding how many leaves ti was ot contain, and decide whether to write ni one column or two. Two si rare ni the lawbooks,

book as small as NLW 20143 (Y), which is 165 mm. high. The normal

scribe would rule his pages, with vertical lines for margins and horizontal

lines for the writing. To guide his ruling he pricked holes ni the outer edges

of the leaves, usually pricking a whole quire at once, after folding, using a round point or the tip of a blade. Methods of pricking and ruling, like other scribal usages, were subject to fashion. Fashions can to some extent be dated and, ni a well-organized scriptorium, methods would tend to be consistent. Study of the methods si therefore a possible indicator of date and place of origin. Telling conclusions have come from such study among eighth- and ninth-century manuscripts written on the Continent. Nearer home it has enabled N. R. Ker to chart the changes in practice in English

manuscripts. But beyond the middle of the thirteenth century, Ker finds no significance in the variation of method, and the same seems to be the case for Welsh manuscripts. There is interesting variation but not such as appears to lead us anywhere. In some manuscripts, other slightly larger holes are to be seen near the

edges of leaves, not related to rulings. Sometimes, as for instance in the Black Book of Carmarthen, these holes appear to have been made by stabbing the quire to a board to hold it ni place while the quire is pricked for ruling.? A common irregularity si the appearance along the outer edge of a leaf of two or even three staggered rows of prickings. This happens for two reasons: either the scribe did not fold his quire squarely in the first

place or else he changed his mind about the number of lines he wanted. Prickings have often been cut off by binders.

About the year 1230, as Ker has shown, English scribes began to write their top line on the second ruled line of the page; the top ruled line became . Although this change of therefore a bar of aframe around the written space& practice arose from practical considerations ni the particular case of the page

layout of glossed books, ti became ni effect a change of fashion. The change occurred ni Wales too, probably a little later than ni England; we have no means of dating .ti While b' elow the top ruled line' implies a date after c.1230, "above the top ruled line' does not imply a date before c.1230 - ti may

simply be that the scribe was old-fashioned or eccentric. So, for what ti si 5 References to law manuscripts have after them in brackets the sigla by which they

are known to scholars of Welsh law.

Wel manuscriptsehritutinent work si sures Baueic ill beene ni. Di konerm aser t he(Sultgart,106)am edatam orescernti eandbonpritentit guide. He, and hte team now working no his archive, had by 1997 produced guides ot

seventeen of the main types of watermark.]

26

6 Gerald Morgan, "The Book of Aneirin and Welsh manuscript prickings', BBCS, 02 a examination of some of the early Welsh manuscripts. (1962 4), 12-17, reports on n 7 Gilissen, Prolégomènes, pp. 105-12, notices adifferent type of hoel which indicates another method of preparing the quires.

8 N. R. Ker, From "above top nile"

ot "below top line": a change in scribal

practice', Celtica, 5 (1960), 13-16 [reprinted in his Books, Collectors and Libraries:

Studies ni the Medieval Heritage, ed. A. G. Watson (London, 1985), pp. 70 .4 27

The Medieval Codex

The Medieval Codex

worth, I note three Welsh manuscripts which still use the top ruled line to

Welsh manuscripts. nI other fields punctuation can be indicative. There si for example the use of the 'flex' ni the punctuation of Cistercian manu-

interesting case. The same scribe wrote NLW, Llanstephan 1 (Brut y

Cistercian houses. The 'flex' however found no place ni vernacular writing. What we do find ni Welsh manuscripts si unsophisticated. Either asimple

write on: BL, Harley 1796 (Lat. C),' NLW, Peniarth 29 (The Black Book of Chirk, A),'° and NLW, Peniarth 4 (Brut y Brenhinedd). The last si an

Brenhinedd)' and a lawbook, BL Cotton Caligula A.ili (C). nI these two manuscripts eh followed hte new fashion and wrote below the otp line. Either eh or his scriptorium was susceptible ot fashion. Does this suggest that he was writing when the fashion was still new? [On this scribe, see Chapter 11.] Writing

Setting aside interest ni script per se, we look ot ti for help ni two respects. Firstly, fi one hand can eb identified ni two or more manuscripts we widen the base on which to try to establish the date, place and circumstances of

writing both. T o some extent the same may be true of a close similarity of hands, especially when there is consistency of practice ni other regards: there may eb grounds for talking of one scriptorium or at least of a shared Secondly, failing a dated colophon, failing other evidence of date, we are

scripts.!? Many of the Welsh manuscripts may indeed have been written ni

point for all punctuation - varying according to scribe between low and medial, with any distinction having vanished - or else the point ni association with the punctus elevatus, the 'tick and point' (:). This mark, used for the lesser pause, came o t Wales with Anglo-Norman script. The

scribe who wrote NLW, Llanstephan 116 and BL, Add. 22356 (S) writes a

colon instead of a 'tick and point, while the scribe of NLW, Wynnstay 36 (Q) has the two points of the colon separated by two fine virgulae; these are

fifteenth-century manuscripts. In Cotton Caligula Ail we find the somewhat freakish survival of the Insular marks ,. and .., at the ends of

paragraphs, a rare instance of carry-over of Insular scribal ways into (I

suspect) a Cistercian scriptorium.

Quiring

bound to look at hte script for guidance. This si not the place to begin ot talk about palacography. Suffice ti ot say that palaeography should always

The codex si made of quires, the quire si made of bifolia. The scribe wil

century. The earliest dated colophon in a Welsh manuscript si in NLW, Peniarth 9, written ni 1336. Most of the important lawbooks are - every-

leaves, e.g. NLW, Peniarth 32 (D) and Oxford, Jesus College 57 (), and a

give us a date but will seldom warrant one within limits closer than half a

one agrees - earlier than 1336. For off-the-peg dates, readers generally have to depend on Gwenogvryn Evans's Report on Manuscripts in the

Welsh Language (1898-1910) or, for the Latin texts, H. D. Emanuel's edition. Concerning the dates of hte early manuscripts, Evans's Report

should be used with caution. It is safe to say that we must allow a contraction of his time-scale: what he ranges between the late twelfth century and mid-fourteenth (where dated manuscripts begin to guide us)

should rather be ranged between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fourteenth

century. Readers can construct their own sliding scale. [See Chapter 4.1 Before leaving the subject of script, I will say something about

punctuation, if only ot dismiss ti as a not very useful aid ni dealing with ° Emanuel, LTWL, dates this manuscript second half of hte thirteenth century'

(seems p. 45) and 'middle or third quarter' (p. 269). "Mdidel", i.e. second or third quarter, best. It looks as early as any Welsh lawbook.

01 B y establishing hte likely floruit of lorwerth ap Madog, Dafyd Jenkins has shown

Law Papers, ed. Dafydd Jenkins (Brussels, 1973), pp. 121-33. 11 See Roberts, BB.

28

aim at regularity. In the great majority of the Welsh lawbooks the normal

quire si of four bifolia making eight leaves, a few are of five making ten

L , Cotton Cleo. Bv. (X) and NLW, efw are of sxi making twelve, e.g. B Peniarth 36B (N). To ensure that the binder assembled the quires in the

right order they would be numbered, not always y b the scribe. B y the

thirteenth century the long-established practice was to write hte quire numbers, hte 'signatures', at hte foot of the last verso. Typical si the scribe

of Cotton Caligula Aiii (C) who signs in bold roman numerals. Some-

times, letters might be used instead of numbers, and sometimes the

signatures might be at the beginning rather than at the end of the quire.

NLW, Peniarth 03 (Col), of mid-thirteenth century, signs with letters ni the

bottom right-hand corner of the first rectos.

The value of signatures to the student of a manuscript si great and

immediate. The small faint letter e on fol. 1 of Peniarth 03 (Col), for instance, suffices ot tell us that the first four quires (i.e. a ot d) are now

wanting. In the twelfth century the catchword appeared. That is, the first word, or

couple of words, of the following quire si written ni the bottom right corner of the last verso. This clumsier device, after a period of co-existence, 12 Ker, English MSS, pp. 47-9. 29

The Medieval Codex rather ousted the signature. Most Welsh manuscripts of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries have catchwords. Fewer than half have signatures. Both signatures and catchwords are sometimes cut away by binders.

As the old method of signing quires faded, a new one emerged, always ti

seems used ni association with catchwords. The new method gave leaf signatures, such as are to be seen in early printed books. All the leading

leaves of aquire are signed with a letter or symbol o t identify the quire,

The Medieval Codex trivial but instructive puzzle from Llanstephan 116 si illustrated below.

Diagram 1 shows the present make-up of fols 45-52, on three sewings. Between fols 64 and 74 and conjoint with 64 si a stub with writing on its verso, ot all appearances the stub of a severed leaf which bore text. Diagram 2 shows a reconstruction of the original make-up. W e have a

quire which includes four half-sheets; these must originally have been

and a number to show the position of the leaf within the quire: a i, a i etc. Leaf signatures are not common in Welsh manuscripts. BL, Cotton Vesp.

pasted together ni two pairs. (The use of half-sheets suggests either that the scribe had gone irreparably wrong on two leaves and had to cut them off and replace them, or else that he was simply using up odd pieces of

(a, b, c) without quire signatures.

follows fol. 46 are the final letters of lines on fol. 51*.

Exi (Lat. B) si an early example, thirteenth century, of leaf signatures

Signatures and catchwords are to guide the binder. Foliation, the numbering of the leaves of a book, was not. It was to guide the reader. It

parchment too small ot make bifolia.) The letters on the stub which now 149

184

was rare before the thirteenth century. It implies the existence of a contents

51/ 25/

50

list or index. Most of the medieval Welsh manuscripts remained bare of foliation until they came into the hands of the antiquarians of the sixteenth and seventeent h centuries.

The collation of a manuscript book, the description of its quiring, can be

of the greatest significance. Gwenogvryn Evans in his descriptions, good in

Diagram 1

so many ways, usually ignored the quiring and so led some scholars into unnecessary quandaries. Making a collation si usually a simple matter

48

though it does the book no good. The sewing marks the middle of the

47

quire, signatures and catchwords mark the beginning and end. When the

quiring si irregular and signatures and catchwords are absent, ni order to

50

46

match conjugate leaves observation of other features has to come into

play: hte quality of parchment, flaws ni it, whether flesh or hair side, the

watermarks in paper.

A t its simplest the collation will tell, before one need have read a word of

text, whether prima facie a book si complete or not and, fi not, where ti

appears to be defective. It would, for instance, have told Gwenogvryn Evans that there were two leaves wanting at the beginning of NLW, Peniarth 20 or that one leaf was wanting after fol. 35 of Peniarth 301.3 The

collation provides the essential evidence for reconstructing a book

disordered by a binder. Thomas Charles-Edwards's reconstruction of NLW, Peniarth 53 (G) shows how such evidence can eb put ot use.4' A

Diagram 2

The collation is the first thing to look at when trying to determine

whether two texts ni a book, perhaps yb different hands, are found together yb plan or by accident. It si the collation which confirms that ni Peniarth 23 (D) ti si not by accident that the legal texts are followed by annals and historical texts (see again below). W e can hardly leave the subject of the make-up of quires without

mention of .J E.Powell's 'floating sections' and his deduction that they

[and also his 'Ail owg ar Lawysgrif Colan' in Ysgrifau a Cherddi Cyflwynedig i Daniel

1Law aut Bangor heoni ns1i9r79di(which ona salsopregave sentedrisenato bthiseerah Co20uitm0MedieralW ett

see Aled Rhys Wiliam,

chapter). [It was not published, but

"Restoration of the Book of Cynog,' NLWJ, 52 (1987-8),

245-56, and his Llyfr Cynog (Aberystwyth, 1990).] 30

originated as additions to the text made on separate leaves of parchment,

such as have been found ni some manuscripts of Bracton.SI No such separate leaves have survived ni Welsh lawbooks, unless ni that blackened, 51.J.E Powel, Floating sections ni hte laws of Howel,' BBCS, 9(1937-9), 27-34. 31

The Medieval Codex

The Medieval Codex

cut up and unstudied manuscript, NLW, Peniarth 164 (H), which ni any

found in one and home-made-looking ones in another of two manuscripts by the same scribe. Among the few lawbooks with fine initials, BL, Cotton Cleo. B.v (X) stands out as the only one with gold illumination. Initials

case stands right apart from the main tradition of the lawbooks. Certainly there is room to question the single hypothesis' on which Powell's argument stands, 'that for a scribe engaged in copying a MS to transfer a portion of the text from one position in the book to another would be so

difficult and thankless as never to occur'. This is not to challenge the 'floating sections', merely the manner of their floating. Correction Correction of the text was a necessary part of good book-production. The corrector need not be the scribe. Most Welsh manuscripts show correction

by the scribe, ni the same ink as the text, probably made as he went along. Correction ni different ink, or by another hand, implying as it does

apart, Welsh manuscripts of the post-Norman tradition have little to boast

of in the way of decoration. Most commonly it consists merely of line-

filling by the scribe, a simple pattern filling the remainder of the line at the

end of paragraphs. The ascenders of letters in the top line become a decorative feature in some hands, with flourishes and drawings. So do catchwords and run-ons at the foot of the page. Much the most striking drawings in the early Welsh lawbooks are the

well-known pictures of court officials and the things of legal value in NLW,

Peniarth 82 (Lat. A,) crude, bold and, what si rare ni medieval art, almost

without known antecedents. Cotton Caligula A.ii (C) has the remains of evangelist symbols in its margins (a binder has cut them away ni part). From the next century we have crucifixions in Oxford, Bodleian Library,

correction as a separate process after the scribe had finished copying, suggests an organized scriptorium rather than the single scribe working on his own. The rarity of such correction in Welsh manuscripts si not very surprising. Llanstephan 1 (by the scribe of Cotton Caligula A.ili) is so far as I have noticed alone among Welsh manuscripts in having the corrector's correctus written at the end of quires.

Cambridge, Trinity College 0.7.1 (Tr) and NLW, Peniarth 36B (N) goes

Decoration

manuscripts they are both ni fact the work of the Trinity scribe, Gwilym

In all but the most modest manuscripts the scribe would leave spaces for coloured initials and rubrics (headings, perhaps incipits and explicits) and, if there were to be any, for illustrations or diagrams. Inconspicuously in the margins or in the spaces themselves the scribe would write ni small with a fine nib or in pencil what the initials and text of rubrics were to be, as

Binding

Rawlinson C 821 (Lat. D) and NLW 20143 (Y). From the fifteenth century,

there are drawings of the court in session in Llanstephan 116 and BL, Add. 22356 (S). All these drawings are likely ot be the work of the scribes. Even humble line-filling can sometimes help us. The scroll pattern in

towards showing that despite some differences ni the writing of the two

guidance for the rubricator. The quires, after correction, could then pass to the rubricator and illuminator.

Illumination, far more than palaeography, demands an expertise of its own. Being so much more complex an art than writing, with so many more factors at work, illumination often allows the expert to make more accur-

ate attributions of date and place than does palaeography. But, having said that, we must turn to what the Welsh manuscripts show in fact. 61 And first, the initials. The manuscript in which the coloured initials are

done by an expert hand is the exception, even though the scribe may have left guide-letters. More often than not the initials and the rubrics appear to

be the work of the scribe himself; professional-looking initials may be 61 No mention of illumination can now omit reference to .J J. G . Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work (New Haven/London, 1992).] 32

Wasta.

Our quires were not a codex until they had been bound. The binding might

be done many years after the completion of the other stages of the work. Sometimes ti is possible to show that this was so. This might often be the

case where the book was a composite one, that si ot say, an assembly of several texts on discrete quires brought together either arbitrarily, simply

to make up a book of convenient size, or else ot bring together a number of short works with a common subject. NLW, Peniarth 356 si a good example

of the latter. In it are brought together sixteen booklets, each consisting of one or two quires, containing a wide selection of Latin grammatical texts

current ni the second half of the fifteenth century. Many were written, ni his youth, by Thomas Pennant, probably he who was abbot of Basingwerk 1481-1522, and doubtless ti was Thomas Pennant who brought them together. Our only composite lawbooks are, I think, those composite yb later accident.

" [These are al reproduced ni Huws, Peniarth 28]. 33

The Medieval Codex

Any binding, the more so an original one, can offer precious evidence:

by the method of construction, by decoration, fittings, labels, paste-

downs.18 In medieval binding the quires were sewn, through the trough created by folding them, onto two or more thongs. The loose ends of the thongs were attached, through holes, to wooden boards. The boards and

back were covered by a skin. Not many medieval bindings from Wales

survive. There are a few in Oxford and London and elsewhere. The best the

National Library of Wales can offer are two lawbooks, NLW, Peniarth 37

(U) and NLW 20143 (Y), both re-covered but with apparently original sewing and, underneath the modern covers, 'cushion bevel' boards,

characteristic of the fourteenth century.

Later bindings often have a story to tell, but that really belongs to the history of the book rather than of its making. *

*

⽔

Binding can, somewhat arbitrarily, be regarded as the end of the making of

the book. What happens o t ti thereafter we can call its history. It may

indeed have a history before being bound and, equally, important text may be added after it has been bound.

There is no need to emphasize how the history of a medieval book may

bear on the significance of its contents. To know where a book was, who owned it, who saw it, may suggest where it originated, what might have been copied from it, collated with it, influenced by it. All I shall do here is mention the chief sorts of evidence that enable us to give a book a history.

Most medieval books, though not perhaps most medieval books in

Welsh, were ni institutional libraries, the libraries of religious houses and

colleges. Many of these wil bear xe libris inscriptions, naming the founda-

tion, pressmarks (showing the book's place in the library) or perhaps other features by which the library can be recognized.! Much of this evidence, on the covers and flyleaves, si lost when a book si re-bound. No doubt most of the medieval Welsh lawbooks were written for lawyers. Welsh law maintained a tenuous life until the end of the Middle Ages and interest in it probably remained primarily practical rather than academic. The books

The Medieval Codex Gratian's Decretum, evidence of a philosophical interest in the nature of law. In the fifteenth century an antiquarian interest begins to show; Peniarth 32 (D), written c. 1404, is probably the earliest evidence of this.20 The only lawbook indubitably from a known medieval library comes, strangely enough, from an English one. Peniarth 28 (Lat. A) has the pressmark of St Augustine's abbey, Canterbury. It probably went to Canterbury for political reasons.?' People wrote their names or other people's names in books, with or without explicit statements of ownership. It hardly needs saying that such

names will be of immediate value where the persons are identifiable, and of potential value always. The writing will provide at least a rough date. Of much less obvious value than personal names are the marks made ni books by readers, so much less obvious that they are commonly ignored.

Some readers at all dates have been markers of books. At the simplest, the

reader may write nota or nota bene ni the margin, or draw a pointing finger or make some other mark. More elaborately, he may note keywords in the margin or abstract statements from the text. This much is still passive

annotation, echoes. The marking becomes more than an echo when the reader adds comment or makes corrections or inserts new matter. Occas-

ionally the hand of the marker may be recognized. But even where this is not the case the marks and notes by different hands in a manuscript are

worth disentangling. Later eyes may see significance in them which we do not. The marks even of a passive annotator may reveal a definite or even an unexpected interest. A series of marks in Peniarth 28 (Lat. A) shows interest in the law relating to marriage and inheritance. They come to life

when we realize that this book was at Canterbury and that the marks may be associated with Archbishop John Pecham.22

There remains to mention, though not ot expand upon, one other type of evidence that contributes ot the history of a manuscript: the random

and extraneous additions ni blank spaces and margins, often of great

intrinsic interest, such as the near-contemporary copy of Dafydd Benfras's elegy ot Llywelyn ap lorwerth added on blank spaces of Peniarth 29 (A).

were more likely to be ni the hands of a dosbarthwr (a Welsh legal official)

than in a library. One book probably in a library was Cotton Caligula Aili

(C): at the end, a fourteenth-century hand has added part of the opening of 81 Graham Pollard, 'Describing medieval bookbindings', ni Medieval Learning and (Oxford, 1976), pp. 50-65, si hte best starting-point. 91 MLGB, pp. Xv-xxil, gives a summary of hte types of evidence.

Literature: Essays Presented ot R. W . Hunt, ed. .J .J G . Alexander and M. T. Gibson

points but also ot references to Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, Dyfnwal and Iorwerth ap Madog. 21 See Chapter 10.

35

43

02 First, ew have the novel association ni one book of aw l texts, Llyft lonwerth and

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

3

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

been an eruption of producing books in Welsh and recording literature. If

the title which I chose has any merit, ti si ni drawing attention o t that

eruption - but without going so far as to offer an explanation.

To return to the question of pre-1250 books ni Welsh: were there ever

any? The answer si simple: yes. Gerald of Wales refers ot pedigree books ni Welsh which were kept by the bards, books which he calls 'ancient.! There may have been books n i Welsh even as early as the ninth century, if we can

contemplate that the leap had been made from making additions ni margins to devoting a book to texts ni Welsh. But on other grounds we can speculate on this matter with greater confidence.

There are traces of

Old Welsh orthography ni some of our early Welsh texts, and evidence

A m e b o r f o it o t d e p a r t i o n m a n y r o e e l a n p a d i n a en o b aware of the almost mythical figure of Sir John Williams looming on the

horizon. fI I felt that I knew him better (and were not newly retired) I might perhaps have given this memorial lecture another title: 'From the Black o t the Red'. Taking the Black Book of Carmarthen as 'the first

Welsh book' (whatever may eb the truth of the case), and taking the Red

Book of Hergest as a high point ni the making of Welsh manuscript books, that title would have conveyed just as well as the prosaic title which I did choose the scope of what follows. I shall discuss the earliest Welsh verna-

cular books which we have, including the Black and the Red (two books whose names go back to the sixteenth century if not earlier), the Book of Aneirin and the Book of Taliesin, and others of the familiar names,

including the Hendregadredd Manuscript (manuscript', not "book', notice, because by the twentieth century, when ti was given its name,

"book' had ni common speech come ot denote something printed). nI all, I

of errors of copying which can only be explained by postulating misinterpretation of Insular script, pointing in both cases to a written tradition that goes back to the twelfth century if not earlier, when Insular

script still prevailed, and ni texts which are too long to have been mere

marginalia. The exemplars must have been books in Welsh. It is in poetry,

the literature which was most likely to have been obscure to the scribe, that

the traces of old orthography and the influence of archaic script are most apparent. Setting aside the question of when the earliest material ni the Book of Aneirin and the Book of Taliesin - poetry which si commonly

attributed ot the late sixth century - may first have been written down, ti si quite clear that by the thirteenth century ti was old enough to be partly incomprehensible. I take it that in the Book of Aneirin and in the

collection of poetry copied ni hte Book of Taliesin we see the work of medieval antiquaries, and that ni these books there si an element of rescue

work. n I the Welsh manuscript tradition from beginning to end (the end

was not to come before the nineteenth century) there are two streams. On the one hand, the recording of new work - the translation of a saint's life from Latin, for instance, or an up-to-date version of the law of Hywel -

shall consider some eighty books, or fragments of books. The enormous generosity of Sir John Williams, and his powers of persuasion, are responsible for the presence today in the National Library of more than half of these books, in the Peniarth and Llanstephan collections.

and on the other, the rescue work, copying from older manuscripts, or

What about the dates 1250 and 1400? Another title might have been

in the early centuries in the Celtic countries, and one which was adopted by

'Books ni Welsh before 1400'. We know that Welsh was a written language by the eighth century; we know that Welsh poetry was written down, at least ni the margins of books, by the tenth century. Are there no vernacular

the English. We know that ni Brittany it was displaced by the new Caroline (or Carolingian) minuscule during the ninth century; and that ni England

Welsh books earlier than 1250? None of the surviving Welsh books, so far

as I can see, can be dated with confidence earlier than 1250, though one or

two may have been written shortly before that date. The astonishing fact is this: that by about 1350 some sixty of the surviving vernacular Welsh

books had been written; and by about 1400 almost everything which we treasure of early Welsh literature had been recorded in books. There had

63

from oral tradition (oddi ar dafod leferydd). I referred just now to Insular script. This si the script which was current

ti yielded ot the Caroline as the medium for Latin ni the tenth century,

though it retained its role as the medium for the vernacular until

about 1200. nI Ireland, Insular script held its own, even into the age of print. nI Wales, os scant si the evidence that we cannot be sure whether the

Caroline minuscule, and the modes of book-production associated with it,

' Descriptio Cambriae, lib. ,i cap3.. 37

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

established itself before the end of the eleventh century, though an example of it occurs in one column of a Welsh book as early as the beginning of the

ones whose surviving books can still be counted in hundreds. In the refuge

tenth century; two books whose production can be placed firmly at Llanbadarn Fawr at the end of the eleventh century still belong in all respects to the Insular tradition.? The bridging from the one tradition to the other can be seen in a number of twelfth-century books. In these, even where the new continental script has been adopted, there is adherence to Insular habits in the arrangement of membranes, in abbreviation and in decoration. But for those clasau which at the beginning of the thirteenth century remained beyond the reach of the flood of Norman influence, where native tradition might still have flourished - Clynnog Fawr or Llandinam, for instance - we lack any evidence about book-production. In

these, I find it hard to believe that the Insular tradition did not survive. There si room to speculate that the force of conservatism may have applied more to writing in the vernacular than in Latin. Might Insular script for a while have been used for Welsh and Caroline for Latin, as happened with

regard to English and Latin? Suggestively, ni Liber Landavensis, written at

Llandaf when that church had become thoroughly Norman in spirit, both the main scribes when quoting Welsh make use of forms belonging to Insular script. My suggestion, therefore, is that in parts of Wales Insular script may still have been used for writing the vernacular in the early thirteenth century.

of these large libraries a book which had outlived its original use and

interest could sleep for centuries (as did, for instance, NLW, Peniarth 28, the Law of Hywel Dda, at Canterbury). This si how many Old English

books, regarded dismissively by medieval cataloguers, were able to survive

ni obscurity until their discovery by eager sixteenth-century antiquaries.' In Wales, one question must be how many books in Welsh there were by

1536 to eb rescued from the few ecclesiastical libraries. Of the important medieval Welsh manuscripts the only one which we know to have been ni an institutional library at the end of the Middle Ages si the Black Book of

Carmarthen (NLW, Peniarth 1), which was ni the Augustinian priory at

Carmarthen. There are grounds for thinking that most of the others were

in the hands of laymen. It is probable that the great majority of the eighty Welsh books we are concerned with were also in the hands of private

persons (one can hardly yet speak of 'private libraries'). Few at that time would have kept a book that was not easily legible. Could one reason for

the non-survival of pre-1250 Welsh vernacular books be that they were largely in Insular script, a script that would have been illegible to all but such few as might be led by antiquarian zeal to master it? Such an owner

would have been rare ni the late Middle Ages, the more os a succession of

such owners.

I mentioned Ireland. A strange fact about the vernacular literatures of

the Celtic countries is the diversity ni the history of their being written down. In Brittany, and in Cornwall, it does not appear that the written language became a medium for vernacular literature until the fifteenth

in Latin. The evidence reflects badly on Welsh custodianship. Every pre1100 Welsh book, and every fragment of one, has been cared for since

century, however vigorous the oral tradition may have been; no helpful comparison with Wales can be made. In Ireland, on the other hand, there

England, as in Wales, the dissolution of the monasteries followed by the

seventh century; there si manuscript evidence by the ninth century, and about 1100 we meet the earliest survivor of the great compilations of Irish

before 1600, fi not since the end of the Middle Ages, outside Wales.^ In

Protestant Reformation led to the loss of most of the contents of the

ecclesiastical libraries. But there was a difference. In England, a few

ecclesiastical libraries were preserved relatively intact, some of them large 2Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 153 (Martianus Capella), fol. 17', contains the

column of Caroline script: see Lindsay, EWS, plate X I and pp. 19-21; T. A . M . Bishop, 'The Corpus Martianus Capella', TCBS, 4 (1964 8), 257-75 (262-6); D. N. Dumville, Liturgy and Ecclesiastical History of Late Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 1992), pp.116-17. Dublin, Trinity College 50 (the Ricemarch Psalter) and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 199 (Augustine, De Trinitate) are the two Llanbadarn books.

3 NLW 17110 (Liber Landavensis); BL, Cotton Faustina C.i, fols 66-93 (Cicero,

Somnium Scipionis with Macrobius' commentary); NLW, Peniarth 540 (Beda, D e natura

is evidence to suggest that Irish literature was being written as early as the

literature (a library ni a single volume), hte Lebor na hUidre, which si

followed by others ni the twelfth century, books which ni size and scope $On the medieval location, ni twenty-three libraries, of surviving books which

contain Old English (with evidence from medieval catalogues for eighteen libraries), see N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), pp. xlii-xlviii; on the evidence that they were considered to be practically without value

ni the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries', because of changes ni language and script,

es .pThxleix.largest

Welsh library for which we have evidence is that of Margam abbey. About the beginning of the fourteenth century, 242 titles were listed in it (the number of

volumes would no doubt have been lower), these constituting only part of the holdings:

are briefly discussed in D. Simon Evans, Llên a Llafar yn yr Hen Gyfnod (Cardiff, 1982),

broadly speaking, works relating to theology, see Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum at . Mynors, R . H. Rouse and M. .A Rouse (London, 1991), auctorum veterum, ed. R. A. B pp. 289-91. So far as is known, not one of these books survives.

38

39

4Lindsay, EWS, offers the only general survey of these books and fragments. They

pp. 6-8.

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400 The

the eighty are not described in his Report: three now in the National

Gaelic parts of Scotland were no more than a poor region of the Irish literary domain until the end of the Middle Ages; there are no books in Gaelic before the fourteenth century. And the manuscript tradition of the Isle of Man is poor and late. Looking eastwards, in England there had from the ninth century been a remarkable unbroken tradition of recording

Library, NLW 6680, 7006 and 20143; two ni the Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B 467 and C 821; British Library, Add. 14912; Cambridge,

have no Welsh counterparts other than the Red Book of Hergest.

vernacular literature in books. We have to ask whether Wales may not

have been as forward as Ireland, or England. There is no difficulty in accepting that Welsh vernacular literature may have been found in books

(not merely in margins) by 1100, but it is hard to accept that the range of written literature could have compared with that which was current in

Irish. We have to bear in mind how very much richer was the early bookproduction in Ireland, and how much richer a country ti was. Looking again at Ireland, a remarkable contrast emerges ni the hundred years which are here proposed as the crucial period for the recording of early Welsh literature, 1250 to 1350: these years were a notably barren period in the recording of Irish literature.

After the Anglo-Norman

conquest of Ireland, the recording of vernacular literature seems to have gone under a cloud, only to revive in the second half of the fourteenth century.

tI si time o t start talking about the Welsh books. I propose eighty books as products of the period 1250-1400, allowing that these dates are

approximate ones. Fewer than a fifth of them are complete (such is the fate of books that have spent centuries outside regulated libraries). Some are mere fragments, such as the two leaves in Peniarth 6 which represent the

earliest text of the Pedair Cainc, or the single quire ni Peniarth 3 which contains the earliest collection of poems by Cynddelw. It is possible that some of these fragments derive from single composite books, books which cannot now be recognized as entities: if so, our figure of eighty si diminished. On the other hand, some of the composite books which I treat as entities may be of post-medieval creation; fi so, our figure increases. This is no more

than to emphasize that eighty si an approximate figure. The eighty are listed

Trinity College,

O.7.1;

the Plas Bodorgan manuscript of Welsh law;

Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, 5; and Philadelphia, Library

Company of Philadelphia, 8680.8

Little needs to be said here about the contents of the eighty books. Their

contents may be summarized as follows: books of the law of Hywel Dda,

28 (this includes 4with Latin text);° poetry, 9; prose (other than law), 48,

made up of Brut y Brenhinedd, 15, Brut y Tywysogyon, 5, religious texts, 18, narrative, including romance, 14; medicine, ;4 grammar,

2.(The total is

more than eighty because some books contain a variety of texts.) The eighty include most of the well-known names among Welsh manuscripts: the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Black Book of Chirk, the Red Book of Hergest, the Red Book of Talgarth, the White Book of Rhydderch, the Books of Aneirin and Taliesin, and the Hendregadredd Manuscript. The most interesting of these books on many accounts are those which show an editor at work creating a new compilation; this is especially the case with the collections of poetry. Each of these stands on its own, unrelated to any

other. Apart from the work of the Gogynfeirdd, where there si some overlap between the collections, almost every early Welsh poem derives from a

single medieval source. No more needs to be said to show how frail the

It could be said that pre-1400 Welsh literature, such as we know of it, would not be much the poorer, excepting one category, were we entirely dependent on books written before 1400. By 1400, the earliest poetry was &Descriptions of the ten, very variable ni degree of detail, can be found as follows:

NLW 6680, Handlist, s.n., LIH, pp. viii-xill, and Chapter 12; NLW 7006, Handlist, s.n., and Jones, BS, pp. xviii-xx; NLW 20143, National Library of Wales, Annual Report

1968-69, p. 36, and in Welsh King and his Court, ed. .T M . Charles-Edwards, Morfydd .E Owen and Paul Russell (Cardiff, forthcoming); Rawl. B 467, Bodleian 'Quarto'

Catalogue, sn.;. Rawl. C 821, Bodleian 'Quarto' Catalogue, s.n., and Emanuel, LTWL,

in Chapter 4; the table in that chapter evades many awkward questions. Where are the eighty books to be found today? Some two-thirds of them

pp. 294 6; Add. 14912, Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum, . Owen, *Meddygon Myddfai: a preliminary survey of some s.n., and Morfydd E

are ni the National Library of Wales, a sixth ni the British Library and the

. James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge M . R (Cambridge, 1900-2), s.n., and .J .E Powell, The Trinity College manuscript of Hywel

rest scattered in various other libraries. Our knowledge of them is heavily indebted to the work of Gwenogryn Evans, almost a century ago: his facsimile volumes, his diplomatic editions and, above all, his descriptions

ni Report on Manuscripts ni hte Welsh Language (1898-1910).? Only ten of While there are ni print later studies of many of the eighty manuscripts,

Gwenogvryn Evans's work remains indispensible.

40

medieval medical writings ni Welsh', SC, 10/11 (1975-6), 210-33 (222-3); Trinity 0.7.1,

Jenkni and Moryd Owen ari, 19n, p. 131,35, Bosotn, Men, d. owen,

*Lawysgrif gyfreithiol goll', BBCS, 2 (1966-8), 338 43; Philadelphia, B. F. Roberts, 'Un o lawysgrifau Hopcyn ap Tomas o Ynys Dawe', BBCS, 2 (1966-8), 223-8. 9 I t mi cht bear eue dt hat t he Lat in t exts of Ar males Car bri aeb ear as cl o se a rel a tion to Brut y Tywysogyon as do the Latin texts to the Welsh texts of the law, and ought to be included in the count. But I have not included them; the oldest text of the Annales Cambriae, for one, si of English origin.

41

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

safely recorded ni manuscript; so too was the poetry of the Poets of the Princes and later Gogynfeirdd, as were the classics of Welsh narrative, the

bulk of the translations from Latin and French, the best of the religious prose, the main texts of the law of Hywel, of medicine and bardic

grammar. The one glaring absence is the poetry of the fourteenth-century cywyddwyr. This absence is worth a moment's attention. In the Hendregadredd Manuscript awdlau and englynion are kept apart; englynion did not have the status of the awdl. Not until the autograph manuscripts of Lewys Glyn Cothi do we find cywyddau being written with the same care as that shown in the collections of the work of the Gogynfeirdd. Where the work of the cywyddwyr occurs in books before the middle of the fifteenth

century, ti occurs as additions in blank space or in the margins. I suspect that this is not accident; that it is not a case of lost books. The cywydd did not yet have the status that was associated with the metres of the Gogynfeirdd. And besides, the poetry of the cywyddwyr was an oral tradition, and

when an oral tradition si flourishing the need to commit it to writing is not

obvious. There may perhaps have been another factor: bards and datgeiniaid (declaimers), dependent as their livelihood was on performance, may have been reluctant to see their stock in trade being put on record. What did Welsh books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries look

like? They are all of parchment, the parchment usually thick and yellowish,

not at all of a quality which would have been acceptable in Paris or Oxford. Although the manufacture of paper had reached Spain (through the Moors) by the twelfth century and books made of paper were known in France by the thirteenth century and in England by the fourteenth, there is

no book on paper ni Welsh before about 1450.

a vehadestybolsInW al

Accepting that many medieval books have had their leaves cropped by

later binders, we can nevertheless be certain that the early books in Welsh

were small books. About 80 per cent of our eighty books are less than 20 cm. high, about the size of a small octavo volume, while only one, the Red Book of Hergest, is over 25 cm. high. Many of the larger ones are two-columned, as are some (among the lawbooks) of the smaller ones. So many of the

books have lost quires, often at the beginning or end, that ti si usually hard to know how many leaves they originally contained. But one interesting tendency si apparent: h te books, or what remains of them, that belong to

the first half of our period contain on average about sixty leaves; those of the second half contain about twice as many. Although these figures may not be of great intrinsic value, they do have comparative value. There was an unmistakable trend towards thicker and more comprehensive books,

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400 Our Welsh books are generally made of quires of eight leaves, though

quires of ten and twelve are not uncommon, nor are books of irregular

quiring. The Book of Aneirin is an exception, made of quires of four. The methods of making up quires, of pricking for ruling and of the ruling itself are all consistent with the common contemporary practices of western Europe.

Late ni the day, seldom before the twentieth century, collectors and librarians came to realize that the whole structure of books is of interest, not only their texts. Of our eighty books, only two are in their original

bindings, both standing on the threshold of the fifteenth century: Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B 467 and Oxford, Jesus College 20. Another two appear to retain their original binding structure (boards and sewing)

beneath new covering.! It is distressing to have to note that an original binding of the thirteenth century, on Peniarth 28, was destroyed, at the

National Library of Wales, as recently as 1940." Although the surviving

examples are few, ti can safely be asserted that almost all of our books would first have been b o u n d between o ak b o a r d s a n d covered in whit-

tawed skin (Iledr gwyn n i Welsh), or possibly whittawed skin stained red,

giving rise to a 'Red Book.! That was the common type of binding of

the time. Likely exceptions would have been small, thin books; they would

very likely have been stitched between limp covers of parchment. The

destruction of an original binding means the loss of important evidence

about the history of the book; the loss may be reduced fi the original flyleaves are preserved.

By the time of the making of our earliest vernacular Welsh books,

continental methods and fashions of book-production were prevalent. An educated visitor from Paris would have seen nothing out of the ordinary ni thirteenth-century Welsh books. They would have appeared to him provincial ni their craftsmanship and old-fashioned ni the appearance of their pages, but not ni these respects differing from vernacular books ni other

countries. The script of all our thirteenth-century books si textura ("text hand', "book hand), the standard contemporary high-status script of

western Europe, varying only ni grade and quality of execution. The highest grade si ot be seen ni that extraordinary book, the Black Book of Carmarthen. At hte beginning of the book the script si a large textura such as one would expect at this date for the scriptural text ni a glossed book of

the Bible or for the canon of the mass ni a missal, but here used for a 01 NLW, Peniarth 73 and NLW 20143. " See below, p. 169.

one which suggests a growing confidence in this period among the makers of books, and at the same time implies a lack of confidence and experience (compared for instance with Ireland) at the beginning of our period.

Lesetr, ted in t dire n o atnd nis w ehdna ousy bki oers

42

43

in our period.

4 ร สvoar iev eenvroourto aieonnvelilae ec:lig

r eti neomvimet oiruvenDed aut v at Pi oncbv e

V t emot onr oc o

v v pv o r t a f m o n t b s 9 a• @c t en o e om ml ic ev n y za o zh o n fa c o ar om y o t n o. v m vmmo ol ot v co a oDu o D r o l o r .n o

h w c af

n e bn ec ard ic o.

ท บ ใชแขา

นv oในสอ ดS 0f 1 โ นi n.tv80 us y um un goicu ee o nu

an ov I c a nan H -2 2 u mne s n ov n he r. e m / e v า ต น ย า อ n O e

→ver i co pofnat d o g i t a g e a r ก โ า บ b e r ficovoy2v n a v o g n i t r e d r d n e g t v i m 0 g di ac ua or e e n o g c a l e n o n e f e n e t en m guad us 2v dr o. mmova r

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u en o

nb

02170const u 9 n e g m e r t t n o c า ท อ จ น โ ด - 1 m v ar ea t omoeb: c พว กเ อ : อ ากมองอ ยบท ล ตลบาราจะ 1 2 @mmi e r b u

by

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แ ลอง ร< 9aTP

Plate 5 Oxford, Jesus College 119 (the Book of the Anchorite), fol. % 4: showing colophon dated 1346 at the foot of the page

a

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an ndi ts manch A n lus

v g o d e sv a ngl op o e u " a o u a b u n cu t t er

c f o r t h w a la wor g 0 6

c c nt a Ep o zt h re

a r belif aut a o d conat Gathev n benesLotil eo t r h cbe f 0n 6n vrol dhou b e ao np e d นส ) เ ง ง m a En0 ovovg oi n a n / mar obp) rolond genn uf vutheir vu ban not deo n

ไ รง นา c on ap on d a v e b eld cu tp m o ge d e b a a g c l e bt h v a c oom oa l- a c o u p e

ห นอน งแบบ v n o a c h u teu e.c oc a g ef o p

d uturelut o ni e s ob ont c a b udhbollo di Ar y K c he avg a te nt el n r amG e ur gi a 0 0p l i e n oo

uar epat e. o c p d s v i t n o f n v e c i at o n n D 4 .ก ร ดาเพอใด P all pc v2 0 o nan a-o onff t G i firon3 1! กบบ l pag • 010 0 1 001n um v

• a t os

p ot olon o 9 c ha r t v ea t ur c c ur gp ff e nelt r u d i dl a r a d

t s a v ro n g o g y umt oa r u r

w i t or r o h v u n a l l at a c o r t e l e o n

da

C r al vo t dreaoramtooluost idooprda fheypdai goan ก า ร @ a on

h on a ll an b e l a d hl eb c E g u n i h ou a ti t

Plate 6 NLW, Peniarth 9, p. 14: dated 1336

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400 collection of poetry in Welsh. It is extraordinary that someone should have chosen to give such status to a collection of vernacular poetry, much of it not even religious. (As he proceeded with his book the scribe lowered the grade of the script, a fact which suggests its experimental nature, see below pp. 70-1.) With regard to its script, the Black Book has no peer, but with regard to professional consistency of script from page to page, it should be

said that many of the early Welsh books surpass it. Altogether lower in grade than textura were the cursive scripts which developed for business purposes - for documents, court records and accounts. The commonly used form of cursive ("documentary hand' or

'court hand') si now, ni the British context, known as anglicana.! This

documentary script penetrated into Wales and its influence on textura can be seen ni some books of the thirteenth century, and more so ni those of the fourteenth. Lacking the status of textura, ti had to wait long before being accepted in Wales as a literary hand. In England it had already by 1300 been adopted as a literary hand for a few manuscripts in French and English; a notable English example si BL, Harley 2253, containing the 'Harley Lyrics', compiled at Ludlow in the 1330s. But the only use of anglicana before 1400 for a Welsh vernacular book si ni NLW, Peniarth 164, a lawbook, and ni additions made ni a number of others. The addi-

tions n i the Hendregadredd Manuscript which constitute its third stratum

offer the best early examples of a literary use of anglicana. We might here look at the later history of anglicana in Wales. During the fifteenth century ti came into widespread use in literary manuscripts. Slowly, during the same period, ti was, in England, displaced as an every-

day hand by a new script from the continent, now called 'secretary'.

Though displaced ni England, anglicana held its footing ni some circles ni Wales almost until the end of the sixteenth century. It si, for instance, the

hand of Gruffudd Hiraethog, in whose time ti survived ni England only ni

a petrified form used yb certain alw courts. The name anglicana by this

date becomes oddly inappropriate.

nI relation ot our eighty books, the discussion up ot this point may have

books are a few more or less datable ones. Cambridge,

Trinity College

0.7.1, a book written by Gwilym Wasta (Was Da) of Y Drenewydd (Newton), has to be dated later than 1298 (the date of the founding of the borough near Dinefwr); Gwilym si listed as a burgess there ni 1302/3.14 NLW, Peniarth 20, a book from Valle Crucis abbey containing the earliest texts both of Brut y Tywysogyon and of any bardic grammar, closes its text of the Brut with three annals each in different ink: a fairly clear indication

of contemporary entries. I take the main texts of this book to have been written about 1330. I also accept the strength of the evidence that points to

1404 as the date at which at least part of NLW, Peniarth 32 was written (by one of the scribes of the Red Book of Hergest). And for the Red Book itself we have 1382 as a terminus post quem. But all told, the reference points are few.

Following Gwenogvryn Evans, ti was for long customary to date three of our books to the late twelfth century: the Black Book of Carmarthen, NLW, Peniarth 29 (the Black Book of Chirk) and Peniarth 28. All three have now been placed in the middle of the thirteenth century.

The most we

can say is that they all belong to the first generation of books in Welsh. Is

The dates of other manuscripts dated by Gwenogvryn Evans earlier than the middle of the thirteenth century also need to be brought forward. What then do we have o t guide us with regard ot dating? Firstly, there si

one obvious criterion. Since textura was an international script, com-

parison with dated examples from neighbouring countries ought to provide some guidance. To a large degree, this is true. Comparison has

been much facilitated ni recent years by the appearance of many volumes

ni the series of catalogues of Dated and datable manuscripts.16 But in comparing a book from Wales with one from, say, England or France,

questions arise. Wales was a conservative country, yb this time receiving fashions mostly from England, and England ni turn receiving them from France. How long should we allow for such transmission of fashion?

41 Morfydd .E Owen and Dafydd Jenkins, G ' wilym Was Da,' NLWJ, 12 (1979-80),

suggested that their dating could be taken for granted. Are there grounds for such confidence? The stark truth si that there are only two dated books

within our period. They are NLW, Peniarth 9, with a colophon dated 1336,

and Oxford, Jesus College 119 (the Book of the Anchorite) with a

01behe mots relevant sereis ear .CSamaarn and .R Marciha,l Caatolgue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, ed lieu ou de copiste (Paris,

1959-); G . .I Lieftinck, Manuscrits datés conserrés dans les Pays-Bas (Amsterdam,

. Wittek, Manuscrits datés conservés en Belgique (Brussels, 1964); .F Masai and M 1968); and the volumes os far published for English libraries, Watson, Dated MSS BL, . R . Robinson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Watson, Dated MSS Oxford, and P

. B . Parkes, English Cursive Book Hands 1250-1500 (Oxford, 1969) provided a 31M

new analysis and established the name anglicana.

46

ab,a S e Litante dna mbdrige, 1988.) Ther ear corespondnig seeris Foruseman, ACm 47

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

Perhaps a generation or two. Yet this would not be relevant ni the case of a

young Welsh university student returning home from Paris.

Strangely, it is a manuscript about whose date there used to be consider-

able uncertainty that, as I see it, offers the best evidence about Welsh palaeography in our period: the Hendregadredd Manuscript.

The main

hand of this book, writing some time after 1282, gathered together n i a systematic way the poetry of the Poets of the Princes. He was followed, in a second stratum, by nineteen other hands, each making additions in conformity with the original pattern of the book.

This stratum in turn was

succeeded by a third stratum, eighteen other hands, much less formal, adding poetry which has no connection whatsoever with the original plan, much of it poetry addressed to or concerning leuan Llwyd ab leuan ap Gruffudd Liwyd, a man from the Aeron valley who flourished 1332-43.17 The nineteen hands of the second stratum are contained between 1282 and

about the beginning of the second quarter of the fourteenth century. We have here examples of the hands of nineteen near-contemporaries. Taken together with our other criteria they offer some solid ground ni the middle of our period. I have elsewhere suggested a number of palaeographical features which can furnish some help in trying to date the script of Welsh

vernacular books ni the period 1250-1350.18 In hte table ni Chapter 4a( revised version of the table which was pub-

lished as an appendix to this lecture in 1993) our eighty books are grouped within half-century brackets. In general, palaeographical judgement (upon

which most of the dating is based) cannot do better than this. The table by its nature is a rough affair. Supposing, however, that its groupings are close to being correct, one feature which stands out is the productivity of

Hand in hand with the growth of universities in the thirteenth century

came commerce ni books and professional production. This brought a new

uniformity to the appearance of the written page. A pattern was established which lasted into the age of the printed book ni the fifteenth century. One feature of this pattern was the alternation of red and blue initials for chapters or divisions, the initials decorated with pen-work of contrasting colour, usually blue for red initials and red for blue. In our books in Welsh we can see recognition of the norm, but seldom is it fulfilled. Few manuscripts lack coloured initials, but in two-thirds of them the initials are only in red, generally done by the scribe himself. Blues could be expensive colours. There is interesting variation in those books which manage to

provide alternation of colours. In the thirteenth century green is more

common than blue.' Green could be made cheaply. The use of green can also be looked on as a mark of Welsh conservatism: alternate red and

green was common throughout western Europe in the twelfth century.

There are examples of the use of green in Welsh books even as late as the fourteenth century.20 Another solution by the Welsh to the problem of the blue was to use a blue-green colour, no doubt derived from copper salts. This colour occurs throughout our period as frequently as does blue (notable examples are the Book of Aneirin and the Book of Taliesin); one

might even regard this colour as aWelsh trait.21

Difficulty ni obtaining the material accounts for the scarcity of blue initials in Welsh books. Lack of opportunity to develop the skill accounts for the scarcity of books that contain good pen-work: only in some 10 per cent of the books does it accompany the coloured initials, and in many of

those ti si of poor execution. Among the efw that show skilled pen-work

the first half of the fourteenth century ni contrast to the barrenness of the second half. Could this be a consequence of the Black Death?

are the Hendregadredd Manuscript (NLW 6680B), in its first stratum, and NLW, Peniarth 46 and 47i (perhaps originally two parts of one book).

skill, decorating it another, probably exercised by a different hand. The circumstances of the making of the Welsh vernacular books are brought

the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi. His hand appears in three other books.

nI a large scriptorium of our period, writing a book would demand one

Peniarth 46 and 47 provide an interesting case. They were both written by

home to us by their decoration. Usually, it si possible to be fairly sure that

In two of them, NLW, Peniarth 5and NLW, Peniarth 18, he left spaces, ni the normal way, for large coloured initials; ni the former, the spaces were

required for fine decoration, such as gold leaf and lapis lazuli, were

Cotton Vespasian Exi and Peniarth 28. Only in Vespasian si blue also used, as well as

the decoration, seldom very skilled, si by the scribe himself. Materials

expensive, and the appropriate skills not ones that could be developed without a regular market for work. Such a market required a class of rich

bibliophiles sharing their pleasure ni de luxe books. A love of literature does not necessarily give rise to fine books.

71 See below, pp. 207-10.

81 Below, pp. 233-4.

48

91 Green si used ni Peniarth 1 (the Black Bock fo Carmarthen), Peniarth 4, BL,

20 Green si used in Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C 821, in the second stratum of

Hendregadredd (but blue more commonly), NLW, Peniarth 31, h te second part of BL,

Cotton Cleopatra C.v (with blue also) and NLW. Peniarth 33

12 This blue-green occurs in the Book of Aneirin (Cardiff. Central Library, 2.81). the Book of Taliesin (NLW, Peniarth 2), NLW, Peniarth 36A, NLW 3036 (Mostyn 117), BL, Harley 958, the first and third parts of BL, Cotton Cleopatra Bv., Peniarth 20, Cardiff, Central Library 1.363 (Havod 2), Peniarth 46, Peniarth 47, NLW 7006 and NLW, Peniarth 1 (a rather pale blue, not alternating with red). Philadelphia 8680 (to judge by afilm) has initials in two colours but I have not seen the original. 49

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

filled by another hand, in the latter they remained blank. In the third book, the Book of the Anchorite, ti looks as though ti was he himself who provided its plain red initials. This shows that the usual expectation of the Anchorite (one of the best Welsh scribes) was that a second hand, that of a specialist, would provide the decorative initials. One indicator of the status of a book was illumination, the use of gold, for initials and miniatures. The only two of our eighty books to be illuminated are BL, Cotton Cleopatra B.v, part ii, containing Welsh law, and the first part of NLW 7006 [sic 1992, a manuscript which I now place in the fifteenth century].

For many, a medieval manuscript brings to mind miniatures: medieval books with miniatures are those which are most commonly reproduced. Miniatures, illustrations, usually represent a step away from the plain

book in the direction of the de luxe book. The approach of makers of Welsh vernacular books was utilitarian, if craftsmanlike. The same could

be said of most contemporary makers of books ni the vernacular,

including English ones; illustrations would not be expected. Only one of our Welsh books contains a series of illustrations integrated with its text, NLW, Peniarth 28, with a series of drawings to accompany its text of the

law of Hywel.22 The likelihood is that this book was a special presentation

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

de oB Neiv, Pe of 7R

NLW, Peniarth 7 and NLW, Peniarth 21, and both Hywel Fychan, the

chief scribe of the Red Book of Hergest, and one of his collaborators.24 How much do we know about the scribes of our early books in Welsh? Setting aside the thirty-seven fourteenth-century hands which made addi-

tions to the Hendregadredd Manuscript, by my present reckoning eightythree hands were responsible for writing the primary texts of our eighty

books.25 Of these eighty-three, one, Hywel Fychan ap Hywel Goch of

Buellt, wrote seven books, wholly or in part; three scribes each wrote five (the Book of Taliesin scribe, the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi and the

scribe of Y' Llyfr Teg', Peniarth 32, one of Hywel Fychan's collabor-

ators);? three each wrote three books (Gwilym Wasta, the hand of NLW,

Peniarth 4 and the hand of NLW, Peniarth 35); and six contributed to two books. This leaves about seventy scribes who contributed only to a

single book. Might some statistician estimate the scale of our losses on the strength of these figures (and a few assumptions)? Of all these scribes, three

10 was, I think, its scribe. No questions about the early Welsh books are of greater interest than the triple one about their origin: by whom, for whom, where? The evidence

copy. Our only other three illustrated books are, as it happens, also lawbooks, BL, Cotton Caligula A.ili, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C 821 and NLW 20143. In all three, drawings contemporary with the text have

of colophons is, as we have seen, meagre. The indispensable guide to the

drawings are of religious and not legal subjects. In the first and third of them, there are symbols of the evangelists, and in the second and third,

are included, the Black Book of Carmarthen and NLW 7006, the Black

been added ni blank space or ni the margins. Strangely, ni each case the

. R . Ker's Medieval medieval locations of manuscripts ni Britain si N Libraries of Great Britain. In the second edition (1964), two of our books

Book of Basingwerk [now (2000) placed ni the fifteenth century], both with

crucifixions. I suspect that a tradition older than these three books lies behind this association of legal text and religious illustrations. Is it a carry-

question marks. In the 1987 Supplement, the Black Book of Carmarthen

over from lawbooks which were written in the clasau? An old tradition is

Crucis) and Peniarth 28, have been added.28 Only one of our eighty books

suggested by the evangelist symbols ni Caligula Aili with their similarity of

form to those of Insular Celtic gospel books.23

There are scribes who seem to be possessed of an urge to draw. By the

period ni question, ti was a not uncommon practice to decorate catch-

words and other words which h a d run on below the b o t t o m ruled line of

the page. Animals, fish, monsters or human faces may grow out of these isolated words. Some scribes tend to treat tall ascenders in the top line in

the same way. Scribes given to this exhuberance include the scribe of

has shed its question mark, while two other books, Peniarth 20 (from Valle

bears a library pressmark, Peniarth 28, which has on an old pastedown a 42See Plate 10 and, for examples by Hywel Fychan, NLWJ, 21 (1979-80), plate 8

(facing p. 250), and Thomas Jones, Ystorvaeu Seint Greal (Cardiff, 1992), frontispiece.

25 Needless to say, eighty-three si likely to prove avariable figure, most likely to

reduce. It conceals some hesitant conclusions [sic 1992 - the number has not been

26 On Hywel Fychan, see B. F. Roberts, Un c lawysgrifau Hopcyn ap Tomas o Ynys

Dawe' [and now Christine James, "Llwyr wybodau, lên a llyfrau": Hopcyn ap Tomas

a'r traddodiad llenyddol Cymraeg', in Cwm Tave, ed. Hywel Teifi Edwards (Llandysul, 1993), pp. 4 44]; on his books, see G . Charles-Edwards, "The scribes of the Red Book of

Hergest', NLWJ, 21 (1987-8), 246-50. Although his work is now to be found in seven

books, they represent five original books, one of them now divided into three parts.

22 The series si reproduced ni Huws, Peniarth 28. 32 For three examples, see Plates 25 and 26. 50

12On these three, see Marged Haycock, 'Llyfr Taliesin', NLWJ, 25 (1987-8), 357-86;

Chapter 13; G. Charles-Edwards, The scribes of the Red Book of Hergest.

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

pressmark of the abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury (an indistinct mark

splendour of Welsh literature. Much of the recording was no doubt done by lay brothers or clerks who had benefited from monastic training. There are a number of books which may tentatively be associated with

on the cover of Jesus 20 may possibly be the trace of a pressmark).

The largest category of our books si of lawbooks. Many of these are small books, often bearing the marks of use. Most of them were probably made for practising men of law. It might seem likely that they would have

been produced by lawyers and clerks, but there is no evidence that such was the case. On the other hand, we do know that lawbooks were produced by the scribes of other books. The scribe of the Book of Taliesin wrote two lawbooks, the scribe who copied literary and historical texts ni NLW, Peniarth 45 also wrote two, and at the end of our period both

Hywel Fychan and his collaborator, the scribe of Y' Llyfr Teg,' wrote

lawbooks.

A child's answer to the question 'Where were medieval manuscripts

written?' is: in monasteries. In the Welsh context, there has since the time of Gwenogvryn Evans been a tendency to try to link Welsh manuscripts to Cistercian monasteries. I offer no new approach. It si hard to discern ni late medieval Wales any centres other than the monasteries that might have had the resources and skills to produce books of good quality. Where

there were universities, book trade grew; but Wales had no university. And

towns, which ni many countries were forward ni producing books ni the

vernacular, were, in Wales, with their preponderance of English burgesses,

unlikely to have harboured many who would engage ni copying Welsh

literature; though we do have Gwilym Wasta, the burgess of Y Drenewydd (Newton), Dinefwr, copying his lawbooks soon after 1300.

The clasau, those tolerantly secular ecclesiastical establishments, were

the centres of learning and literature in Wales until ecclesiastical reform

and the arrival of new monastic orders in the twelfth century; these were

followed ni the thirteenth century by the arrival of the preaching orders.

One monastic order in particular, the Cistercian, established the houses which took the place of the clasau as the nodes of Welsh consciousness;

and one particular branch of that order, the abbey of Whitland and its daughter-houses and granddaughters: Strata Florida, Strata Marcella,

Aberconwy, Valle Crucis, Cymer and Cwm-hir. These houses became the burial places of Welsh princes and royal lines; ti was they which maintained a tradition of annal-writing (an activity which the Cistercian order commended); some of their abbots had by the middle of the fourteenth century had become patrons of the bards. Much of this constituted a serious deviation from the puritan ideals of the order. For a period, I suggest, between the slackening of the strict idealism of the thirteenth century and the degeneration which had come to afflict most of the monasteries by the fifteenth century, a small number of Cistercian houses

managed o t provide means for the preservation of a large part of the 52

Cistercian houses even though the evidence si too uncertain to allow their inclusion in Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: Peniarth 44, Llanstephan 1 and Cotton Caligula Aili, all by one scribe, are likely to have come from Valle Crucis; Cotton Cleopatra B.v, the first and third parts, by the same hands as Peniarth 20, is no doubt also from Valle Crucis; the Hendregadredd Manuscript is probably from Strata Florida; and the five books in which the

hand of the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi occurs probably have some association with Strata Florida. Texts of the Brutiau are conspicuous in these

books. Brut y Tywysogyon (the Chronicle of the Princes) was in origin a Strata Florida text and Brut y Brenhinedd, in most of its versions, seems to have been a Valle Crucis text.29 These texts also appear in copies by the Book

of Taliesin scribe, lending weight ot the suspicion that the five books by this

scribe may also have a Cistercian background.03

Every Irish book before the fourteenth century, according to F. .J

Byrne, is of monastic origin.' Excepting perhaps some of the lawbooks, this may well be true of Welsh books.

The fourteenth century then

witnessed two important developments: the gradual secularizing of the

monasteries and an expanding market for books produced by independent

scribes. The period 1250-1400 was one in which the friars, Dominican and Franciscan, came to have enormous influence throughout western Europe. Their contribution to learning and literature was great, but the physical production of books (as distinct from being their authors) was not one of

their characteristic activities. The crafts of the scriptorium never formed

part of the life of afriary as they did of hte monastery and there seems ot

be no evidence that any surviving Welsh book before 1400 derives from one of the Welsh friaries. 23 Having examined the case for the prime role of the monasteries, we have ot turn o t evidence which points elsewhere. Gwilym Wasta was neither monk nor lay brother, and in his excellent hand he may have written more than the three lawbooks by which we know him. And we have already referred to the ambivalent case of the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi; he was 92 B. .F Roberts, Brut Tysilio (Swansea, 1980), pp. 18-20.

03 Marged Haycock, 'Llyfr Taliesin', 365-6. 13 See his introduction to Timothy O'Neill, The Irish Hand (Portlaoise, 1984), .p X .v

23 A Welsh text of apparent Dominican origin si Gassanaeth Meri (the Hours of hte

. .F Virgin) which occurs at the close of our period ni Shrewsbury School 11, see B

Roberts, Gwassanaeth Meir (Cardiff, 1961), pp. xxx-xxxi. Iestyn Daniel, 'Golwg ra

sudsiant contil conot na deival eth isrause ybhe Domnicianes het case ofr a 53

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400 not a monk in 1346, even though he appears to have been working within

the penumbra of Strata Florida. And what about leuan Ysgolhaig? He is more likely to have come to be called 'ysgolhaig' (scholar or clerk) outside the walls of a monastery.33 And at the end of the fourteenth century we encounter the most productive of all teams, Hywel Fychan and his collaborators. Hywel in a colophon refers to his making a book at the request (arch) of his master.34 Hywel, therefore, servant of a layman, was a man with clerical training, knowing Latin, who was able to edit and organize a book. If Hopeyn ap Tomas at the end of the century employed someone to make

Evan Evans (leuan Brydydd Hir or leuan Fardd) had already in the

eighteenth century boasted that ti was ni south Wales that the earliest and

best Welsh manuscripts had been written, and G. J. Williams has shown

that there si a good deal of truth ni that assertion.38 Many of the surviving books can, on several grounds, be cast into a rough north/south division.

For many English vernacular books in this very same period, locations can be worked out with remarkable accuracy by analysis of the dialect of the text, even to within ten miles.° Welsh, unfortunately, was far ni advance of English: it already existed as a more or less standard written literary

the books made by Hywel Fychan and his collaborators on the one hand with a group of books such as that associated with the Anchorite or with the Book of Taliesin scribe, one difference stands out. The books of Hywel and his fellow scribes have simple initials ni red, or blue, done by the scribe

language, with few dialectal features. The rare attempts to localize Welsh manuscripts by the dialect of their scribes have been at best speculative. 04 Recently however Peter Wynn Thomas, using statistical evidence, has tackled the problem anew, with interesting results." It is now possible to speak more confidently than before at least of a regional classification:

himself; in the other two groups, spaces were left for initials in anticipation of an expert hand to follow, as sometimes it did, furnishing them in two

are mixed features, to suggest perhaps a more precise location. Among

books, could the same not have happened earlier? Perhaps. But comparing

colours. In these two earlier groups I sense that we are still close to the scriptorium with its varied skills.

Already, to some degree, w e have met the answer to the question: for whom? Other than religious houses, the few identifiable owners of books in

our period are upper-class laymen: Gruffudd ap Llywelyn ap Phylip for

whom the Book of the Anchorite was written; Rhydderch ab leuan Llwyd, probable first owner of the White Book of Rhydderch; Hopcyn ap Tomas

and his brother Rhys ap Tomas for whom Hywel Fychan wrote books.35

Another layman, earlier than these four, whom we know to have been an owner of books in Welsh was Llywelyn Bren. When he was executed in

1317, eight books were listed among his possessions, three of them in Welsh (but not named - the only book named is Le Roman de la Rose which gives an idea of his taste).36 We know of patrons, men and women,

for whom translations into Welsh were made in the thirteenth century 37 One can assume that they would have owned books containing these translations. Inscribed in the margins of Welsh books of our period there

are a number of names which by their script can be dated earlier than 1400.

Some, perhaps, may one day be identified and come ot life.

northern, south-western or south-eastern; and in some cases, where there

interesting matters in Thomas's study is a comparison between the habits of two of our most prominent scribes, the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi and Hywel Fychan.

The Anchorite appears to have ironed out all un-

familiar dialect forms, producing texts with regular south-western forms. Hywel Fychan on the other hand was tolerant: eh could copy a text

and preserve the dialectal features of the exemplar. This contrast carries an implicit warning, that conclusions cannot be drawn unquestioningly from analysis of dialectal features. But ti is encouraging to meet a new

Another aspect of the early Welsh manuscripts which has recently received attention is their orthography. Over the years, much evidence had been collected and analysed ni relation ot particular texts, but the general picture had remained confused. Studies by Thomas Charles-Edwards and 83 G . .J Wiliams, 4gweddau ar Hanes Dysg Gymreig, ed. Aneirin Lewis (Cardiff, 1969), H ' anes yllawysgrifau Cymraeg', pp. 1-30 (4, 17-18). While G. J. Williams's point has ageneral truth, the number of northern manuscripts, especially ni the thirteenth

in that case to Gwilym Wasta.

.L . Samues,l T eh dialect fo cenutry si alrone exampel olnere mnay mgihtebgvien, M Samue one gran ans, Aberden 82, 0,652 Bok fo Anneir Lanbedrog [1922)),

331-6.

article was originally cited prior ot its publication.]

the scribe of the Harley Lyrics', ni Middle English Dialectology, ed. .A McIntosh, M . L. 43 Roberts, Un o lawysgrifau Hopcyn ap Tomas o Ynys Dawe', 227. 53 On Rhys ap Tomas, ibid., 224. 63 Cardiff Records, ed. J. H. Matthews (Cardiff, 1898-1911), iv, p. 58. 73 .J E. Caerwyn Williams, Rhyddiaith grefyddol Gymraeg Ganol', TRhOC, pp. 54

p. xi, attributes the Book of Aneirin to Basingwerk abbey, partly on grounds of dialect, without being followed in this by anyone; Watkin, YBH, pp. xlvi-liv, proposes that the text of Bown de Hamtwn in Peniarth 5 shows the scribe to be a native of north

eshdialers:problernsandperspectives,BBCS, 40(1993),17- 50. (T his Pen r daleW 55

Welsh Vernacular Books, 1250-1400

Paul Russell have brought much needed light ot the subject.24 They show

at the same time how analysis of the orthographical habits of a scribe can be an aid to palaeography ni trying to understand the history of the making of a book.

The magnifying glass, for centuries, and the ultra-violet lamp, for a

hundred years, have been among the tools of the student of manuscripts.

But in general, Welsh manuscript studies have seldom called on the

4

Table of Medieval Welsh Vernacular Manuscripts

inventiveness of science. One scientific invention which has in recent years been adapted to research on early printed books and manuscripts, a

development which no doubt would have appealed to the scientist ni Sir

John Williams, si the isochronous cyclotron. The technology associated with this invention provides the means for making an analysis of the

elements (all elements higher than sodium ni the Periodic Table). Analysis

of the composition of ink or pigment, without recourse ot any chemical

test, has become possible. But, and ti is a big 'but, one would at present

need to go to California. Sir John might find even more intriguing the

possibility of being able to find out by DNA-analysis the history and

pedigrees of the sheep and goats from whose skins the parchment of the Welsh books was made. W e can contemplate the happy day when, for example, the goats of Penarth 6i are shown ot be next of kin ot the goats of Hendregadredd.

A sit o lisa t r a n s i t e d a l a per d o v e . T h a t e t m h a s here been subject ot correction of a ew f mistakes and changes of mind.

While the original purpose was ot provide a convenient list of Welsh vernacular manuscripts up ot about 1400, ti seemed convenient, given the

title of the present volume, ot extend the table ot encompass the whole

medieval period (1540 is taken as a limit) even though many of the later manuscripts are nowhere else mentioned between these covers and even

though up ot the moment of going ot press the components of the latter part of hte table were shifting like hte sands of an estuary.

Some indication of the contents of the manuscript si given ni the second column of the table: ni the first place, distinction between poetry, alw and

other prose. In connection with poetry manuscripts, those containing

cywyddau are distinguished. nI connection with the alw manuscripts, the

e ni th er ni atot chalede in a m a y e t h i h c iotherybprow c b se, there si an indication of the nature of the text: religious,

narrative, medical, historical, grammar and, specifically, BB for Brut y

Brenhinedd, B T for Brut y Tywysogyon, BS for Brenhinedd ySaesson, Mab.

for texts from hte 'Mabinogion', ChS for Chwedlau Siarlymaen.

Manuscripts which include primary text written wholly or ni part by a common scribe are bracketed together. Names of their scribes if known are

given ni bold print, as are their dates. . Russell, "The Hendregadredd Manuscript and hte 24 .T Charles-Edwards and P

For full forms of address of hte manuscripts, see .p x.i

Papers of hte Bibliographical Society of America, beginning with R. .N Schwab et a,l.

"Cyclotron analysis of hte ink of the 42-line Bible', 7 (1983), 285-315. 56

57

Table of Medieval Welsh Vernacular Manuscripts SAEC. XIII med. u Caerfyrddin) Pen. 1(Llyfr D Pen. 4 +List.1, pp. 102-45

Poetry

LIst. 1

Prose (BB) Prose (BB)

Harl. 1796 Cotton Vesp. Exi

Law (Latin C) Law (Latin B)

Coton Calig. Aili, fols 149-98 Law (C) Pen. 28

Pen. 92 (Llyfi Dur' Waun) Pen. 03 (Llyfr Colan)

Law (Latin A) Law (A') Law (Colan')

Tabel of Medieval Weslh Vernacular Manuscripts II SAEC. XV

Trinity 0.7.1

Law (Tr'), Gwilym Was Da, >1298

Pen. 36A

Law (*0'), Gwilym Was Da Law (*N'), Gwilym Was Da

Pen. 36B

Law ("Mk)

Bodorgan

NL W 3036 (Mostyn 117) Cotton Cleo. Ax.iv

Prose (BB, etc) Law (W) Prose (narrative: Mab.)

vi Pen. G

Pen. 2(Llyfr Taliesin)

Harl. 4353

Poetry

N W L 6680 (Hendregadredi), II

SAEC. XIF Card. 28.1 (Llyfr Aneirin)

Pen. 14, pp. 1-44 Pen. 17

Pen. 6і +бії Cotton Titus Dii Add. 14931 NLW 5266 +Pen. 16vi Pen. i3 Pen. 16ii

Pen. 14, pp. 45-78 LPen. 14, pp. 79-90

Poetry

Prose (religious) Prose (historical, etc) Prose (narrative: Mab.)

Law ('B') Law (E)

Prose (BB, etc) Poetry

L Pen. 8

Pen. 02

\ Coton Celo. By., parts i&il Card. 1.363 (Havod 2) Pen. 14, pp. 101-90

Prose (religious)

Prose (narrative: Chs)

NLW 6680 (Hendregadreda), I Poetry, >1282 Prose (narrative: Mab., ChS) _ Pen. 12 Prose (BB, religious)

Poetry, prose (religious) Prose (narrative: Mab.)

Law (Latin D)

Prose (BB, etc)

Prose (narrative: ChS), leuan Ysgolhaig, 1336

Prose (BT, grammar, etc), c.1330

Prose (BB, BS, etc)

Prose (BB, etc)

Prose (religious, narrative: Mab.)

SAEC. X V I med.

Prose (religious)

[Pen. 7

Pen. Зії Pen. 6ili Rawl. C821

Pen. 73 Pen. 45 Pen. 9

Prose (narrative) Prose (religious)

SAEC. XIII /XIV

[Pen. 16i

Pen. 13 Pen. 53

Law (V) Poetry Law (R') Law (G) Law (U)

Card. 1.362 (Havod 1)

Prose (Dares, BB, etc)

Pen. 10

Prose (narrative: ChS), ?Gruffudd Ddu Prose (religious), the Anchorite, 1346

Cotton Cleo. B.v, part i

Jesus 19 (Llyfr ry Ancr)

Law (X)

Pen. 18 Pen. 46

Prose (BB), the Anchorite

Pen. 4+5 (Llyfr Gwyn

Prose (religious, narrative: Mab,. Chs),

Pen. 47i

Rhydderch)

Coton Titus Dix. Harl. 958

Boston 5

Prose (BT), the Anchorite

Prose (Dares), the Anchorite

poetry, the Anchorite, et a.l

Law (L')

Law (T)

Law "Boston")

N L W 6680 (Hendregadreda), II Poetry 58

95

Tabel of Medieval Weslh Vernacular Manuscripts

Table of Medieval Welsh Vernacular Manuscripts SAEC. XIN [NLW 3035 (Mostyn 116)

Prose(be,55)

Add. 19709

NLW 20143

Law (Y)

Law (H')

Pen. 164

SAEC. XVI Jesus 23

List. 3

Cotton Titus D.xxii

Jesus 20 Pen. 15

Add. 14912

Law ('Q) Prose (Dares)

Corpus 454

Law (Latin E)

Wynnstay 63

Rawl. B467

Poetry, prose (narrative: Mab,. etc) Prose (religious, narrative: Greal)

Prose (medical Prose (medical)

NLW 5267

Pen. 33 Pen. 38

Prose (religious)

Law ("M') Law (T') Prose (medical)

Pen. 1

Prose (narrative: Greal), Hywel Fychan Prose (religious), poetry, Hywel Fychan et al.

Pen. 2

Card. 32.42 (Havod 16), pp. 1-100

List. 27 (Llyfr Coch Talgarth) + Pen. 12, pp. 77-116

+Card. 32.42 (Havod 16),

pp. 101-12 Philadelphia 8680 Prose (Dares, BB, etc), Hywel Fychan Jesus 57 Law (J'), Hywel Fychan Jesus 111 (Llyfr Coch Hergest) Prose (Dares, BB, BT; narrative: Mab,. ChS .; religious, medical, grammar, etc), et al., >1382 Law (D'), prose (historical, religious),

Pen. 91

Llyfi Teg hand et al., 1404 Prose (religious), Llyf; Teg hand et a.l Prose (Dares, BB, BT), Llyfr Teg hand

Llst. 4

Prose (narrative, religious), Llyfr Teg

Pen. 190

et al.

hand et a.l

Prose (religious, etc), 1438 Prose (narrative, religious)

Prose (religious, etc) Pen. 47iii Pen. 191 +Bangor 1 +List. 200 Prose (religious, grammar) Law ("Tim' List. 116 Add. 22356 Law ('S') Pen. 16li Prose (historical, etc)

Pen. 50Y( Cwat Cyfarwydd)

Pen. 57i, pp. 1-78

Pen. 39

Pen. 26

Prose (BB), 1444 Vaticination ni verse and prose, ect, David, c.1445

Poetry (cywyddau) Law (Lew'), Lewys Ysgolhaig Vaticination ni verse and prose, >1456 Y SAEC. X

poetry, Hywel Fychan, Lylfy Teg hand

Pen. 23Y( Llyfr Teg)

Prose (vaticination, etc)

SAEC. X V med. LIst. 2

Shrewsbury xi

Prose (religious, historical), 1429

Pen. 263

Pen. 471i

I /V X SAEC. XV

Prose (religious) Prose (religious, grammar)

Jesus 2

Pen. 23

Pen. 24 Add. 19710

Card. 27. (RMWL2) Pen. 34

Pen. 41 Pen. 51 Pen. 84

Pen. 52

Prose (medical)

Prose (BB) Prose (BB), 1477

Vaticination ni verse and prose Law (Blegywryd) Law (F) Prose (Statud Rhuddlan)

Miscelany: poetry and prose, Gwilym T ew Poetry (cywyddau) Poetry (cywyddau)

Table of Medieval Welsh Vernacular Manuscripts Pen. 40

Pen. 54

Pen. 70

Poetry (cywyddau), Lewys Glyn Cothi, 1470s

Pen. 109

Poetry (cywyddau), Lewys Glyn Cothi,

Pen. 204, pp. 27-58

Prose (medical) Prose (medical), etc

1470s

Pen. 205

Law ('As) Law ('s')

Pen. 175

Pen. 258

Pen. 259A

Pen. 326 (bundle 6), fols 1-20 Pen. 356

Law (P)

Prose (medical)

Latin grammar, etc, Thomas Pennant, c.1470

Latin grammar, ect, John Edwards, 1481

NLW 423

NLW 1 Hunter U.6.5 LIst. 28

Prose (narrative)

NL W 7006 (Llyfr Du Basing) Pen. 131, pp. 71-138, 199-308 Jesus 141 + NLW 1585, fols 132-3 NL W 3026 (Mostyn 88) Pen. 27i Pen. 27ii

) Law (Latin B Prose (religious, grammar, etc), Gutun Owain, >1456 Prose (Dares, BB, BS), Gutun Owain et a,l. >1461

L Pen. 60

Pen. 52

Pen. 27ii

Pen. 36C

Pen. 59i, pp. 21-40

1488-9

Prose (calendar), Gutun Owani

Prose (pedigrees), Guutn Owani, 1497

1493

Prose (calendar), Gutun Owain

SAEC. XV/ XVI

NL W 3063 (Mostyn 184)

Prose (narrative: Greal), Gwilym ap John

Add. 14997

Poetry (cywyddau)

pa Gwilym, >1485

Poetry (cywyddau)

Poetry (vaticination, etc), c.1485 x1510

et a,l. c.1480 Poetry (cywyddau), Huw Cae LIwyd

Poetry (cywyddau), Hywel Dafi, >1483 Poetry (cywyddau), Huw Cae Llwyd, Dafydd Epynt, te a,.l c.1500 Poetry (cywyddau), Dafydd Epynt, et al.,

c.1510 x51 Prose (Dares, BB)

Prose (religious, historical, etc), poetry Law (m')

Pen. 204, pp. 27-58 List. 29 Add. 12193

Law (Blegywryd) Prose (historical), Thomas ab leuan ap

LIst. 5

[ Pen. 1271

Prose (BB)

Deicws, 1508-10

Prose (pedigrees, etc), Thomas ab leuan

pa Deicws, 1510

SAEC. XVI (to 1540) Pen. 354

Formulary, ect, Edward ap Rhys,

Pen. 56, pp. 1-60

Prose (grammar, etc) Poetry (cywyddau)

Pen. 57, pp. 79-176 Pen. 110

Pen. 126

1502-31

Poetry (cywyddau), >1509 Prose (grammar, pedigrees, etc), poetry

Pen. 129 Pen. 130

Prose (pedigrees) Prose (pedigrees)

Sotheby C2 List. 6

List. 7

Prose (medical), Bened Feddyg et a.l Poetry (cywyddau), c.1510 x 03 Poetry (cywyddau), leuan Brechfa et a,l.

LIst. 10

Prose (medical, ect), Dafydd pa Gruffudd

Pen. 182

Add. 14967 62

Poetry (cywyddau), Huw Cae Llwyd, Hywel Dafi, Hywel Swrdwal,

Poetry Law (anomalous) Prose (medical)

Pen. 166

Owain, >1471

Rylands Welsh 1

Pen. 53

Pen. 67 Pen. 5

Prose (medical, etc), Gutun Owain,

Add. 14919, fols 104-50

Pen. 10, fols 60-74

Pen. 189i, pp.85-108

Prose (pedigrees), Gutun Owain et al. Prose (Dares, BB, BT, etc), Gutun

Prose (miscellany), Gutun Owain Prose (pedigrees, etc), Gutun Owain,

Pen. 186

Table of Medieval Welsh Vernacular Manuscripts

Miscellany: poetry, prose, Huw Pennant, 1514

1505-30

Offeiriad, 1515 Poetry, prose (narrative), >1526 63

Tabel of Medieval Weslh Vernacular Manuscripts Poetry (cywyddau), Elis Gruffydd, 1527 Card. 34. (RMWL )5 Pen. 127i

Pen. 131, pp. 13-68 Card. 2.629 (Havod 19)

Poetry, prose (pedigrees), 1531 ×4

Prose (pedigrees), leuan pa Madog pa Rhys

Pen. 179i

Prose (religious), cuan ap Wilam ap Dafydd, 1535-6 Prose (pedigrees, etc), Huw Bangor,

Pen. 181

Prose (pedigrees, etc)

Pen. 204, pp. 1-26, 149-272

5

Five Ancient Books of Wales

1538/9

Prose (medical)

Erelit ni sureshet lot ligature Distin nets w hti phsi

wonder, hesitatingly, whether Welsh poetry may not be older than English

poetry, whether it may not eb something more intricate, not to say more mysterious, and whether ti may not survive ni manuscripts which are more

ancient. The first two could be valid points for discussion, but they are not

appropriate ot a lecture which si about books rather than poetry. sAfor

hte third, there si hardly need of a specialist ot pronounce that ti si wrong.

The earliest manuscript book of Welsh poetry si centuries later than the earliest ones of English poetry. To be famous you need a name. Two of the five books I am going to

discuss had acquired their names by the end of the sixteenth century, if not earlier: Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, the Black Book of Carmarthen (NLW, Peniarth 1), and Llyfr Coch Hergest, the Red Book of Hergest (Oxford, Jesus College 111). These two have in common another attainment. They both passed through the hands of Sir John Prise, the first conspicuous

Welsh collector of manuscripts after the dissolution of the monasteries,

and made fleeting precociously early appearances ni print, by way of brief quotation ni Prise's defence of the British history, Historiae Brytannicae Defensio, a work written ni the 1540s and published posthumously ni 1573. Another of the five had acquired its name by the time it was catalogued

in the library of Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt about 1658: Llyfr Taliesin,

the Book of Taliesin (NLW, Peniarth 2). While another, Llyfr Aneirin, the

Book of Aneirin (Cardiff, Central Library 2.81), appears ot have been

given its name by Edward Lhuyd. The name first occurs ni the invaluable catalogue of Welsh manuscripts which Lhuyd included ni his Archaeologia

Britannica (1707), where the four books are grouped together for the first In 1868 the Scottish historian William Skene published The Four Ancient Books of Wales, an admirable work with a catchy title, so catchy that even

today you should not be surprised ot hear the organizer of a literary 65

Five Ancient Books of Wales

Five Ancient Books of Wales

festival in Wales blithely announce that it is hoped to exhibit 'the Four Ancient Books of Wales'. Skene's four books are the four books already

Rhydderch which contained most of its poetry; a source of poetry of the

mentioned. He recognized that these four contained the oldest texts of

Gogynfeirdd which was used by Dr John Davies of Mallwyd; and an 'exact

copy' of the Black Book of Carmarthen, evidently made in the early

most of the early Welsh poetry. This poetry had been in print since 1801 in

fourteenth century, which was owned by Humphrey Humphreys.3

the egregious Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (a few poems had appeared ni earlier publications), but ni poor texts derived from late copies. Skene

wanted for detailed attention, si ot try ot characterize them. But first, ni

went back to the four sources. That his published text has its misreadings and that the translations are poor ones are faults we need not dwell on.

The title of this chapter looks like a challenge to Skene. It is really more of a tribute. His books are still the four books containing the earliest Welsh poetry'. Mine are 'the five earliest books of Welsh poetry; the earliest books do not necessarily contain the earliest poetry. The point is

made by my fifth book, the Hendregadredd Manuscript (NLW 6680). It was unknown to Skene but, although earlier in date than two of his four

books, would not have been relevant to his volumes because of the relative lateness of its contents.

The Hendregadredd Manuscript, like all but one of our five, the Red Book of Hergest, was at one time in Robert Vaughan's collection at Hengwit. Like the Book of Aneirin (and other valuable manuscripts) it was borrowed from Hengwrt, fi not stolen, never to return, during a period ni the eighteenth century when the famous library was badly neglected.

Not until 1910 was the Hendregadredd Manuscript 'outed", having then

been found, ti was said, at Hendregadredd, a house near Porthmadog, 'in instead of 'the Book of Hendregadredd' we have inherited t h e Hendregadredd Manuscript'.

Al but a very small number of extant Welsh poems earlier than A D 1330 come from one or more of our five books. The few exceptions are: poems in early books whose contents are otherwise predominantly prose; a few

My intention in discussing the five ancient books, none of which have

order to make sure that a few important distinctions are understood, ti is necessary briefly to be didactic. Welsh bardic grammars (the earliest surviving text dates from about 1330) speak of hengerdd, 'ancient poetry;

knowledge of it was required of a bard. It was 'ancient' ni contrast to the

modes of poetry current when the grammars were composed, in the early fourteenth century. The poets associated with hengerdd came ni later

centuries to be called Cynfeirdd, while the bards whose poetry set the standards for the grammars, court bards of the preceding two centuries, came to be known as Gogynfeirdd. The two kinds of poetry are usually kept apart ni manuscripts. A third kind came into being about 1330,

associated with the poets who adopted the new metre commonly called the cywydd and the new spirit which arrived with ti - poets who came to be called cywyddwyr. To put into perspective my account of the five books, something also needs to be said about the written tradition of Welsh vernacular literature and the earliest books. The earliest written Welsh in manuscript is probably that which occurs in marginal additions to the Lichfield Gospels ("the Book of St Chad', Lichfield Cathedral 1). This was probably written

about D A 8004. The earliest Welsh poetry ni manuscript si ni Cambridge Cambridge, University Library, Ff.4.42 - a manuscript of Juvencus ni

which were added in the late ninth or early tenth century two series of englynion. Manuscripts for more than 300 years after this date have nothing more substantial than these englynion to offer. Nor does Welsh

prose fare much better during these centuries; we have only brief and

which survive n i fragments of early manuscripts; a few ni later copies which are explicit about their now lost sources, and a few ni later copies

fragmentary texts, and glosses.

which are not.? Three important medieval collections of early poetry which

C , 18/19 (1983 4), 79-95, and below, pp. 258 9. tradition of the Red Book englynion', S

were lost ni post-medieval times (though none could have compared ni importance with our five survivors) are that part of the White Book of . F. Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (Edinburgh, 1868). 1W

2 Early poetry occurs as primary text ni hte White Book of Rhydderch (NLW,

Peniarth 4 and 5), the Red Book of Talgarth (NLW, Llanstephan 27) and Oxford, Jesus

College 20, and as added text in the Black Book of Chirk (NLW, Peniarth 29). NLW, Peniarth 3 parts i and i are stray quires containing poetry. Lost sources, 'old' and on.

3 On hte lost quire of the White Book, see Jenny Rowland, "The manuscript

On Dr John Davies's source, see Gerald Morgan, 'Testun barddoniaeth y Tywysogion yn lisgr. NLW 4973', BBCS, 20 (1962 4), 95-103; Rowland, The manuscript tradition'. Astrong case could be made for regarding Dr Davies's source as missing quires of the

Hendregadredd Manuscript; ti would have dovetailed wel. The "exact copy' of the

Black Book which Humphrey Humphreys (1648-1712) refers to in a note on foi. i was ni 'the very same hand' as that at the bottom of fol. 24*. This hand looks early fourteenth-

4 Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd .E Owen, The Welsh marginalia ni the Lichfield

Gospels, CMCS, 5(1983), 37-66, and 7(1984), 91-120. Interpretation of the evidence

parchment. are referred to by Jaspar Gryffyth i n NLW, Peniarth 53 and NLW, Llanstephan 120, by Dr John Davies in NLW, Peniarth 102 and by John Jones in NLW,

of dating of the Surexit memorandum can follow several lines. 'About 800' reflects my

66

67

Peniarth 111 (see RMWL, i, pp. 405, 638 and 671, ii, p. 605).

preference.

Five Ancient Books of Wales

All of a sudden - in the historical time-scale - the scene is transformed.

Around the middle of the thirteenth century, books written ni Welsh crowd in. Over fifty books survive from the hundred years or so between the mid-thirteenth century and the mid-fourteenth. These years saw the

recording of most of the treasures of early Welsh literature, ni books

which, though modest enough by international standards, were superior in quality of production to most of those which followed in Wales in the later

Middle Ages. Between about 1250 and about 1350, these Welsh books display a growth in size and scope and assurance. The implication must be that in Wales around 1250 large codices of vernacular literature such as survive from as early as 1100 for Irish and English were unknown. If they ever existed, that tradition had been broken.

That there must have been books of some kind in Welsh - as distinct from books in Latin to which additions in Welsh had been made - by the

twelfth century, if not earlier, seems certain. Gerald of Wales refers to

them he particularly rejoiced ni having tracked down a copy of the

ancyraman hi anady daech tad kjulaun lar

kindur aamellury ku

ynan. Has badon odm

prophecies of Merlinus'). Geoffrey of Monmouth's notorious 'ancient book in the British tongue' may or may not have existed, but his reference

to ti is surely evidence that books in Welsh were not unknown. Evidence of

another kind lurks ni some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Welsh texts,

in survivals of earlier orthography and in errors which can only be explained as misreadings of Insular script.

D Excellent Insular script was still written at Llanbadarn Fawr about A

1100. A few Insular letter-forms survive, associated with passages ni the

vernacular, in the two main hands of the Book of Llandaf (NLW 17110),

written ni the most Normanized part of Wales ni the middle of the twelfth

century. But ni general we lack evidence to show how long Insular script

persisted ni Wales. My suspicion si that ni those Welsh clasau (the major ecclesiastical centres) which remained immune to Norman influence, ni north and mid-Wales, ti may have survived into the thirteenth century, particularly perhaps for use with the vernacular (as was the case with

nodmausendod gan.

n-Jir a C ihyad c gom

tn-Rup aRuy tavath tau umdoedh› doedhan

Anglo-Saxon). Such conservatism would have been characteristic of the

Welsh scribal tradition. I make this point because it may offer part of an explanation for the total disappearance of books ni Welsh earlier than

about 1250. In England, books in Anglo-Saxon ni Insular script mostly

survived the Middle Ages as sleepers in large ecclesiastical libraries. In

Ireland, early books ni Irish probably survived because their Insular script

belonged recognizably to a continuing tradition. In Wales there was

neither continuity of libraries (unless possibly at St David's, where most of

the books seem to have been destroyed soon after the Reformation) nor continuity of script.

68

Plate 7 NLW, Peniarth 1(the Black Book of Carmarthen), fol. 2

Five Ancient Books of Wales

Five Ancient Books of Wales *

*

In 1936 the Oxford University Press published the Oxford Book of Modern

. B . Yeats. It was received with some English Verse 1892-1935, edited by W dismay; it had about ti more the air of the 1890s than the 1930s. Beside the large eccentricity of the selection, the inclusion in an anthology of modern English verse of a version of a Welsh poem from the Black Book of Carmarthen may have seemed no more than amiable perversity. This poem,

'palacographical freak'.

The appearance of the page is the most immedi-

ately striking aspect of the compiler's eccentricity.

The scribe of the Black Book had to come to terms with practicality. Forty words to the page is not practical in a book for grown-ups. H e reduced the size of his script, chopping and changing somewhat, and gave

up writing only on alternate lines. The non-uniform appearance of the pages of the Black Book (which has led some to attribute it to several

graves which the rain wets'). A Chinese poet might almost have left ti at that. The Welsh poet goes on to build up an evocative catalogue of places of

t i s p i o r s e g n a h c a e nic

'antiquarian verse'). Before turning to the Black Book of Carmarthen itself we might notice the first line of the English version by Edward Rhys which had appealed to Yeats: 'In graves where drips the winter rain'. Almost everything lost, Stoke Poges rather than a Welsh mountain.

the foot of pages. Different mixes of red, and of green ni some quires, suggest that rubrication ni turn was done ni nine separate phases.' Al ni

ni Welsh, opens marvellously: Y" beddau a'i gwlych y glaw' (lamely, "The

the graves of heroes (one which these days si likely o t be pigeon-holed as

The Black Book of Carmarthen was long regarded as 'the oldest Welsh

manuscript', and dated late twelfth-century. Now anchored in the midthirteenth century, ti still has claim to be the oldest manuscript of Welsh

poetry. Its scribe - and contrary to first impressions there seems only to

have been one - stands out among the scribes associated with our five books as the most wayward. Furthermore, since the book is one whose composition can only satisfactorily be explained by supposing that the

scribe also chose the contents, we discover that as an anthologist he was as wayward as he was as a scribe.

Characteristic of good book-production is regularity in basic pro-

quiring, ni its pattern of ruling, ni the number of lines to the page, in its script. Visually, its opening si dramatic. The first pages are written ni a large, majestic, slightly laboured textura using only alternate ruled lines: a thirteenth-century reader could have been reminded of the scriptural text of a glossed book of the Bible, or the canon of the mass in a missal (see Plate 7). But these books would have been large ones; the Black Book is small (no more than 17 x 13 cm.). The page can only accommodate nine

lines of such script - about forty words, or six lines of verse (written

without line breaks, as prose: not until the fifteenth century did Welsh scribes begin to write poetry line by line). Such generous spacing and such high-grade script for something as off-beat as vernacular poetry is, in its time, bizarre. The result is what Denholm-Young has called a 5 .J Gwenogvryn Evans, Facsimile of the Black Book of Carmarthen (Oxford, 1888) and The Black Book of Carmarthen (Pwllheli, 1907); D e n h o l m - Yo u n g , H E W, pp. 42-3;

Jarman, LID and 'Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin: the Black Book of Carmarthen', PBA, 71

(1985), 333-56.

70

hands) si due in part to its being the product of many phases of activity. To judge by changes of script-size, of script, of quill and of ink, the Black Book as we know ti (at least three quires are probably lost) is the product of fourteen phases of writing, not to count stints within these phases. Our scribe was also the rubricator, and no doubt responsible also for the drawings (such as a beast and a man's head) which adorn some run-ons at

all, without our even beginning to read the text, the Black Book gives an impression of being a slowly built-up work of love. Lay-out and script alone suggest that the Black Book originated in an ecclesiastical milieu. The anthology contains a remarkable variety of

poetry, much of it religious, but the poems given pride of place and written ni the largest script are secular. The secular poetry includes legendary 'saga poems', vaticination (such as the Afallennau and the Oianau), five praisepoems (three of them by Cynddelw, the greatest of the twelfth-century court poets), and even parody. Our compiler showed little concern about grouping like with like. The lack of order could be explained by a slow

heterogeneous accumulation; this would tally with the spasmodic activity suggested by the evidence of script and rubrication. fI the compilation of the Black Book was indeed such a spasmodic process as is here envisaged, there are several conclusions which seem to follow. Our compiler was guided by personal taste, he was working for himself, with no clear preconceived idea of what his book would contain. In this, he stands apart from all the scribes of our other four books. We

might say that hte impulse was literary rather than antiquarian. Charm si a

word which can be used of many poems ni the Black Book. It is not a word

brought ot mind by much of the hengerdd ni the other manuscripts, even less so by the poetry of the Gogynfeirdd. A second conclusion concerns the sources of the compiler. They were presumably many, though not necessarily as many as fourteen. And if the

anusepreanerhetha hentur ,ustobeToti nhede m anuseripreis E ngThm

late as the fourteenth centurv.

71

Five Ancient Books of Wales

sources were many, none of them yielding a large haul of poems, it si fair

to ask: were they all written sources? Of our five books, the Black Book

19

seems the likeliest to contain a substantial proportion of poems which

might derive directly from oral tradition. This likelihood si increased by

the presence ni the Black Book of several abbreviated texts and 'floaters',

fragments of poems, some of them known elsewhere ni fuller versions.? A last conclusion concerns the orthography of the Black Book. The

orthography is fairly consistent and has received much attention, largely

p oatra er:att ep i neoh ly er ear oen)e -g m mtyoe

bật no l ơ g nonny gwyne. t a n bôm trat tri: t

e s a en t i ng uzu co:b y to f m g ooo

3 com ordinat en agub. minnoc t u . S i beo.

because for much of the twentieth century it was taken to typify Welsh orthography of .c 1200. If we are right to accept the Black Book as a compilation made from many sources, the simplest explanation of the

ข อส ะt arec ut er s.t udoccha dhoc tyasyberto-t yroo

not necessarily represent any external standard. 8 Where was the Black Book written? At the dissolution of the monasteries, the Black Book was rescued from Carmarthen priory, a house of

implimmot in uywey peloin. peledit gogymugo

consistency of the orthography si that ti was imposed by the scribe. It does

Augustinian canons? It is indeed the only Welsh vernacular manuscript

about whose rescue from a religious house we have any circumstantial details. Of our other four books, three if not all four were in secular hands

at the end of the Middle Ages.) But, was the Black Book written at Carmarthen? This likelihood has been proposed on account of the

nyt do at let bro poodel. an golwi mot a climmer.

soglittur h e n tver tawe ne affed fydn ys gorm en tridat: gwu twitlawn flamu tac cigar การ ทา ง อ

) fortet cat venth a chat feird, greuter at gauaet c c ytemact raen oj ob eat nSmut a engt git ic ygrear t y v e a ng oh otn gf aut si ae f ojr e-ce yabat beibj uf acar ni e.

dominant south-west Wales interest of the contents and the prominence of

• j naeegr ooo mactycamor mina t ean tat

It might be held that the near-autonomy of houses of Augustinian canons and their relative openness to the laity could have provided an environment congenial to the headstrong eccentric to whom I give credit for the Black Book.

j e t puyou-cfwoet t het ont er o oe nat pat a rb i teatant s i um yf-on t eve etpor thyefm ant r 010p oofgo vir yo

poetry associated with Myrddin (the supposed eponym of Carmarthen). °1

*

*

Our second book si the Book of Aneirin, perhaps a generation later ni date

than hte Black Book; most scholars have been content with a date ni the

Kointyator tac cuin aryal tam ngt aror of dosef corte

g ollet m or j et.ngb uaeltavo r of f ordiynt a edhye n

p regti n ber nper star oes ar o upoe s t afpeur1ocoa r

T ong oyon od t ad yTavnav espa ngro psoeg ar :

" See, for example, ni Jarman, LID, the following items and the editor's comment:

72.8, 3ml - anddalP.CRussell, mar landThyebHendregadredd e, 19e, .i M gared Hayock, B183S,e 24.,T28M,. 2Charles-Edwards Manuscript and

hte orthography and phonology of Welsh ni the carly fourteenth century, NLWJ, 82

(1993 4), 419-62 (especially 420).

Plate 8 Cardiff, Central Library 2.81 (the Book of Aneirin), p. 91

72

Five Ancient Books of Wales

Five Ancient Books of Wales

second half of the thirteenth century.! We have little but the script to judge by. This again is a small book. A mere nineteen leaves are extant, with an indeterminate number, but probably not many, wanting at the

In the Black Book we encountered an enthusiastic anthologist. Here, ni the Book of Aneirin, the aim is narrower, and the personnel more reticent.

end. Until the seventeenth century the book was not even bound: it evidently survived in a succession of limp covers. The Book of Aneirin is our sole source of the Gododdin. This is the work about which Lewis Morris wrote so extravagantly after its discovery by Evan Evans ni 1758:

The c o m m o n aim was to recover the text of the Gododdin a n d its a t t e n d a n t

"Gorchanau'. Whether scribe A or scribe B or an invisible third party was the moving spirit we cannot say. What can safely be said si that the writing of the Book of Aneirin was an operation to rescue, from two fi not more exemplars, treasured texts which had probably almost passed from oral currency and which were perhaps no longer entirely understood. The long

rubric assigning fairytale-like values ni yryson (poetic contest) to poems Tudfwich and Marchlew are heroes fiercer then Achilles or Satan. 21 Five short and early poems called 'Gorchanau' complete the book.

Visually the Book of Aneirin is very different from the Black Book. If the Black Book is a case of uninhibited trying on costume, the Book of Aneirin comes in a sober suit. Quiring, ruling and the number of lines to the page are regular. The script is clear and unostentatious, rubrication

and decoration, on the pages written by the main scribe, are simple and consistent (see Plate 8). 31 There are two scribes. Scribe A opens with the y y Gododin. Aneirin ai cant' ("This si hte Gododdin. ' wn w rubric H Aneirin sang it). He concluded his text of the Gododdin ni the third quire, without an explicit, and left the remainder of the quire blank. He evidently regarded his text as incomplete and hoped to return to it. Beginning a new quire, he copied the 'Gorchanau', n i two stints, failing to rubricate the , now appears, perhaps a contemporary of second. Another hand, scribe B scribe A with a slightly younger-looking hand, or perhaps a later comer.

Using the blank space left by scribe A at the end of quires 3 and 4, and

adding a fifth quire of his own, scribe B wrote the text of forty-two further awdlau of the Gododdin. Scribe B's text is of particular interest to scholars:

ni contrast to scribe A's, it preserves a large element of Old Welsh ortho-

graphy; and almost half its awdlau are variants, if distant ones, of awdlau

already copied ni scribe As' text, offering precious evidence of divergence

during what must have been a period of oral transmission.

in the book suggests that the real value of the contents of the Book of Aneirin was by now largely talismanic. To the question of where the book of Aneirin was written the answer has

to be vague. Of our five books, ti si the only one which may not be of southWales origin: the absence of instances of h- for ch- points that way.14 The good quality parchment and disciplined expertise of scribe A's work suggest

a practised centre of book-production. For this, ni thirteenth-century

Wales, we still look to monastic scriptoria, and for books in the vernacular, to the small family of Cistercian houses which grew up under native Welsh t the risk of being tendentious, I will mention one such patronage. A monastery: Strata Marcella, near Welshpool, founded by the poet-prince

Owain Cyfeiliog who was buried there ni 1197. The one long poem attributed to Owain which has survived, 'Hirlas Owain', echoes the

Gododdin in structure and phrase. Strata Marcella scribes might conceivably have had a role in the transmission of the text of the Gododdin. The

localizing of the scriptorium which produced the Book of Aneirin comes

closer ni the light of the identification by Ingo Mittendorf of two other

manuscripts written yb scribe B: NLW, leniarth 14, pp. 1-44 (containing religious texts) and NLW, Peniarth 17. The latter contains Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, a text primarily of Gwynedd

interest. Aberconwy abbey now becomes the leading candidate. Sec Ingo

Mittendorf, Sprachliche und orthographische Besonderheiten eines mittelkymrischen Textes aus dem 13. Jahrhundert (Gwyrthyeu e Wynvydedic Veir), in Akten des Zweiten Deutschen Keltologen-Symposiums, ed. S.

. Ködderitzsch and .A Wigger, Buchreihe der Zeitschrift für Zimmer, R

celtische Philologie,71 (Tübingen, 1999), pp. 127-48 (129).] 11.J Gwenogvryn Evans, Facsimile and Text of the Book of Aneirin (Pwllheli, 1908);

Canu Aneirin (Cardiff, 1938); Denholm-Young, HEW, p. 44; .A O. H.

Jarman, Aneirin: Y Gododdin: Britain's Oldest Poem (Llandysul, 1988); Early Welsh

. .F Roberts (Aberystwyth, 1988); D . Huws, Poetry: Studies ni hte Book of Aneirin, ed. B

Llyfr Aneirin: A Facsimile (Aberystwyth, 1989).

21 Additional Letters of the Morrises of Anglesey (1735-1786), ed. Hugh Owen (London, 1947-9), i, p.349. 31 The second scribe, Scribe B, made no use of colour nor did he allow for it. 74

In December 1282 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was killed and his head sent to

London. For some, most memorably for Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch ni a 41 Marged Haycock, L ' lyfr Taliesin,' NLWJ, 52 (1987-8), 357-86 (364). 75

Five Ancient Books of Wales

Five

Ancient Books of Wales

famous elegy, ti was like the end of the world. For everyone in Wales, whether they regarded the event with despair or resignation or even with relief, ti marked an epoch. Not long after 1282, at the Cistercian abbey of

the original plan; less than 10 per cent of the book was now empty. Their work was rubricated and decorated by several hands, but none by the skilful hand that decorated the work of Alpha. This unskilled rubrication

monastic annals, was given formS The Latin chronicle si lost, but we

Crucis about 1330, and that of the other, NLW, Peniarth 18, probably at

There remained some blank leaves at the end of some quires, the unfilled 10 per cent. This too in turn came to be filled, by twenty further scribes, in what evidently was a somewhat different environment. Many of these scribes no longer write textura; none of their texts is rubricated. A more profound difference ni this third stratum si in the nature of its contents.

Also not long after 1282, a remarkable editor, again probably at Strata Florida, undertook to make a more unusual monument to the extin-

different kind, poetry of the first generation of the cywyddwyr, including poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym. Much of this poetry concerns leuan Llwyd

Strata Florida, a Latin chronicle of Welsh history up to 1282, based on know it from two derivative Welsh versions which circulated widely, known as Brut y Tywysogyon. The earliest surviving manuscript of one

version, NLW, Peniarth 20, was written at the Cistercian abbey of Valle

Strata Florida, ni the mid-fourteenth century.

is the seal on stratum II of the Hendregadredd Manuscript.

Alpha's scheme is ignored; what these scribes add is poetry of a very

guished independent rule of Wales. He set about collecting the poetry of

ab leuan and his wife Angharad. The home of leuan and Angharad was in

centuries. His horizon was Meilyr, court poet of Gruffudd ap Cynan, king of Gwynedd. His terminus was 1282. When scholars speak of the 'Poets of

floruit is 1332-43. While the contents of this third stratum lie on the

defined by this anonymous compiler. His compilation si the Hendre-

cannot be far wrong ni saying that stratum III si contemporary with leuan,

the court poets associated with the Welsh rulers of the previous two the Princes' they tacitly acknowledge the chapter of Welsh literary history gadredd Manuscript.

As an artefact, the Hendregadredd Manuscript si by far the most reveal-

ing of our five books. 61 The compiler - called Alpha (a), ot distinguish him from the two groups of scribes which followed him, labelled A-S and a-t

- gathered ni separate quires or, when necessary, n i sequences of quires, the poetry of each bard. Having allocated quires to all the main bards, he

allowed one quire for 'others', the bards represented only by a few poems

each. He writes a fluent and bold hand, with a thick nib, which ni its squatness and roundedness suggests a university training (see Plate 28). Not only si his organization good, his texts are good. He left his successors sixteen quires (besides one or more now missing), about three-quarters full. His work is rubricated and decorated by a hand that is one of the few

accomplished pen-flourishers ot be met with ni Welsh medieval vernacular

manuscripts. This rubrication and decoration can be said to seal stratum .I Alpha's work was continued by nineteen other scribes, contemporaries or near-contemporaries, all of them writing competent textura (see Plates

82 and 29). They supplemented Alpha's collection, adding poems ni appropriate quires, respecting his arrangement. They more or less completed

15 Thomas Jones, Brut y Tywysogyon or the Chronicle of the Princes: Peniarth MS. 20

Llangeitho, ni Ceredigion, some ten miles from Strata Florida; leuan's

threshold of an exciting new age of Welsh poetry, their present relevance si

htat htey hepl xfihte Hender

that they help fix the Hendregadredd Manuscript in time and place. We

stratum I belongs to the first quarter of the fourteenth century and

stratum I to around 1300; and that stratum III si the handiwork of a lay household and its visitors, while strata I and I are the handiwork of a

scriptorium, probably at Strata Florida where, to speculate, Alpha, the

architect of the book, may also have had a hand in the genesis of Brut y Tywysogyon, the product of similar historical awareness. Following the strong-headed anthologist of the Black Book and the

quiet antiquarians who rescued the Gododdin ni the Book of Aneirin, we have the able and incisive editor who precociously identified a chapter of

Welsh literary history and preserved its poetry ni the Hendregadredd Manuscript. The generation of scribes who continued his work, together with the scribes of the third stratum, not only added ot the literary richness but made hte Hendregadredd Manuscript hte most valuable palaco-

graphical repertory of hte Welsh Middle Ages. *

With regard ot its contents, the Book of Taliesin would probably be

thought yb many ot be the most fascinating of our five books.! tI includes the "historical' poems of Taliesin, poems which are the fountainhead of the

Version (Cardiff, 1952), pp. xxxv-xliv.

Welsh bardic tradition, poems whcih ostensibly date from hte late sixth

prime source, has been edited in seven volumes, Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, general editor R. G. Gruffydd (Cardiff, 1991-6).

1910); Denholm-Young, HEW, p. 44; Haycock, 'Llyfr Taliesin'.

61 LIH; Chapter 12; Charles-Edwards and Russell, 'The Hendregadredd Manuscript', The work of the Poets of the Princes, for which the Hendregadredd Manuscript si the

76

17J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Facsimile and Text of the Book of Taliesin (Llanbedrog,

77

Five Ancient Books of Wales

23

S t bei cn:u rfivdyl e sแลงทอs m d nuch

century. It also includes much of the poetry associated with the legendary Taliesin, poetry potent and puzzling enough to sustain many a White Goddess and New Age. The historical, the quasi-historical, the religious, the learned, the arcane, they all come together. But that said, the Book of Taliesin as an artefact is much the least interesting of the five books. Small,

adidiot yacao vum táut. am el Ashores

like the Black Book and the Book of Aneirin, written - to judge by the script - ni the first half of the fourteenth century, ti si the product of

yndas, bum achicac.bum liatracguledic.

suf grafuid am vodes. obt tracthatto maus

m othat e. ant vf tati e n vpt v af iao tli

straightforward copying by a single scribe, regular in his scribal practices. Beyond the Book of Taliesin, at one or more removes, must lie an exemplar which may have resembled the Black Book, an original compila-

u mynthacen chf a bum 015 / grob .

tion drawing its rich material from a variety of sources; though it should be said that the Book of Taliesin is slightly more orderly in arrangement than

g vfirt ).b um.dooyf outu i th .c oo f m

& ำ u nSogv na r um t en o s b umgerr yntl yth r ouml yfor ympzif t or.

bum Hugurn eufer blowdyn alanter: bum pontar tnger atngem vie. bum hunt bi ay:bum oymyr:. bum davobed untlat.

vi mdofyst ad at. Dumdcdyfonaghat.tum

the Black Book, and more exclusive, ni that ti excludes both poetry of the

Gogynfeirdd and 'saga poetry'. To the eye, however, the Book of Taliesin

itself si seamless, the editorial activity screened. It is like a new housing estate: we are surprised to discover after a while what interesting old characters live in some of the houses (see Plate 9).

The most interesting thing about the excellent but self-effacing scribe who wrote the Book of Taliesin is that we have confirmation that he was at

one level a mere scribe. Four other manuscripts in his hand survive: two books of Welsh law, a Brut yBrenhinedd (the Welsh version of Geoffrey of

n a cbi onov . v us or n v e do n. b m n» houg

Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannia) and a copy of the romance of Geraint.18 He is as good an example as any of an expert scribe active during the best period of production of books of vernacular literature in medieval

g a nke n t ur p u byd m e men gt at oneu

colophon. We can only say that such pointers as we have, ni the texts he copied and ni the later descent of hte five manuscripts, direct us towards

v iot oust a.bumt ant nt el ont er ntha c

» car b un govov t a ,mt m ou m

B e comapr oe nt

or g e nt t on comt ol c.

T as j elios menchc.gr omo m maczen.a

h a ow compen. achat ar ematt oa t on ptauast dehatmatt ylivd ymy destys.lyf hti snow cantenat try vechatt aluenn

Wales. It would be a boon to know where he worked.

But he left no

south-east Wales.19 The Book of Taliesin itself was ni Radnorshire ni the

sixteenth century - and, ti seems likely, ni the fifteenth century also - ni aly hands.20 If the combination of good parchment, a practised scribe and good texts si sufficient ot indicate an institutional scriptorium, we again find ourselves looking at the Cistercians, and wishing this time that we knew more about the strongly Welsh abbey of Cwm-hir. *

*

*

In Welsh, as ni French and English, the word Brut (derived from Brutus, the supposed eponym of Britain) came to mean a 'history'. In Welsh, ti Plate 9 NLW, Peniarth 2 (the Book of Taliesin), p. 23

18 Haycock, 'Llyfr Taliesin', 359-60. 19Ibid., 363-7. 02 Ibid., 367-8.

79

Five Ancient Books of Wales

316

developed the further meaning of 'prophecy'. To the Welsh in particular, history and prophecy were complementary. Not until Henry VII came to

C L

the throne ni 1485, fulfilling, it seemed, the ancient prophecies, did political prophecy cease to be a strain n i Welsh poetry. Owain Glyndwr knew this poetry and took prophecy seriously. In July 1403, his fortunes were riding

high. He was ni Carmarthen and sent for Hopcyn ap Tomas 'of Gower', described as master of Brut', to come o t Carmarthen under a safe-conduct

to tell him 'how and of what manner ti should befall of him'? Hopcyn, then an old man, must have had a reputation as an interpreter of prophetic poetry. Hopcyn's answer has been regarded by some historians as one of ingenious self-interest. He foretold that Owain would be captured between Carmarthen and Gower. Whether or not as a consequence of this answer, the fact is that Owain did not go in that direction. Gower, and Hopcyn's

home, were spared the ravage, by both English and Welsh, that laid waste

much of Wales ni the years of Owain's rising. And of greatest moment, given the subject of this chapter, Hopcyn's library survived the war.

In Philadelphia there is a medieval Welsh manuscript of Brut y Brenhinedd.22 The manuscript was unknown to Welsh scholars until the 1960s. It is one of the precious few medieval Welsh manuscripts that has a colophon. From it we learn that the book was written by Hywel Fychan ap

Hywel Goch of Buellt at the command of his master, Hopeyn ap Tomas ab

Einon. This colophon has been the key to several doors. Hopcyn ap Tomas was already known as the subject of praise-poems; the hand of the Phil-

adelphia manuscript was recognized ni several other manuscripts, most

notably the Red Book of Hergest, a book which includes five poems

addressed to Hopcyn.23 The new evidence made fairly certain what had

previously been a suggestion: that the Red Book was written for Hopcyn

ap Tomas.24 The Red Book si the only one of our five books whose making

can be connected to named persons. The Red Book itself may even have

6 eoyova p orooni e net c oc yn t yu

a gos pho obo ne po oe g m ae BydaelynoDroy o2di Kyo as onelgon gantuef periedir agrubio al maveduo gynot

N s t u t i oa bg oen

i n yur a it oe gobel ห "างเ น.V roD c ti int yueut chenor C i n ou tm o nf o oy

egluys vac pota t yuethaus. atl

by Eurys .I Rowlands ni Nodiadau ar y traddodiad moliant a'r cywydd',

(1962-3), 217-43 (220-2); on the scribes, se G. Charles-Edwards,

s

e t c l c u D d 11tMNU a f mf tasie Ti n bg

w

a u ac 1pot is on deos yumunot .a ty g ovzmao2k oyz , A rpe mact i n.

e ut u ry ont erot

vuyon. alcuelly y

p e et b y20111. p ami 2

sednt ahollariar

)c ar losone T r a o r o2 0 c h ewat Oc e.udthp ar n aphot i

tilyned aocuchut

ч о г о всупетись всб а

LIC, 7

"The scribes of the

Red Book of Hergest', NLWJ, 21 (1989-90), 246-56. The name of the book derives

from its late medieval home at Hergest, near Kington; on the descent of the Red Book, see Prys Morgan, 'Glamorgan and the Red Book', Morgannwg, 2 (1978), 42-60. 42 The suggestion was made by G. J. Williams, TLIM, pp. 11-14, 147-8. On Hopcyn ap Tomas, see Christine James, ""Llwyr wybodau, lên a llyfrau": Hopcyn ap Tomas a'r . T. Edwards (Llandysul, 1994), traddodiad llenyddol Cymraeg' in Cwm Tawe, ed. H

y ur e upour ooyt

l

iyayub ouso I ncount maher ldyorad

Plate 10 Oxford, Jesus College 111 (the Red Book of Hergest), fol. 89%: showing Hywel Fychan taking over from 'Hand 'I

80

าม ไ

clavo lydel' ar ie

21Henry Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd series, I (London, 1827), p. 23.

22Philadclphia, Library Company of Philadelphia, 8680. See B . .F Roberts, U 'n o lawysgrifau Hopcyn ap Tomas o Ynys Dawy', BBCS, 22 (1966-8), 223-8. 23 The fullest description of the Red Book of Hergest remains that by Gwenogvryn Evans in RMWL, ii, pp. 1-29; the poetry si printed ni PBRH; there si valuable comment

ต ร บสนทง ม อน คา มห/าห0นม

Five Ancient Books of Wales had a colophon: a common feature of all five books is that their final

leaves are missing. They have suffered damage characteristic of books whose bindings have been at some stage too loose for too long, or which may even have lost their covers. Some book reviewers like to tell us the weight of a book under review, seldom meaning to be complimentary about the book. I do not know the weight of the Red Book of Hergest. It will be enough to say that ti si by far

the heaviest of the medieval books ni Welsh, the largest ni its dimensions (34 x 21 cm.) and the thickest (362 parchment leaves, originally at least 382). Oddly, its very size exemplifies a bibliographical phenomenon. The largest English vernacular books of the Middle Ages, the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts, are contemporaries of the Red Book. (They are, ti should be said, even larger.) It was an age of the jumbo book.

Five Ancient Books of Wales the cywydd; they must have known what he favoured. But we ought not

perhaps to dismiss the possibility that Hopcyn may also have appreciated the cywydd, and taken steps to have a collection made, consigned however to a lesser (and lost) book. In terms of the production of collections of Welsh literature in the Middle Ages, the Red Book can be seen as a climax. The thirteenth-

century books are generally small in size and in scope. The fourteenth century showed increasing ambition; the White Book of Rhydderch in mid-century (a collection mainly of prose) reached a new level of inclusive-

ness, to be outdone in turn by the great codex of Hywel Fychan and his fellow scribes. But, ni terms of quality of production, the Red Book represents a falling away from the standards of the earlier books.

1382, probabl quei so,

The Red Book was written sometime after 1382, probably quite soon after that date. It was written by Hywel Fychan with the collaboration of two other scribes (see Plate 10).25 Hywel's brief appears to have been to gather into one book the classics of Welsh literature. The book has been described as a one-volume library. To judge by our knowledge of pre-1400 Welsh literature, he successfully collected the best of the prose: the group of

tales which later found fame as the 'Mabinogion', the main historical texts and most of the other narrative texts. Obviously deliberate exclusions were law and religion, doubtless because Hopcyn had these texts in other books.

The inclusions and exclusions of poetry have more interesting implications. There is a large collection of hengerdd, but the poetry of the Book of

Aneirin si quite absent, as si most of that ni h te Book of Taliesin: it must

have been unavailable. There si a good collection of the poetry of the

Gogynfeirdd, poorer however than that of the Hendregadredd Manuscript

for the pre-1282 period. The poetry of the Gogynfeirdd ni the Red Book

begins with a large body of religious poems. Some degree of classification was probably the intention. But the arrangement soon broke down. What

follows si a jumble of praise-poetry, religious poetry and satire, offering an

added interest ni that the undigested blocks may represent distinct sources. Where the Red Book surpasses all other manuscripts si ni the poetry of the fourteenth-century Gogynfeirdd, poets who were contemporaries of Hopcyn ap Tomas himself, including much of their satire. The presence of this large group of the work of the late Gogynfeirdd raises a question about

the gaping absence of the work of their contemporaries, hte earliest of hte

cywyddwyr, of whom Dafydd ap Gwilym might be taken as representative.

The exclusion must have been deliberate. Hopcyn was conservative ni taste. The five bards who sang his praise al opted for the old-fashioned awdl, not

If we had to depend on manuscripts of the period 1400-1550 for our

e should have to speak very disknowledge of pre-1330 Welsh poetry, w missively of .ti The first half of the fifteenth century has left us few Welsh

manuscripts at all: the post-Glyndwr economic depression in Wales was

profound and long-lasting. After the Red Book, there si no significant collection of poetry before about 1450. The poetry collections which began

to appear about the middle of the fifteenth century are far removed ni most respects from our five books. They are generally of paper, not parchment; they are mostly home-made little books, the skills of the scriptorium largely forgotten; what they contain is the poetry of the cywyddwyr, the

poetry of the previous hundred years or so, some of ti even contemporary and autograph; and their texts derive ni the main, I believe, directly from oral tradition. Hengerdd, apart from vaticination, was not copied, nor the

poems of hte Gogynfeirdd. The new tradition, that of hte cywyddwyr ni its full vigour, seems to have swept away interest ni the older one. Such was

the vitality of this new tradition that the need to make written collections

seems not ot have been felt until ti was over ahundred years old. As we move off through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century, the receding view of our five books allows them ot stand out like distant peaks above the intervening ranges and ot show their true scale. They preserve

between them almost al w e have of early Welsh poetry. Antiquaries of the second half of the sixteenth century discerned their value. Before 1600 all

five had begun to be studied and transcribed; the slow dissemination of

their precious contents was under way.

52 G. Charles-Edwards, "The scribes'.

82

83

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

6

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

Kin Pnig apaperious inane afod plas alyad

of the period of manuscript transmission prior to the thirteenth century. The poetry ni these two manuscripts si a main part of that body which

already ni the earliest Welsh treatises on the bardic art (the earliest dates from the 1320s) si called hengerdd, 'ancient poetry'. A second main

ingredient of hengerdd si what has come ot be called s'aga poetry; simple ni form, heroic in mood, mythic ni treatment, the best known si ni two cycles, one centred on Llywarch Hen, the other on Heledd.? Roughly A 1100. Nothing much of ti speaking, hengerdd si Welsh poetry before D survives ni manuscript before about 1250. Aefw snatches did however manage to lodge in the margins of two of the few pre-1100 Welsh manuscripts of Latin texts. The second recognized phase of Welsh poetry, a highly elaborate

years shifted from the Greek manuscripts of the library of Lorenzo de'

development of a central strand ni the hengerdd, the praise-poetry, si that of the Gogynfeirdd.? The Gogynfeirdd were court poets, the greatest of them the poets of Welsh kings and princes ni the last two centuries of independence. Tradition regards as the earliest of them Meilyr (f. 1100-37), court poet of Gruffudd ap Cynan, king of Gwynedd. The dense, mannered style of this poetry could be majestic at its best, as ni the work of

transmitting classical and Christian Greek literature. Wales and Byzantium, there si little ni common, although, as ti happens, the late thirteenth

ni its own time. The work of the Gogynfeirdd si known mainly from two large collections, the Hendregadredd Manuscript (NLW 6680B) of about

ap Gwilym which si to be published in a festschrift for one whose heart has

found a home ni Byzantium. No one holds ni higher regard than Edmund Fryde the value of close scholarship, yet no one would sooner admit the merit of sometimes changing focal length. His own attention has ni recent

Medici ot wider questions of the role of Byzantium ni preserving and

and early fourteenth centuries, a period of intellectual renaissance in Byzantium, was a golden age of recording early vernacular Welsh literature: there was in common at this time at least a consciousness of

preserving a threatened heritage. The Byzantine scholars of the time might, however,

have found more common ground with their counterparts in

Wales of the late sixteenth century. It was then that the Italian Renaissance echoed ni the isolated studies of a few Welsh scholars and ti was then that

Dafydd ap Gwilym, two centuries after his death, became a classic, one whose work was seen ot deserve preservation, like the classics of antiquity, in critically established written texts.

Cynddelw, and ponderous and impenetrable at its worst, and derided even

1300 (with later additions) and the Red Book of Hergest (Oxford, Jesus College 111) of about 1400. A few poems by Cynddelw survive in two thirteenth-century manuscripts, the Black Book of Carmarthen (NLW, Peniarth 1) and NLW, Peniarth .3

The earliest Welsh vernacular books appear together in a burst about

hte middle of the thirteenth century.* W e have poems of Cynddelw written down little more than half a century after his death. The Hendregadredd Manuscript displays something more precocious. This carefully planned collection bringing together poems from Meilyr, the first of the Gogyn-

feirdd, up to laments of 1282 and 1283 and the fall of the dynasty of

The earliest Welsh poetry, associated with the names Taliesin and

Aneirin, si heroic poetry ni which historical characters of the late sixth

century figure. tI survives ni w t o manuscripts, the early-fourteenth-

century Book of Taliesin (NLW, Peniarth 2) and the mid-thirteenthcentury Book of Aneirin (Cardiff, Central Library, 2.81). How much of

this body of poetry si indeed of sixth-century origin remains a debated question (most would say some, some would say none); so does the length

it fi Tr isho si nLands, 017) Wit athsPontin17c : 0. 1.a W

References to works of only a general bearing will be few in number, with preference given to publications in English. 84

Gwynedd, was made within a decade or two of the events which gave it its

coherence. The evidence points towards Strata Florida abbey as the place

of compilation. There, at the same time, one at least of the versions of Brut y Tywysogyon, the chronicle of independent Wales, took its final form. The Hendregadredd Manuscript was a poetic counterpart. While the editor of

kor fohet pre-1283 3 Teher Rowalds, Feaylr Wel Sa Poeryt Cambride,ehW

Gogynfeirdd, the Poets of the Princes', under the general editorship of R. Geraint

Gruffydd, Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion (Cardiff, 1991-6). .J .E Caerwyn Williams, The Poets of the Welsh Princes (Cardiff, 2nd edn., 1994) offers a good introduction.

‡ See Chapter 3

85

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym the Hendregadredd Manuscript probably worked mainly from written

sources (varying patterns of orthography suggest this), he must also have had the abundance of oral tradition to draw on. The circumstances of making the Hendregadredd Manuscript, in commemoration of an epoch,

were exceptional; so too was the recording of Welsh poetry in manuscript so soon after composition. The Red Book of Hergest, probably written in the last years of the fourteenth century, si a huge compilation, larger by far than any other medieval Welsh book. It assembles a large part of the then extant Welsh

literature, prose and poetry. Obvious exclusions are religious prose and

law. The patron - Hopcyn ap Tomas, as seems fairly certain, of Ynysforgan, near Swansea - doubtless had collections of these in other books.

The other striking absence is of the most popular poetry of the previous

half-century, the poetry of the cywyddwyr.

After 1283 the bards had to make do with more modest patrons. They found them in the resilient elements of the Welsh upper class which was discovering a new modus vivendi as officials of the English. The tradition of the Gogynfeirdd persisted, but in decline, except perhaps for satire. By the chance survival of a large collection in a single manuscript, the Red Book o f Hergest, the late Gogynfeirdd stand unrivalled in this left-handed art. What survived o f their conventions and technique bevond the days o f the

Gogynfeirdd did so by becoming absorbed into something new. The introduction to the editio princeps of the poetry of Dafydd ap

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

Gwilym has been widely translated. But much of his particular genius has to be taken on trust by the non-Welsh reader; as might the reader of - to give a deliberate example - a paraphrase of the poetry of John Donne.

No dates ni Dafydd ap Gwilym's life are known; no documentary references to him have been discovered. The poems that can be securely dated by internal evidence fall in the 1340s. He died young. Three contemporaries - Madog Benfras, Gruffudd Gryg and lolo Goch, older or

younger members of the first generation of the cywyddwyr - composed

elegies to Dafydd. For two centuries, the two richest centuries of Welsh poetry, the cywydd, and the cywyddwyr, were dominant and, for more than another hundred years of slow degeneration, provided the chief mode of the bardic tradition. By 1700 the tradition was virtually dead, and with ti the profession of bard. The patronage upon which it depended had withered as the gentry became Anglicized. But the sparkle of the golden centuries had long gone.

The cywydd as a form, however, survived and, to this day, has remained one of the minor and occasionally important channels of Welsh poetry. Dafydd ap Gwilym lived in what was a golden age of Welsh bookproduction. To his and the two or three preceding generations we owe the

manuscripts which have preserved most of what we prize of early and medieval Welsh literature. Few of the later manuscripts match those of this

period in quality of production. Dafydd, and some of his contemporaries, lolo Goch and Gruffudd Gryg certainly, had had clerical as well as bardic

hte poeryt fo Dard aer

training. Transmission of their poems from autograph manuscripts was

word has since then been used many times of the change, more clear cut than any other in its history, which came over Welsh poetry in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. Aspects of the revolution were a new

1450, a century or so after Dafydd's death - some one hundred survive w e find ni them next to nothing of the work of Dafydd ap Gwilym or any

Gwilym, ni 1789, speaks of a revolution' ni the poetry of the bards." The

metre, the cywydd deuair hirion, commonly called the cywydd; new subjectmatter, one which was ni the air throughout western Europe, with love as its essence; a new freedom of language - more colloquial forms, more

English loan-words; and a new tone, often ironic. The new poets became known as cywyddwyr. Even in its first flush, the new began to assimilate

elements of the older tradition of hte Gogynfeirdd; most significantly, the cywydd in turn gradually became a medium of praise-poetry. The revolu-

tion is associated with one poet above all others, and was so already by his contemporaries: Dafydd ap Gwilym. The popularity of Dafydd's cywydd-

au seems to have been a main reason for the rapid adoption of the new

form, whether or not he was ni fact the first to make general use of it. Since

feasible. And yet, looking at the surviving manuscripts earlier than about

indeed of the early cywyddwyr. In one manuscript alone, the Red Book of Hergest, is any of their work preserved as a primary text: a handful of poems by three of Dafydd's contemporaries, lolo Goch, Llywelyn Goch and Gruffudd Gryg, including one solitary cywydd. Hopcyn ap Tomas, the

patron, was evidently conservative in taste. While his great book was

planned as a repository of the classics of Welsh literature, the cywydd may 6 The authoritative edition si Gwaith Dafyad ap Gwilym, ed. Thomas Parry (Cardiff,

1952), referred to henceforth as GDG. Unless otherwise indicated, references will be to the first edition. The section discussing the manuscripts, without which this paper could not have been contemplated, is not reprinted in later editions (2nd 1963, 3rd 1979). The

poems ni Parry's edition are translated, ni their entirety or ni large selections, ni .J P.

the appearance of a scholarly edition of his poetry ni 1952, Dafydd ap

Clancy, Medieval Welsh Lyrics (London, 1965); Rachel Bromwich, Dafydd ap Gwilym: . L. Loomis. A Selection of Poems (Llandvsul. 1982, new edn. London. 1985): a n d R

5Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym, ed. Owen Jones and Wiliam Owen (London,

Dafydd ap Gwilym: The Poems (Binghamton, NY, 1982). Rachel Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym (Cardiff, 1986), covers many of the important questions

1789).

86

concerning Dafydd ap Gwilym and the early cywyddwyr. 87

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

have been too jumped-up a form, and the new subject-matter too modish,

equipped him to write. fI his autograph survives, these englynion are its likeliest representative. The superscription names the poet as 'Dauid LIwyd uab Gwilym Gam'. The unusual, but correct, form of the name si certainly

too tainted by foreign influence, ot have found favour with the aged

evidence that the poet was not yet the universal 'Dafydd ap Gwilym'; it could

ni the period 1350-1450. Poetic forms had varying status ni the bardic tradition, status established largely by age, with the awdl at the apex. This class distinction is reflected in the manuscripts. In the Hendregadredd Manuscript, englynion are kept apart from the more highly esteemed awdlau; Lewys Glyn Cothi, the fifteenth-century bard, separates awdlau and cywyddau in his autograph manuscripts; in manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries the barrier between the strict metres and free metres was very slow to break down. The exclusion of cywyddau from the Red Book is not an unparalleled phenomenon. Apart from the few examples among the primary texts of the Red Book, our only other pre-1450 examples of the poems of the cywyddwyr occur as

secondary texts, that is to say, texts added in unused space, on blank leaves and in margins of manuscripts whose primary contents are of a different

nature. It si ni this manner that the earliest texts of poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym have survived. The earliest are on the leaves of two famous manuscripts, both from Dafydd's own area, Ceredigion, both probably produced by Strata Florida abbey scribes, and both, at the time the additions

were made, belonging to a family of his patrons: the Hendregadredd

Manuscript and the White Book of Rhydderch. In the second quarter of the fourteenth century, a variety of poems to leuan Llwyd ab leuan were added

on blank pages ni hte Hendregadredd Manuscript? Aslo added was na elegy

to leuan's wife Angharad, by Dafydd ap Gwilym, a tour de force ni which Dafydd demonstrated his mastery of the venerable awdl form, composed, according to later manuscript tradition, while Angharad was alive: elegies to hte living were a recognized genre ni the intimate circles of the Welsh bards. There is a second poem by Dafydd ni the same manuscript, a series of

englynion o t the rood at Carmarthen.& These englynion occur ni no other

manuscript. leuan Llwyd's known floruit extends to 1344. Both poems could have entered the manuscript during Dafydd's lifetime. The elegy is in the anglicana script of a practised scribe, the englynion in the careful but

awkward textura of a less practised writer. Dafydd's education would have 7 See Chapter 12.

§ Part of the mutilated text is printed ni LIH, pp. 357-8. See Thomas Parry's remarks in GDG, 2nd edn., 556. [Ann Parry Owen, Gwaith Llywelyn Brydydd Hoddnant, Dafvdd

also be interpreted as a personal touch. The home of leuan Llwyd and Angharad is recognized as that which was most closely associated with the new poetry of the fourteenth century. Their son, Rhydderch (c.1325-c.1399), was famed as a patron of bards. He was celebrated, when young, by Dafydd ap Gwilym. It was for Rhydderch, about 1350, that the White Book of Rhydderch appears to have been compiled, a book in which for the first time, so far was we know, an attempt was made to gather together a large corpus of Welsh narrative prose, including what later reached far beyond Wales as the 'Mabinogion'? Added on a blank page of the White Book ni a fourteenth-century hand are four englynion by Dafydd ap Gwilym, "The Kiss', also unknown from later manuscripts.' Why, a hundred years after his death, there should not have been, so far as we can tell, any collection of the work of Dafydd ap Gwilym or of any of the cywyddwyr, raises a large question. A possible answer, incontrovertible but unsatisfactory, is that manuscript collections already existed

but are now all lost. The textual evidence suggests another answer. We

need ot look at the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century bards ni their milieu. Ysgrifennu cerdd, 'to write a poem',

si an acceptable idiom ni modern

Welsh for the creative act. But canu, to' sing', not ysgrifennu, si the verb ni the older and still current idiom. Side by side with the medieval profession of bard there existed the profession of musician. Poems were sung, to instru-

mental accompaniment, normally that of a harp. But how they were sung si not known. The art still flourished at the beginning of the seventeenth century; awdlau, cywyddau and englynion were still sung. Many bards, including Dafydd ap Gwilym (as we gather from one of his own poems) were also musicians and might sing their own poems, probably ot their own accom-

paniment. But hte bards were not necessarily either musicians or performers. There was a class of professional performers, known as datgeiniaid, whose part was to know poems and be able to sing them on request. Bardic tracts place the status of the datgeiniad below that of the bard and the musician."

Some patrons no doubt patronized the bards simply ni order ot uphold hte

family name. Others were connoisseurs, or were flattered to be thought so;

°SaChapet R . Geranit Grufyd, E'ngyloin yCuasn yb Dayfd pa Gw ylm i,'

. .J Bowen, 'Dafydd pa Gwilym adatblygiad ycywydd', LIC, 8 " On datgeiniaid see D

edin noeHlunar si ti orhet enht, 19. She hoW s that dites eh Tiestred posi

(1964), 1-32 (29-30); Eurys .I Rowlands, Poems of the Cywyddwyr (Dublin, 1976), pp.

88

89

Carmarthen, not Chester as had previously been supposed.]

xi-xx.

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

some were themselves amateur poets and musicians. Among the most inter-

We arrive at the hypothesis that there were no manuscript collections of the poetry of the cywyddwyr earlier than about 1450 for the reason that oral tradition was so predominant. The evidence of the texts can be taken

esting of the praise-poems of the cywyddwyr are those to such patrons, poems which go beyond praise of bravery, leadership and hospitality to picture a world of the mind shared by patron and poet. Shared pleasures included books. There are references to reading history, chronicles, genealogy, much of this embraced by the word ystoria, a word which implied written rather than

oral narrative. Hengerdd, ancient poetry, si also mentioned ni connection with reading. But although we meet references to patrons who wish to hear

cywyddau, even, specifically, cywyddau by Dafydd ap Gwilym, there is no suggestion that these cywyddau were associated with books.4' For such entertainment one presumably turned not to books but to bards or datgeiniaid.

The point we are coming to si that transmission of the poetry of the

cywyddwyr was oral. Learning the best poems of earlier poets must have been an important part of bardic training; learning as large a repertoire as possible

was incumbent on the datgeiniad. Our lack of early manuscripts can be interpreted as evidence of the vigour of the oral tradition of the new poetry. There may even have been a reluctance on the part of bards, and more so, of datgeiniaid, to commit to books poems which were their stock in trade. Praise-poems might be learnt for their masterliness or their originality or for the fame of their subjects, but otherwise their appeal would have been

particular and local. Much of the poetry of the cywyddwyr on the other hand,

and most of Dafydd ap Gwilym's, while ti might have been intended ni the first place for a particular audience,

was universal in its appeal.

The

datgeiniad, to whom the poems were valueless unless he had them by heart, would not have welcomed the circulation of his repertoire in books, while, to the poet, living memory was a more flattering memorial than a written page. A hint of deliberate restrictiveness occurs in an carly-sixteenth-century manu-

script of poetry, Llanstephan ,7 where a scribe advises the owner, because there are many good things ni ,ti t'o keep the book from datgeiniaid'. sI . F . Roberts, "Ystoria', BBCS, 26 (1974 6), 13-20, shows how the word ystoria 21 B

connoted written narrative, and gives illuminating examples from cywyddau. For other

examples of the mutual interest of bard and patron in books see Eurys .I Rowlands, Poems of the Cywyddwyr and 'Bardic lore and education', BBCS, 32 (1985), 143-55. 31 Rowlands, Poems of the Cywyddwyr, p. xvii; Rowlands, 'Bardic lore', 147-50. 41 A striking example, harking back to the first generation of the cywyddwyr, of the way in which audiences might demand a favourite poem is offered by lolo Goch's elegy

to Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen, see GIG, pp. 93-5, lines 21-6 and 83 4. Calls for

poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym are referred to by the late-fifteenth-century poets Hywel Dafi and leuan Tew: *Crwth eilwaith croww a thelyn / cywydd i Forfudd a fyn' (Rowlands, Poems of the Cywyddwyr, pp. xvii-xvill); 'galw am gerdd fab Gwilym gynt'

(D. H . Evans, "Cyfeiriad at Dafydd ap Gwilym', BBCS, 23 (1985), 156-7).

is The note si by Siôn Wiliam, a 'poor chaplain', ot John Lewys, owner of the book:

yn wir dewedaf i chwi Sir John kadw du lyfr yn dda rag dadgainiait kanys ymay indo ef

lawer o bethau da'. See RMWL, ii, p. 440.

90

ni corroboration. Manuscript texts of the poetry of the pre-1450 cywyddwyr, the early ones ni particular, are pervaded by what look like signs of oral transmission. There are verbal variants which are most simply ex-

plained as mishearing or as unconscious substitution of non-structural

words, words, that is, which are not necessary for sense or for cynghanedd: there is omission of couplets or m o r e extensive sections, a n d c o n t a m i n a -

tion by additions from other poems similar in subject; and, most tellingly,

there is, n i sections of poems which lack obvious logical development,

frequent variation of the sequence of couplets, or of englynion. Multiple attributions are also symptomatic. While one should allow for the occa-

sional scribe who thought he could improve the order in which he received a poem, the degree of variation of line-order in the surviving texts of some

rt amonetr o +phanybsuposnig htathety devireem

distinct crystallizations from oral tradition. 61

There are few poems ni manuscript which are explicitly said to have

been taken down orally, ar dafod leferydd. They mostly occur in manuscripts of late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century date, though a few such references are as late as the eighteenth. None seems to occur much

earlier than the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The implication,

clearly, si that by this time transmission by manuscript had become the 61 Much evidence for oral transmission of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poems is presented in G D G . t h o u g h n o t t h e v a r i a t i o n s in l i n e - o r d e r . D. R . J o h n s t o n in h i s e d i t i o n o f D a f v d d

ap Gwilym's contemporary, Gwaith Iolo Goch, does indicate line-order, bewilderingly

variable for some poems; he observes that most of lolo Goch's poems show signs of oral

transmission and makes valuable comment on the features of such transmission (pp. xxvii-xxvill). A lecture by Dafydd Johnston at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and

Celtic Studies, "Trosglwyddiad Ilafar' (on 14 May 1994) brought added weight to the arguments for the prevalence of oral transmission. I am grateful to him for comment on

a draft of this paper.

" D. J. Bowen, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym a datblygiad y cywydd', 29, quotes a number of ' yn examples. Here are others, all late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century in date: H o wawd yr hen brydydd. a ddyscais i ar y mynydd ar fynhafodlyferydd' (Cardiff, Central Library 2.83 = RMWL 6, p. 131); 'gwaith brys oddiar dafod lyferydd' (NLW

Peniarth 72, p. 360); "Nis gwyddai'r dyn ai dyfod imi ar dafod leferydd pwy ai cant'

(BL, Add. 14866 = RMWL 29, fol. 262*); John Brwynog ai kant, i wyr ai doedodd o ai orwy[r] ai schryfenodd o' (BL, Add. 14898 = RMWL 46, fol. 87). David Johns in 1587 in a note in Add. 14866. fol. 194Y. shows awareness o f the textual problems created by oral

transmission: Dafydd ap Gwilym medd llawer copi. Gruffydd Lloyd ap Dd ap Einion

medd ereill. Ef a allei i bob un o honynt ganu ri un destyn a bod yna rai o benillion or ddau gowydd. Hwy ydiw no chowyddau Dafydd, ond ir oedd ef yn i gwneythyr yn hwy nag ydynt. Achos am i mel-lyssed, foi dysgid ar dafod ag a goppiwyd llawer oddiwrth un ni fedrei mor cwbwl weithiau.' 91

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym norm, recording from oral tradition something exceptional, and that ni

earlier times such comment would have been uncalled for. To judge by the survivors, the earliest attempts to make manuscript collections of the work of Dafydd ap Gwilym were ni south Wales, more particularly, ni south-east Wales. The small scale of these collections ni itself suggests an absence of substantial earlier ones. There are four collections of the second half of the fifteenth century, three of them extant - three modest little books - and a fourth, evidently a much grander book, now destroyed. They are textually independent.

The earliest of the four is

probably NLW, Peniarth 57 part i (pp. 1-78, formerly Hengwrt 261, now

bound with former Hengwrt 262), a small paper book (see Plate 11). Two scribes shared the writing of pp. 1-63, which contain a group of poems by

the early cywyddwyr including five by Dafydd ap Gwilym. Together with

these poems si a body of poems which falls, ni os far as ti can be dated, ni the period 1400 40. Among these later poems si a group by Guto ap Siancyn, three of them addressed to Rhys, abbot of Strata Florida 1433-41, and two to Siancyn Havard of Brecon, fl. 1399-1426, including

one which commemorates a pilgrimage by Siancyn to Santiago. Contents,

script and the tenuous evidence of watermarks allow Peniarth 57 part i a

date .c 1450.18

1 06990-1 3yf or ( 9. 29m

5 0 2 1 625n4 2 a

9

Sangolcut

NLW, Peniarth 48, an eight-leaf fragment on parchment, contains seven

cywyddau attributed ot Dafydd ap Gwilym.! The script si careful but

irregular; several of the poems, as si evident from changes of pen and ink, were written one by one on different occasions. The impression given si of an amateur scribe, a bard perhaps, collecting texts from various sources,

below. Our eight surviving leaves had yb hte sixteenth century acquired

n

u d si

on s un d mi se

protective covers from another manuscript (now pp. 1/2 and 19/20) written

ni the reign of Henry VI. On one of these leaves is part of atract ni Welsh on holding courts in the shires of Carmarthen and Cardigan. This provides

hte only clue to h te place of origin of hte collection of Dafydd's

Plate 1 NLW, Peniarth 57, .p 6

1 S5, r eriety, Suntonobers(C odit 121),T heHeniketonofC ad othyLevisTheoidest known ( 90- econtentsofthei sheavesarepritedinTim

( 1530, 3: 50heu sdnl ai edtoRty,andseCod,prSuderAr cgihht m ne alcks itsen anaration. tI ay wle have ben atributedot Dayradni 93

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym cywyddau.20 Because of the appearance of the Peniarth 48 poems, as a

group, in manuscripts which he derives from what he designates the 'northern archetype' (cynsail y gogleda), Thomas Parry treats Peniarth 48

as another derivative from that stock. But, as we have seen, there are reasons for taking Peniarth 48 to be the ultimate written source of the

group of poems it contains. The question is one which will surface again ni

2 Neil prymbo 699l 9

connection with Dr John Davies's vetustus codex. The third and in many respects the most interesting of the three

fifteenth-century manuscripts si NLW, Peniarth 45 (see Plate 12). This si another small paper book, but a thick one, now bound in two volumes, comprising 240 folios in all, written probably about 14802.1 Twenty-five poems attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym are arranged in two numbered

sequences. The twenty-five include two which find themselves among Thomas Parry's rejects. The remainder of the manuscript contains poems by other early cywyddwyr, a few even earlier poems and a large body of poetry by contemporary bards, of the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Aremarkable fact about this contemporary poetry is that most of

ti has every appearance of being autograph. The internal evidence of Peniarth 54 itself makes a prima-facie case for accepting as autograph the poems ni ti by the following: Dafydd Epynt, Huw Cae Llwyd, Rhys

i ni another Dyfnwal, Rhys Fardd, Hywel Dafi (there are also poems by hm

hand), Hywel Swidwal and Dafydd y Nant. For all of these except Rhys

Fardd and Dafydd y Nant there si corroboration from other manuscripts

that the poems by them in Peniarth 54 are indeed autograph.22

Peniarth 54 seems to be witness, one of several (the others do not concern us here), to a striking transition. Until about 1450 the work of the

cywyddwyr is, as we have seen, virtually absent from the surviving manu-

script tradition. Here, a generation later, we meet not only retrospective

collections of their work but collections also of poems of contemporaries,

ni autograph. Abarrier, a taboo almost, seems ot have been broken. The

written text has suddenly come to be taken for granted - at least, ni south

69

02 These outer leaves bear dol foliation 49' and '78'. The name "Dafydd pa Gwilym'

written ni white paint on p. 02 ni a sixteenth-century hand I take ot be a title for the

contents of the enclosed eight leaves, not (as RMWL) an attribution of the poem on

Plate 12 NLW, Peniarth 54, p. 96

Dafi. Dafydd Epynt's hand also occurs ni Peniarth 60, and Huw Cae Llwyd's ni

95

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic:

Dafydd ap Gwilym

Wales. In the case of Peniarth 54, someone - a patron seems more likely than a bard - seems to have recognized the virtue not only of writing poems down but of going to the fountain-head, to the poets themselves. 32 The anonymous main scribe of the book, who copied all the Dafydd ap

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

manuscripts are ni the hands of known bards. Gwilym Tew in NLW, Peniarth 51, his commonplace-book, has two cywyddau, and Hywel Dafi

in NLW, Peniarth 67, a large collection of poetry, much of ti his own, has

one.28 NLW, Peniarth 52, which has been attributed (questionably) to the

Gwilym cywyddau, was perhaps also a bard, working for a patron, a bard

hand of the bard Dafydd Nanmor (it contains a group of his poems)

with access to oral or possibly manuscript tradition. The book includes

includes two cywyddau by Dafydd ap Gwilym.29 Peniarth 52 is possibly a north Wales manuscript. NLW, Llanstephan 27, the Red Book of

poems to the Herberts and to the Vaughans, among them post-Banbury elegies. The patron could no doubt be counted among the followers of

these families ni south-east Wales. The largest group of poems addressed to a single family is to leuan ap Gwilym Fychan ap Llywelyn and his

father, of Peutun, near Brecon. It includes elegies to both and a cywydd to

leuan by Huw Cae Llwyd when the poet was on a pilgrimage to Rome in

1475.24 Brecknockshire and the adjoining parts of neighbouring counties

(to use anachronistic territorial units) represent the area of interest. The destroyed manuscript which contained a collection of Dafydd ap

Gwilym's poems, lost with other manuscripts from the Wynnstay library ni a fire ni a London bookbinder's shop ni 1810, was the White Book of

Hergest, known to have been a substantial parchment book containing a wealth of prose and poetry.? Part, at least, was written by Lewys Glyn Cothi, one of the great fifteenth-century bards and a noted scribe, the first Welsh bard to have left us orderly collections of his own work in autograph.26 The White Book included two cywyddau by Lewys, dated after 1469, to Watcyn Fychan (Vaughan) of Hergest, near Kington. It was

probably at Watcyn Fychan's wish that twenty-seven poems by Dafydd ap

Talgarth, a collection of religious prose, is a fine parchment manuscript

from the same scriptorium as the Red Book of Hergest. Like the more famous Red Book, ti may have left its native Tawe valley as part of goods

forfeited to Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretwr (Tretower), after 146320. It was probably already ni the Brecon area when, late ni the fifteenth century, three cywyddau by Dafydd ap Gwilym (each of them also ni the White Book of Hergest) were added on a flyleaf.

By about 1500, sixty-eight poems attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym,

almost half the current canon, were represented ni the ten known manuscripts. Of the sixty-eight, five, ni Thomas Parry's view, are spuriously attributed. Only six of the sixty-eight occur ni more than one manuscript, an indication of the random nature of the process of accumulation. And only one occurs in more than two: Y' ferch anllad a'm gwadodd' ("The wanton girl who denied me'), a short, subtle, erotic and blasphemous cywydd, not much favoured in later manuscripts, is known from Peniarth 57, the White Book of Hergest and the Red Book of Talgarth. It is noteworthy that these early manuscripts contain a high proportion of the

Gwilym were copied into the book. He becomes the first probable possessor of a written corpus of Dafydd's work to whom we can put a name. The texts of these poems are best preserved in transcripts which Dr

shorter poems in the canon.

John Davies of Mallwyd made ni NLW, Peniarth 49, naming his source.?7

includes thirty-eight poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym."' tI si a small paper

Cywyddau by Dafydd ap Gwilym also occur ni small numbers ni

four other late-fifteenth-century manuscripts, three of them again from Brecknockshire or its adjacent counties. Two if not three of the 32 Two contemporary added notes in Peniarth 54 which seem to be directed more at

the interested amateur than at a bard are: 'Ilyfry kyfrwyddyd yw hwnn. Pwy bynac a vynno kerdd keised yn hwnn ca ef ei keiff yn dda' (p. 21) and Pwy bynnac a vynno dyscy kerdd davod dysged y llyfr hwnn yn ddyval' (p. 179). In effect they say: this book si the key to the art of poetry. A bard would learn by other means.

24Gwaith Huw Cae Lwyd ca Eraill, ed. Leslie Harries (Cardiff, 1953), pp. 86-7.

The streams broaden ni the first half of the sixteenth century. NLW, Llanstephan 6, a south Wales manuscript written perhaps about 1520,

book written by one hand, that of a practised scribe with an eye for the presentation: there are titles, rubrics and drawings. Another south Wales manuscript, one with a close textual relationship to Llanstephan 6, was the

lost book of William Mathew of the Castle, Llandaf. Forty-three cywyddau

of Dafydd ap Gwilym were transcribed ni Peniarth 49 by Dr John Davies, probably ni the 1590s, noting the source. John Davies, ni a letter to Owen

Wynn of Gwydir ni 1639, describes William Mathew's book sa written ni 82 On these two manuscripts see RMWL. The text of Peniarth 76 si printed ni

' Llyfr Gwyn o 52 On the White Book of Hergest see J. E. Caerwyn Williams, Y Hergest a Llanstephan 3', BBCS, 10 (1939 41), 120 4.

Peniarth MS. 67, transcribed by E . Stanton Roberts (Cardiff, 1918).

probably the first Welsh bard to refer to his own poems as something to be read, see Rowlands 'Bardic lore', 150. 72 See RMWL; GDG, pp. cxii cxviii. The text of Peniarth 49 si printed ni Peniarth 49, ed. Thomas Parry (Cardiff, 1929).

associated with Hopcyn ap Tomas, see Prys Morgan, 'Glamorgan and the Red Book',

62 .E D . Jones, A Welsh pencerdd's manuscripts', Celtica, 5(1960), 17-27. H e si also

96

03 On the probable descent of the Red Book of Hergest and other manuscripts

Morgannwe, 22 (1978), 42-60.

13 Se RMWL; GDG, pp. cxii cxili. The text of Llanstephan 6 si printed ni

Llanstephan MS. 6, transcribed by E . Stanton Roberts (Cardiff, 1916).

97

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

paper with an ould hand', words which suggest a date earlier than 1550.32 He had, he explained, 'gotte copie of the one half when I dwelt in those

tilted the evidence. But in the first half of the sixteenth century, north Wales, more particularly north-east Wales, quickly makes up ground. Several collections contain poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym. NLW, Peniarth 182, the commonplace-book of Huw Pennant, priest and poet, brother of Thomas Pennant the abbot of Basingwerk, dated about 1514, contains three of Dafydd's poems to Ifor Hael.3 Three large collections not much

parts' and had recently tried to borrow the book again. William Mathew's book may have contained eighty or ninety cywyddau ni al. To judge by

John Davies's transcript, this book also included titles. Provision of titles for Dafydd ap Gwilym's poems, as in Llanstephan 6 and William

Mathew's book, was an innovation. It was an obvious help to readers, not

to mention collectors. Titles became a general feature of later manuscript

collections. Many of the titles ni Thomas Parry's edition are first met ni

these two early collections from south Wales.

The other important collection of the first half of the sixteenth century

was even larger. It contained more than a hundred poems attributed to

Dafydd ap Gwilym (ninety-nine of them are ni Thomas Parry's edition). Again, we know of this lost collection through the transcripts and variant readings taken from ti by Dr John Davies in Peniarth 493.3 These were taken ex vetusto codice membranaceo scripto circa 1526'. B y 1526 parchment cost much more than paper; parchment books were a luxury. The lost book must have been born of the desire of some person of means living around 1526 for a complete Dafydd ap Gwilym. Lacunae in John Davies's

transcripts suggest that the vetustus codex was already slightly damaged. The vetustus, besides being the largest collection of the poems known to

have existed by that date, si the earliest datable representative of a stock

from which most of the large later north Wales collections drew. Thomas Parry derives these collections from his nebulous 'northern archetype'. The vetustus had a cognate, recognizable in later mutually independent derivatives which indicate a collection very close in sequence and text to John Davies's exemplar. W e can speak of, and could re-create, a vetustus archetype. It stands at the head of the traceable written tradition. It had, however, already absorbed the group of Dafydd's poems found in Peniarth 48. This is probably the earliest instance we can point to of what seems to have been a feature of the manuscript transmission of the poems: the small tributary feeding the larger stream. While all the immediate descendants of

the vetustus and its cognate are north Wales manuscripts, it may be premature to conclude that the vetustus archetype was necessarily a

compilation of north Wales origin. It has to be said that there is an almost total absence of any kind of pre-

1500 poetry manuscripts from north Wales. Oral tradition may have

prevailed longer; this seems likelier than that fate should so much have

32.NLW 14529E, fols 12-13. 33 Sixty poems are transcribed fully, numbers 97 to 138 ni Peniarth 49, while fifty

poems which John Davies had already transcribed from other sources (between

numbers 1and 78) were collated with the vetustus codex. 98

later ni date each include more than a dozen of his poems: B L, Add. 14967,

probably copied from manuscripts of Gutun Owain (d. c.1500), a bard and scribe closely connected to Valle Crucis abbey; Cardiff, Central Library 34. (RMWL 5), written by Elis Gruffydd, the chronicler, ni 1527 while he was custodian of Sir Robert Wingfield's palace in London; and BL, Add.

14997, an anonymous anthology of love-poetry.35 Illustrative of a tend-

ency, in the last-mentioned anthology half the poems attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym are spurious. It is worth noting that, in choice of Dafydd's

poems and in their texts, none of these manuscripts with north-east Welsh connections shows any close relationship to the vetustus codex and its

Some mid-sixteenth-century poetry manuscripts which include Dafydd

ap Gwilym's poems might be mentioned, but at the cost of slowing our story. We turn instead to the last three decades of the century, to north

Wales and to the company of Welsh humanists. Several of these scholars devotedly collected Welsh poetry. Three stand out for the importance of their collections of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym, collections which run from 120 to 150 ni number. Thomas Wiliems, compiler of the great Latin-

Welsh dictionary, collected Dafydd's work ni Cardiff, Central Library 4.330 (Havod 26), around 1574; Dr John Davies, whose invaluable

transcripts in Peniarth 49 have been mentioned more than once, probably began his collection in the 1590s; and Jaspar Gryffyth, one-time warden of

Ruthin School, made his collection about 1590 in two companion volumes,

long separated - Bangor, University of Wales, Gwyneddon ,3 and NLW, Llanstephan 120 - arranging the poems in alphabetical order of first line,63

43 See RMWL. For Huw Pennant, see DWB.

53 On these three manuscripts see RMWL. Add. 14967 includes prose texts derived

from NLW 3026 (Mostyn 88), written by Gutun Owain, and a large collection of his . Bachellery, L'Oeuvre poétique de Gutun poctry, by far the most important extant (see E Owain, 2vols (Paris, 1950-1), ,I p. 19), perhaps deriving from Gutun's autograph. This

manuscript was later owned by Edward ap Roger of Ruabon, the antiquary, who made

additions to it. Some of the diaspora of the Valle Crucis library seem to have passed

through Edward ap Roger's hands. Another important poetry collection from northeast Wales which includes Dafydd ap Gwilym's work si NLW 17114B (Gwysaney 25). But its date is not before 1512' as argued by Bachellery (L'Oeuvre poétique, ,I pp. 21-2) but rather, about 1560. . Ovenden. Jaspar 63 On all three scholars. see DWB. On Jaspar Gruffyth, see R

Gryffyth and his books,' British Library Journal, 02 (1994), 107-39. 99

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym

Thomas Wiliems and Jaspar Gryffyth both evidently derived the greater

Huw Machno and Ifan John, two bards associated with Gwydir, may have been made for Owen Wynn.42 Another similar collection of about the same

part of their collections from the cognate of John Davies's vetustus codex. 73 It was John Davies who, in the naming of sources, collation of texts and recording of variant readings, approached what might have been a critical

edition. In succeeding generations, as the production of collections of Dafydd ap Gwilym's work proliferated, critical standards failed to advance; texts degenerated while the corpus swelled. Peniarth 49 itself was

unfortunately almost unknown to later scholars and scribes.38 Three centuries later, it was Thomas Parry who asserted its authority. Two other collections associated with sixteenth-century clergymen are

noteworthy. Cardiff, Central Library 2.114 (RMWL 7), a book of almost a thousand pages, was written at the court of the bishop of Bangor about 1565, evidently for Richard ap Gruffudd, 'vicar of Woking; ti includes over seventy of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poems, mostly, ti seems, derived from

the vetustus matrix.39 David Johns, vicar of Llanfair Dyffryn Clwyd, was

familiar with the vicar of Woking's big anthology. He was a man of letters more than a scholar, a poet in Welsh and Latin. In 1587 he made for a friend of his a large anthology of Welsh poetry, more methodically classified than the vicar of Woking's, including a selection of Dafydd ap

date ni NLW 3066 (Mostyn 212) was probably made for Robert Wynn of Berth-ddu, a cousin of Owen Wynn. Both collections are n i the main derived from the vetustus stock.

No one better represents the suppliers of copies to the gentry than

Humphrey Davies, vicar of Darowen from 1577 until his death ni 1635, a

noted scribe, many of his manuscripts surviving." He was known for his stock of poetry ("there was never a poem of which he did not have a copy') and, clearly, as a provider for others. Two begging poems to Humphrey Davies asking for books of poems have been preserved. One of them, by the bard Gruffudd Phylip on behalf of Richard Vaughan of Corsygedol,

embodies a request for a book of a hundred cywyddau by Dafydd ap Gwilym. Humphrey Davies responded appropriately. The resulting book, badly mutilated, is now BL, Add. 14933. Humphrey Davies's source was the vetustus codex itself, probably via John Davies.45 Other manuscripts written by Humphrey Davies also contain poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym:

NLW 3056 (Mostyn 160), also probably written for one of the Corsygedol family; and NLW, Brogyntyn I.2, written in 1599 for Theodore Price, later

Gwilym's poems.40 It si David Johns who best and most neatly captures

sub-dean of Westminster.64

which one can see 'the scale of the inventiveness of the inspiration of

Much as Humphrey Davies produced books of Welsh poetry for the gentry of north Wales, an equally productive Glamorgan scribe did so for the gentry of south Wales. Six large collections of poetry survive ni the

the essence of Dafydd's genius, ni a comment for his friend on a poem ni Dafydd ap Gwilym's muse, excelling ni my opinion all others' 14

The large collections of Dafydd ap Gwilym's work made by the humanist scholars were paralleled by large collections different in kind. These

were the collections made or copied for gentlemen by scribes. Dafydd ap Gwilym had become an author for the gentleman's library (for a generation or two, before the gentlemen forgot their Welsh). The interest

of Owen Wynn of Gwydir ni a complete collection si evident from the reply sent by John Davies ni 1639 (see p. 97 above). The large collection of

Dafydd ap Gwilym's poems ni Bodleian Library, Welsh e1., written by 37Sec GDG, pp. cxi-cxxiv. Thomas Parry did not notice that Gwyneddon 3 was ni the

hand of Llywelyn Siôn (fl. 1585-1613). Three of them include substantial

groups of poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym.47 Whereas all the post-1550

collections which have so far been mentioned have been derivatives of the

., se GDG, pp. cxxx cxxxili. Ifan John si probably to eb 24 On Bodleian, Welsh e1

identified with 'your servant leuan Jones' to whom John Davies refers ni his letter to

Owen Wynn ni 1639 (NLW 14529E, fols 12-13). He writes concerning Dafydd ap

Gwilym's poems, referring to leuan Jones, "Yf he would send me a copie of the first verse of every poeme he hath, I would tell him which of them I have not' and proposes

mutual exchange of copies. He is very likely referring to Bodleian, Welsh e.1. Nothing

seems to have come of the proposal.

34 RMWL; GDG, pp. cxxviexxx. The hands ni Mostyn 212 appear ni Berth-ddu

hand of Jaspar Gryffyth. 83 Dr John Davies's manuscripts (and no doubt his whole library) passed after his death into careless hands. The collection was scattered. Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt

manuscripts, e.g. NLW 3031 (Mostyn 112).

nineteenth century, with Griffith Roberts's collection. William Wynn (1709-60) was its

the vetustus itself but from John Davies's transcript si shown by his sequence of poems

acquired a few of the manuscripts. Peniarth 49 did reach Hengwrt, but only in the

only scholarly owner.

14866 (see note 17).

54 On Ádd. 14933, se GDG, p. clv. That Humphrey Davies derived his text not from

following those transcribed in full by John Davies, ignoring all those only represented in

93 RMWL; GDG, pp. xxiv- cxxvi.

04 Add.

. Jones, "The Brogyntyn Welsh 4 On Humphrey Davies se DWB and .E D

Manuscripts: I,' NLWJ, 5 (1947-8), 233-64 (234-5).

This was one of Jaspar Gryffyth's sources for

Gwyneddon 3. For David Johns. see DWB.

14 Add. 14866, fol. 148v: 'I Ddyddgu drwy ddwyn iachau cariad le gellir dyall faint

dyfais berw awenydd Dafydd ap Gwilym yn rhagori om barn i ar bawb arall.' comment is on GDG, no. 92. 100

The

Peniarth 49 yb variant readings. He may have used John Davies's draft transcript rather than Peniarth 49 itself: this would account for the occurrence of a few readings where Peniarth 49 has lacunae, readings which otherwise would have to be explained as Humphrey Davies's reasonable guesswork.

64 See DWB and E. D. Jones, The Brogyntyn Welsh Manuscripts: .'I

74 GDG, pp. exliv-exivii.

101

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym vetustus stock, Llywelyn Sin's texts are closely related to those of Llanstephan 6 and William Mathew's book, to a matrix which Thomas

Parry designates cynsail Morgannwg, the Glamorgan archetype. 84 Thomas Parry in Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym cites some 280 manuscripts. The sifting of this daunting volume of text, guided by a deep knowledge of Welsh literature, a rare feeling for the language and a pragmatic approach to textual cruxes, resulted ni an edition which is one of the landmarks of twentieth-century Welsh scholarship. It opened a new era ni the study of Dafydd ap Gwilym, and of the cywyddwyr in general. The mass of subsequent work on the poet generated by Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym

clamours to be taken up into a new edition. Another equally resolute editor will be called for.

Thomas Parry's apparatus is not one by which the

textual transmission of individual poems can easily be worked out: it unfortunately omits line-order one can imagine the publishing constraints

which may have been decisive); it seems over-indulgent to the late manu-

scripts, notably to the vast progeny of the vetustus stock by which twothirds of the corpus are represented; and, ti has to be said, small and sometimes significant errors lurk. The divergent readings in the vetustus progeny are likely to be the result of carelessness or editorial interference on the part of scribes. Reconstruction of the archetype should be feasible

by orthodox methods.49 This is not something which could be said of a collation of the earliest manuscripts. Nothing would help give a clearer sight of the textual issues than a reconstruction of the vetustus archetype.

The last century of the manuscript tradition can quickly be described.

Copying, compiling, manuscript transmission in general, were now in the

hands of amateurs, fi ni its positive sense we can take that word to include

The Transmission of a Welsh Classic: Dafydd ap Gwilym however, was one of the vetustus clan, Bodleian Library, Welsh e.1, which

had travelled south from its native north Wales.

The last important collecting, as distinct from mere copying, of Dafydd ap Gwilym's work was by the Morris brothers of

Anglesey. William Morris between 1740 and 1755 made a large collection; Lewis Morris,

around 1748, made an even larger one, and played with the idea of publication.

The total now exceeded 200 poems (Lewis Morris had been

able to top up his collection from Llanstephan 133). The collections of the Morrises formed the basis of the collection of Dafydd's work made, with

the help of others, by Owen Jones ("Owain Myfyr', 1741-1814) ni 1768.

The amiable Owen Jones had come to London and made money as a

furrier. So long as he was able, he gave with enormous generosity to the cause of transcribing and publishing early and medieval Welsh literature. It was his collection which was the f o u n d a t i o n o f the

first edition o f

Dafydd's poetry, Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym, published ni 1789. Here

at its magnificent widest is the river we have followed from distant brooks such as Peniarth 48 and the larger tributaries that have been described.

Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym contains 246 poems, with a further 61

ni an appendix (the latter mostly, as a later age was to learn, fakes by lolo Morganwg). The observations already made will be sufficient to indicate that the edition was largely based on poor texts. Its production was a triumph of enthusiasm but not of the critical spirit, though within their

limitations Owen Jones and his assistant editor, Wiliam Owen (later

William Owen Pughe) had worked hard, collating texts and trying to arrive at the best. For all its faults, it is a lovable book. Not until the beginning of the twentieth century did it even come near to being supplanted. To this

day ti still has value as an anthology of fifteenth-century lovc-poctry not ot be found elsewhere ni print, so liberal were the editors ni their inclusion of

poets and antiquaries and men of letters. Dafydd ap Gwilym and the cywyddwyr ni general were still held ni high esteem; a collection of Dafydd's work was a desideratum of hte enthusiast. But many of hte best

wrongly attributed poems from the later manuscript tradition. For wide

comprehensive collection was that represented by NLW, Llanstephan 133,

marked a beginning. For hte manuscript transmission ti marked hte end.

manuscripts were unknown or inaccessible. The next move towards a

appreciation of the poetry of Dafydd pa Gwilym and for modern study, ti

a huge compilation of Welsh poetry made by James Davies ('Taco ab Dewi", 1648-1722), a wandering scholar and scribe, and Samuel Williams

(c.1660 c.1722), vicar of Llandyfriog, both Cardiganshire men5.0 Their

collection of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poems approaches 200, including a few not known from earlier manuscripts, but spurious. Their main source, 84 Ibid.

94 The possibility fo such areconstruction si implied yb Thomas Parry's remarks ni GDG, p. cxxxv, third paragraph. 05 On the two men see DWB. O n Llanstephan 133 es RMWL and GDG, pp. 102

103

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum fragment; it cannot be taken to refer to any other of the fragments in the

7

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum'

folder. It seems fair to conclude that Professor Bensly's miscellaneous section', the De natura rerum fragment in particular, came from one of the

Peniarth manuscripts. Moreover, at the foot of fol. "4 of our fragment si

the word phia (philosophia) written in a small neat hand which I think is that of Robert Vaughan of Hengwit. This identification implies that the manuscript from which the fragments came was a Hengwrt-Peniarth one;

ti carries back its known descent ot the seventeenth century.? No definite identification of the source of the 'miscellaneous section' can be made, but

The manuas peot decri el ocmp is ot bitn fotexte Bedst

NLW, Peniarth 326 (formerly Hengwrt 548) looks a very probable one. This manuscript si described by Gwengovryn Evans as Eight bundles & some loose vellum fragments..?;4 he proceeds to list the contents of the

eight bundles but does not describe h te vellum fragments. Peniarth 326

century. tI would be wel o t indicate at the beginning why a fragmentary

and late manuscript of a common text should be of more than usual

has since been bound: its contents now include all items listed by Gwenogvryn Evans in the eight bundles, but no other vellum fragments. In view of

interest. The manuscript is Welsh; pre-1200 Welsh manuscripts of any sort

the uncertainty, the De natura rerum fragment has not been restored to

are scarce enough. It has Old Welsh glosses. Although written in Caroline minuscule ti still ni several respects belongs to the Insular scribal tradition.

The decoration of some of its initials is 'Trish'. It has grammatical and syntactical glosses and marks and was evidently a school book. It si one of the few witnesses to the transition ni Wales from the last phase of the Insular manuscript tradition to the Anglo-Norman. There is much to link

ti with the manuscripts associated with Sulien's sons. Lack of other contemporary Welsh manuscripts precludes our

making a definite

Before the manuscript is described, something should be said of its recent history. The two bifolia resurfaced a few years ago among uncatalogued material ni the National Library of Wales, wrapped in a folder with other loose unrelated fragments. Clipped to the folder was a note: I have temporarily mislaid the reference to the MS. in which this miscellaneous section should be. / E. Bensly / June 30 / 1931'. Edward Bensly (d. 1939), professor of Latin at the University College of Wales 1905-19, used to help the National Library with its Latin manuscripts. Together with the fragments in the folder was a slip of paper with a note in the hand of W.W. E. Wynne of Peniarth:? Appears to contain signs of the weather.' This would be an apt enough comment on the De natura rerum

Peniarth 326 but instead has been given the new number Peniarth 540,6 The other fragments found in the same folder are now Peniarth 541.7

Preparation of the manuscripts The two bifolia constitute the middle four leaves of a quire. The parchment is stiff, with a smooth matt surface, not very white. The outer bifolium has

several original holes in it, one of them large. The leaves have never been

more than roughly shaped; none of the edges si entirely straight. The 3 Ibid. 4 RMWL, I, p. 1124.

5W . W . .E Wynne ni A C , 4ht Series, 2(1871), 127, describes Hengwit 548 sa A deal

box containing loose leaves and fragments'.

6 The bifolia are now sewn between covers, reusing the original holes. Wynne's and

Bensly's notes are laid down inside the cover.

* They comprise: fol. 1, from Gerard of Cremona's translation of Aristotle, D e caelo te terra, .s xiii; fol. ,2 from an unidentified treatise in English, justifying devotion to images,? Reginald Pecock's lost Book of Worshipping, s.xv [in fact, a fragment of Dives and Pauper, see .J Simons, A fragment of Dives and Pauper in MS. Peniarth 541C, NLWJ, 22 (1981-2), 347]; fol. ,3 fragment of a petition in Chancery of [ ] of Kellilyfday

concerning a book borrowed in 1643 by Thomas Jones of Kirchynan [co. Flint] and not returned, the petitioner si no doubt John Jones of Gellilyfdy; fol. ,4 flyleaf of a book with Latin tags, an englyn, and the name Richard Morres, .s xvii; fol. .5 a bon mot of Dr

' I should like ot thank my colleague R. W. McDonald who brought the folder ot my notice, David Dumville for helpful criticism of a draft of the article and for passing

on to me the comments of Professor Ludwig Bieler and Professor Bernhard Bischoff on facsimiles of the manuscript, and Dr N . R . Ker for similar comment.

2 On W.W. E. Wynne (d. 1880) and the Peniarth Manuscripts see A brief history of

the Hengwrt-Peniarth Collection', Handlist, i, pp. iii-ххі. 104

John Wilkins, bishop of Chester, .s xviii; fols 6-11, Circa generaliores regulas moralis

sententiae aliquot quibus passim es opponit Schola Theologica Louaniensis', a continental hand, .s xvii; fol. 12, inventory of the goods of Thomas Wilkins, papermaker, of the parish of West Drayton, co. Middlesex, 1729 (including

Christianae

stock of paper-mill).

8 Ker, English MSS, bears on much of this and the following section. 105

An oE

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

¡le uapor cutort; thac

bifolia are arranged, following the usual Insular practice, with hair sides outermost. The leaves measure .c 220 × 165 mm,. written space 160 x 95

mm. There are 27 long lines. Pricking si ni the outer margin only. The

bifolia were folded for pricking: the pricked slits in all four leaves cor-

respond exactly. Ruling si by hard point. Instead of being ruled across both leaves, the bifolia were ruled on the right-hand page only and then

turned over and the process repeated, so that all rulings are on the rectos. First and last lines, and sometimes the second and penultimate, are ruled

L ce t Eal i n c or eh t

!

ทเ หล ะa

ex fole

na e

adito mabib; form.

услис пив перива Лає rel

infole

Sentif

imagine anula re u• Pr core La + malcol

r e i c i t t u dev e r r am

เ น ะชนท

ut u t h

c ol o r e . o c

n ee ni pLe nlu mocn re i pu ee de

l u n a refulger;

m a l i l e u c t e e napor

«ges colcto dere guectet coglable

fum-

฿ ก รp llef cot e f i au nf ut pD i al e i

, ท

b

i st

จ t aer i nen ua e h deku a l umot bul oc r un heb yai J en n

A

e

Gif eur e f ipo -

Pert hil a c oeum a er p li f et te n c

H aw

a t eee n

n e f olepl u ut

A ut J er r o t hi ne , S:p l a at u ocanf teea f

right across the page. Vertical bounding lines are single. The ink si dark brown to black. Both a slight distortion of the parchment and stains which cover about a third of the area of the leaves must have been caused by water.

Script and scribal practice The script of Peniarth 540 (see Plate 13) is a Caroline minuscule, more Norman than English. Allowing the manuscript a date in the first half of the twelfth century, conservative features are the wide space between lines in

relation to height, the absence of round ,r the use of round s and vonly as

majuscule forms. Forward-looking features (the use of single vertical bounding lines is another) are the general use of e for ae (e with cedilla

occurs four times), quite frequent diacritical marks on ii, very frequent use

of half-round superscript final .s Possibly Insular traits - all of them may be found in some Norman hands of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries - are the general squareness of letters, the heavy triangular tops of ascenders and

minim strokes, the regularly round d, the elongated shafts of r in the gloss hand, and the hooked form, almost a tick, of the common 'horizontal'

abbreviation stroke. The ct and st ligatures occur regularly. The boldly

angular g si striking. Chapters have the opening word, or part of ,ti ni

majuscule. The large initial letters are described below under Decoration. Word-division at the end of lines si often wrong; the hyphens appear to be

original. Monosyllabic prepositions and conjunctions are frequently not separated from the following word. Punctuation, which si often misleading, si by point, placed on or near the line, and semi-colon; the punctus elevatus (tick and point') makes a couple of appearances (fols 2.12, 3.23). In all these respects a manuscript of the first half of the twelfth century could be called

old-fashioned. There has been some later amending of the punctuation. °1 9 The same mark occurs once on a single i (in the word ui, fol. 11.20) where ti should

Plate 13 NLW, Peniarth 540, fol. 1r

perhaps be regarded as an accent, see below.

01 The ., mark common ni Insular manuscripts occurs once (fol. 1.16); it si hard ot tell

whether ti si original or whether the comma si a later addition to the point.

107

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum The scribe himself, using a narrower nib, or else a contemporary writing a very similar hand, was responsible for adding four chapter headings (fols

2.2, 2.5, 2.7, 2°.11), for the glosses (see below), and for making corrections

to the text. Deletion is by erasure (e.g. fols 2.23, 3.1), by underdotting (fols

1.10, 2".11), by underlining (fol. 4".11), or by a line below and above a letter (fol. 4.19). Insertion by the scribe occurs both with and without a

caret. There are some accents on monosyllables, particularly the word a.

AWelsh Manuscript of Bedes' D e natura rerum only exclusively Insular but exclusively "Celtic' ones (it might be added that these forms are, except for hte omnis group, ones which made their appearance relatively late).18 Many others are Insular abbreviations or

symbols which had yb the eleventh century spread into continental usage. There remain the nine outsiders: est, inde, quia, quam, quod, sed, secundus, sicut and sine. Their abbreviations are al continental forms and such of them as occur at all ni the manuscripts taken for comparison occur ni no

Unfilled lines at the end of chapters are often used to take the second

more than one manuscript. For all of them except inde there were alternative

line of the following chapter, ni accord with the common Insular practice; a gallows bracket si used ni place of the Irish cenn fo eitte ("head under wing) sign.

nI hte list that follows there si no differentiation of abbreviations of hte

Insular forms available ot the scribe; indeed, those for est, quam and snie are used ni the glosses. The nine are recent usurpers.!

nomina sacra class.

Abbreviation

In its abbreviations, as ni other respects, Peniarth 540 holds a position

between hte Insular and continental practices. Welsh manuscripts belonging

Word-abbreviations and symbols

to the Insular ro sub-Insular tradition are rare enough to warrant listing the forms of abbreviation found ni Peniarth 540. For comparison, there are

deus

manuscripts', ni his Early Welsh Script," Doris Bains, A Supplement ot

esse et etiam habet haec ideo

Lindsay's lists of abbreviations, including those for the three 'Rhigyfarch

Notae Latinae, and lists for five Irish manuscripts of the eleventh and early

twelfth centuries, hte 'Psalter of St Caimin'! hte Annals of Tigernach, hte

Annals of Inisfallen,15 and h te Trinity College and Franciscan Library

manuscripts of the Liber hymnorum.16 We also have Lindsay's observations on the manuscripts Vatican Pal. lat. 830 (Marianus Scotus, Chronica), dated

1072, and BL, Harley 1802 (the Gospels of Maelbrigte), dated 1138!7 Of hte word-abbreviations and symbols from Peniarth 540 listed below, al but nine (mentioned later) occur ni some or al of the Irish manuscripts and ni one or more of hte 'Rhigyfarch manuscripts'. Some forms, such as those for caelum, omnis (excepting the form oms), rerum and u,t appear ot have remained not " Lindsay, EWS. The 'Rhigyfarch manuscripts' are: Dublin, Trinity Colege 50 (the

per

autem

caelum

dicunt ergo

id est inde

post

cim, caelo cto

prae

e, est ,E=ni( gloss)

7 eti

quam

,4 q(in gloss)

h

secundus sod sed sicut sine sni, ns ni( gloss) sunt is, 5ิ (ingloss) spiritus sps, spiritu spù

ido

i. (in gloss)

in

nisi

nob i b o s m nunc

tamen vel vero

no

ois also oms, omni o,f omne oe, omnes oms, omnia oĩa,

unde

omnium om i (once only; hte 12Doris Bains, A Supplement to Notae Latinae (Cambridge, 1936).

!

quae

modo

omnis

pro

ut

regular Insular form si

เ#

น#

31 Killiney, Franciscan Library A 1.Se M . Esposito, On hte so-called Psalter of St

Caimin', PRIA, 32 C (1913), 78-88.

41 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B 502, fols 1-12. See R . .I Best, Palacographical

notes', Ériu, 7(1914), 114-20.

. .I Best, The Annals of Inisfallen 15 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B 503. See R

na Insualr om frssiotebesnni apsaetlr om rf * Bain ASupel continental d

(Dublin, 1933), pp. 7-8.

61 Dublin, Trinity College 1441 and Killiney, Franciscan Library A 2.See .L Bieler,

The Irish Book of Hymns: a palacographical study, Scriptorium, 2(1948), 177-94. 17Lindsay, EWS, pp. 39-40.

108

na early Insular form, see W.M.Lindsay, Notae Latinae (Cambridge, 1915), and Bains,

ASupplement.

109

AWelsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum The technical grammatical abbreviations used in the glosses are best

regarded as a group apart. The following occur: accusatius, aduerbium,

casus, genitius, pluratiuus. There remain the following unusual, some of them perhaps unintended, abbreviations, each occurring once only.

factus stabulis

fet° (the usual Insular form is fes) stabl (the usual -ul- and -is contractions combined?)

fri- and adi!q;

quadri utique

- suspension si still characteristically Insular. The common um Syllable- and letter-abbreviations

e-n -er

si-

9 (once only, ni a scribal correction)

-та -те

de d (final and medial), see

-ri TO -

also sine above

i (final and medial)

final ） ，b' c d' n' t u （ all t （ medial)

t,see also nobis above à (once)

,b § (once each) superscript i over ,c,f ,p,t u

superscript o over t s written superscript finally

naci, nacitur, scitique, sinserum, solsticia (c for 1 si rare), Cicilie, exsilensium, equinoxii, excercet, deflexsus

Tracie, nothus

simmul, occulos, reditur, pasum, occeani *corrected yb hte gloss hand Decoration

A t the beginning of chapters, the scribe of Peniarth 540 left spaces for two-line initials (once, three-line); eh sometimes left guide-letters ni hte margins, but generally not. Most of these spaces weer provided with plain initials ni dull red, some of them square capitals, others uncial ni form, al

of them common company for Caroline minuscule. Five spaces, however, ) aer were filled with very different initials. Three of them (an ,F Nand M zoomorphic 'ribbon' initials of Irish type, two (both 0) aer of na abstract and, again, Irish pattern; al but the less elaborate of the two Os are

and once medially ủq; (once) and dequog

-um

& , F,$

indistinguishable from the ink of the text. The three animal initials are partially coloured in white, probably white lead,?' in places simply touched in white, and are surrounded by white dots; otherwise they are not

I (final and medial)

coloured. The two Os have both been discoloured by damp and staining.

u-s

?( leg. sumo), fulmio

superscript aover ,f g, p, t

licor, dequoqti (sic, for decocti)

s-ti

. h oospe.nga. nsuto asunmdmaoso -u-urnt m prevocalic,

(once, for decocti)

cõsist (once), redi (once) occasionally medially

-que

Spelling The more significant causes of abnormal spellings ni Peniarth 540 are

shown below, with examples. There si a not surprising incidence of Insular

spelling habits. But first, two practices which are matters of orthography

rather than of uncertainty: Peniarth 540 never uses hte letter ,y invariably

ti has;i and for hte digraph ph almost invariably ti has .f Uncertainty concerning h Uncertainty of e/i

Uncertainty of t/th

double letters

The syllabic suspensions of Peniarth 540, listed below, provide a similar

e-

Uncertainty of c/ qu

Uncertainty concerning s, ,c t,and x before i and e Uncertainty concerning

mixture of Insular and continental forms, with the latter slightly dominant.

con-

4Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum Uncertainty of o/u pute Fabonius, liuet* Uncertainty of b/v Uncertainty of b/p probter

reproduced ni Plate 14. These five initials are drawn ni ink, an ink

The only colour ot be seen on the simpler of the two si ni the surrounding dots, which now appear white. The more elaborate Oseems ot have been coloured a pale yellow and then painted ni part ni a thick orange, probably n initial @within the text (on red lead, which ni places has turned grey. A fol. 4) has been touched ni the same orange and surrounded by dots. The three zoomorphic initials fall easily into place beside those found ni Irish and Irish-related manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The drawing of the Peniarth 540 initials while not very accomplished si far from unpractised - witness the animal heads. The motifs of hte style are somewhat degenerate. Elements of the common inheritance of Irish

orisonos, coerentibus, coibente, hostia

disicatis, demediam*, degressa, igneum*, mineum, decedere*, seprium (for Cyprium,

corrected ot siprium) 110

oP non, 146,, pist palets, and D .V . Thompson, Maetarisl foMedeival Panitg 111

AWelsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

d e r

illuminators of the period are the ribbon-like animal forms, the stereo-

④

r o t c i t

gore o a

แ ละขน งา Lu n a t e r

n e crede:

"Bes

depence

deca

m

f i l tt dex

typed animal heads, the interlaced in-filling and the projecting knots springing from horns or tails, the curved clawed feet, the surrounding

dots.2 One need only look at some of the decoration ni the tenth eleventh century Southampton Psalter'23 to see all these elements in forms from which they have scarcely developed at all ni Peniarth 540.

The same

elements all appear ni anumber of manuscripts seen by Henry and MarshMicheli as constituting a group.24 These manuscripts belong to the late

eleventh and early twelfth centuries and are associated with Leinster and perhaps Meath. The same elements are also to be found ni a psalter at

Edinburgh, probably written ni the eleventh century and ni Scotland, 52

and, more significantly, ni two of the Rhigyfarch manuscripts' decorated by Sulien's son leuan, the Ricemarch Psalter and the Corpus De trinitate,

probably produced at Llanbadarn Fawr and to be dated 1079 and 1085 x

91 respectively 62 Although the affinities of Peniarth 540 are not markedly greater with these last two manuscripts than with some of the others

referred to, ti would be perverse to look further afield for next of kin. Features of the decoration in leuan's work that are particularly close to that of Peniarth 540 occur in the three full-page decorations of the

Ricemarch Psalter; there is a striking resemblance between the more ornate 14a

14b

bif pere dem

cal gameru

22 The development of Irish book-decoration ni this period si well described and

illustrated in F. Henry, 'Remarks on the decoration of three Irish psalters', PRIA, 61 C (1961), 23-40, and F . Henry and G. .L Marsh-Micheli, A' century of Irish illumination (1070-1170)', PRIA, 62 C (1962), 101-65. For further plates, some ni colour, see F . Henry, L'Art irlandais, i and i (La Pierre-qui-vire, 1964), which appeared in English as Irish Art during the Viking Invasions

the Romanesque Period

(800-1020 A.D.)

(1020-1170 AD . ).

(London, 1967) and Irish

Art ni

(London, 1970). [Since the original appear-

ance of this chapter much has been published on Insular book-decoration, beginning

with J. .J G. Alexander, ASurvey of Manuscripts Illuminated ni the British Isles: Insular

Manuscripts 6th ot 9th Century (London, 1978). For some other references relevant to

Welsh manuscripts, see above, p. 10, n. 14]

23 Cambridge, S.t John's College C.9 (James, 59); es plates in both PRIA articles and

42 Henry and Marsh-Micheli, A century of Irish illumination', 126-36. The manuscripts are Vatican Pal. lat. 830; Dublin, Trinity College 1441; Killiney, Franciscan

To l ed a l e

Library A 2 (all three referred to above in connection with abbreviations); and Bodleian

Library, Rawlinson B 502, fols 19-89.

52 Edinburgh University Library 56, reproduced ni facsimile with introduction ni C. P.

Finlayson, Celtic Psalter, Umbrae Codicum Occidentalium vii (Amsterdam, 1962).

r iaccolar y 14c

14d

Plate 14 NLW, Peniarth 540, initials (about 2x): 14a, fol. 1(F), 14b, fol. 1' (N), 14c, fol. 3 (M), 14d, fol. 3" (0)

26The Ricemarch Psalter, Dublin, Trinity College 50, si reproduced in facsimile ni The Psalter and Martyrology of Ricemarch, Henry Bradshaw Society xlvii-xlviii (1914). Pages from the De trinitate, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 199,

are reproduced in Plate 3; Lawlor,

The

Psalter and

Martyrology,

plates LXXVII,

LXXVIII; Lindsay, EWS, plate XVI; Henry, L'Art irlandais, i, plate P.148; NLWJ.

(1941), plates I, II; and see above, p.10, n. 14. Lawlor's dates for the two manuscripts (The Psalter and Martyrology, p. xiv) have not been questioned. On Llanbadarn Fawr, see below, p. 120.

2

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

AWelsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

O of Peniarth 540 and the design of the curled tail of the large Q on fol. 76 of

kind of meaningful filiation of MSS impossible;33 the few textual features that he notes as likely indicators of groupings of manuscripts all occur

the Psalter. The small decorated initials of both the Ricemarch Psalter and the De trinitate are, on the other hand, unlike those of Peniarth 540, all of

the 'knotted wire' rather than the ribbon' type.27 A slightly odd feature of

the Peniarth 540 initials is the small triangle with a dot in the middle which . It is no doubt a debased form of forms a terminal to the lappet in the M some motif, probably the heart-shaped leaf that is used similarly in many of

the manuscripts named, including the Ricemarch Psalter. It is, however, worth comparing the Peniarth 540 M with a similar one from the probably

early-twelfth-century missal at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where the place of the triangle si taken by a snake's head.? The snake's-head motif (two-eyed from above, one-eyed sideways) does not seem to have appeared in Irish manuscript decoration before the twelfth centry;30 ti seems unlikely that our Welsh scriptorium would have been open to new influence from across the Irish Sea at this late date or that the motif would already be so degenerate by the time of the making of Peniarth 540. Another oddity: the animal ni the Peniarth 540 N, unlike the Irish animals, is hooved. Lastly, a peculiarity of the Peniarth 540 zoomorphic initials for which, so far as published facsimiles reveal, there si no precedent: their strong rectangularity.

Perhaps, had more Welsh manuscripts of this school survived, this rectangularity would eb seen ot be another aspect of degeneration. Text

The text of Peniarth 540 begins ni cap. xxvii (cardinalis auster qui et

outside that part of the text which survives in Peniarth 540. Of the Peniarth

540 text it may be said that ti has no chapter headings (they were added to chapters xxxiv-xxxvi and xxxix by the glossing hand), no chapter numbers,

no figurae, no source marks and no scholia other than the glosses mentioned below. Peniarth 540 makes a chapter beginning of Celum si uespere . . . (in cap. xxxvi) but fails ot mark chapter divisions at the

beginnings of chapters xxxvii, xl and xIviii. Read with Jones's edition, Peniarth 540 reveals itself as a close relative, though hardly a descendant, , Berlin, of one of the eleven manuscripts used for the text, his MS M Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Phill. 1832 (Rose 130), a ninth-century manuscript from Metz. Peniarth 540 shares not only the reversed order of sentences at the end o f cap. xxix but also most of the substantially

discrepant readings of M3.4

One group clearly recognized by Jones is of those manuscripts written in England.35 Peniarth 540 does not belong to it. There are grounds for guessing that the affiliations of our text may be with a "Celtic' family of manuscripts. The Welsh glosses cindraid and riberthi (see below) carry a

eWeshl gloatera l relati

suggestion of at least a collateral relationship with firstly a ninth-century manuscript of Irish associations, Karlsruhe, Landesbibliothek, Aug. perg. 167, and secondly a ninth-century Breton manuscript, Angers 477. Jones says of the text of the former that ti si rather like M;' he has no comment on the latter. The misreading of ras n indicated by the erroneous Navena for Ravenna on fol. 4.4 of Peniarth 540 si evidence of an antecedent text

e natura rerum.?? H e writes of them I find any lists 134 manuscripts of D

Nothus...) and breaks off ni cap. xlviii (... Sicut et ni India supra). Jones

written ni Insular script; similarly, the reading quia for quod (fol. 3.14) no doubt represents misinterpretation of hte Insular abbreviation symbol.

72 O n hte w t o types, see Henry and Marsh-Micheli, A' century of Irish illumination', 82 Others include the Southampton Psalter', the Edinburgh psalter and the Coton

Glosses and syntax marks

psalter (BL, Cotton Vit. F.xi).

century of Irish illumination'. 03 Henry and Marsh-Micheli, A century of Irish illumination', 136 40.

l ost a di mineal lost art ehtier sterybtheside Pee ear am

grammar or syntax or else are lexicographical; sxi of the latter are ni

. Jones ni Corpus 13 The first critical edition of De natura rerum si that of .C W Christianorum, Series Latina, exxili A (1975), pp. 173-234. Chapter divisions ni this

edition do not differ from those in PL, xc, 187-278.

replacenes, foM . . a Set amdints uohte hsi list dos thain, N, pa, P D . 931 4Iportant corecoitn hte da is deni rati, (1 62,) is cr Jones, 'Manuscripts of Bede's De natura rerum', Isis, 27 (1937), 430-40, also remains relevant, as do his comments on the manuscripts in his Bedae opera de temporibus (Cambridge, Mass., 1943). 114

33 Jones, p. 184. H e makes the observation that the Insular textual tradition was severed: that al extant manuscripts derive from hte Continental tradition, p. xv.

43 Eg.. quibuslibet (cap. xxvii), quoque and austros (cap. xxxix), perdurare (cap. xli).

So,losc.pIsi, nda is Manuscrpisto eBed4136-7. 115

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

Welsh, treated in the section that follows. There are only two exegetical glosses of any substance, both on cap. xlvii. 63

drawing attention ot. First, two (or more) words each signed with the same

Simple grammatical glosses are aduerbium (e.g. fol. 1Y.1, 2.24) genitiuu.s

casus (fol. 2".22), accusatius pluratiuus (fol. 3%.3). Syntactical glosses serve uel to hold clauses of a sentence together, e.g. (fols 2*-3) . . . dicunt... etiam (gl. dicunt)...

uel etiam (gl. dicunt) . . . marinis autem (gl. dicunt) . . . ' .

They may serve to identify the explicit but not obvious subject of a verb, or an inexplicit one, e.g. dicunt (gl. filosofi). A similar purpose to that of the syntactical glosses is served by the syntax marks. These marks were noted

by Lindsay as characteristic of early Welsh manuscripts.37 Their use ni

being placed above or below the words; at least, the two usages are worth

mark above the word:42 either grammatical concord or relative pronoun

and antecedent. Second, two (or more) words signed with the same mark, the leading mark, acting as a signal, below its word (succeeding marks likewise if there are more than two), the final mark above its word: sequential links between widely separated words, often enclosing other intervening sets of marks, commonly between a conjunction or relative pronoun and the finite verb of the clause ti introduces. Use of the marks is

carly Irish manuscripts has since been studied ni some detail,38 and more

illustrated in the two short chapters printed below with their complement of marks and glosses. To show at the same time some of the hindrances to reading created by defects of text and bad punctuation, all is reproduced as

described by Robinson.40 The requirement of the system si a small number

inserted in square brackets.

recently their use in English manuscripts.39 Peniarth 540 conforms to the system described by Draak in her two papers and to one of the systems of distinct marks. Peniarth 540 uses ten but could have managed with half

as many ( . . : :

: % . . - ' ) . The purpose is to provide syntact-

ical links between words within a sentence, to make for ease in construing,

and to eliminate ambiguities. These links are made by signing two (or more) words with the same mark,

indicating either a grammatical

relationship or else the sequential connection natural to the glosser and his intended readers but not present ni the Latin.4! The two most common

uses of syntax marks ni Peniarth 540 adhere with a moderate degree of

consistency to what may once have been a firmer rule with regard to their

ni the manuscript except that two readings from the common text are [cap. xxviii] i filosofi

Tonitrua dicunt ex frangore nubium generari, cụm spiritus uentorum

carum sinu concepti sese ibidem uersando pererrantes. Et uirtutis sue

mobilitate ni quamlibet partem uiolenter erumpentes; Magno murmure

concrepant instar exilensium ed stabulis quadrigum uel ussice. quelibet [que licet] parua magnum tamen sonitum displosa emittit;

[cap. xlil hiemali.

The texts of

Mare rubrum nomen aroseo colore trahit quem tamen non naturaliter

Yale University, 1961).

73 Lindsay, EWS, pp. 10, 40.

» Marie Drak, Consrtue makrsni eino-latin rauseries Mededelinder,

20 (1957), 261-82, and 'The higher teaching of Latin grammar ni Ireland during the Rawlinson B 502', Ériu, 23 (1972), 56-71. 93 F. C. Robinson, Syntactical glosses provenance', Speculum, 48 (1973), 443-75.

habet esd uicinis litorius que sanguineo coolre rubent inficitur; Ideoque .i coliguntur

i.rubrum

[indel mineum et ali colores picturarum rubreque gemme leguntur.

ni Latin manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon

04 Ibid., pp. 457-61.

14 O n the fact that hte finite verb si taken first not only ni Insular "Celtic

continental mansi ste heson, marinered oses, but asol ni Engsilh nda 116

24 Much els commonly, both marks come beolw their words. 117

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum i.mare rubrum

Scinditur autem ni duos sinus; quorum persicus aquilonem. arabicus petit

e natura rerum AWelsh Manuscript of Bedes' D Welsh glosses

occidentem. qui cv pasum distat ab egiptiaco mari;

The Welsh glosses occur ni two passages, on fol. 1' (in cap. xxxi) and fol. "2 (in cap. xxxix): irudcoch i.glasliu i.rudlin

The grammatical and syntactical glosses and marks call for a little more comment. Since they all appear to be scribal, ti is likely that they, as the

les, hyacinthinu), edtera granetium trait coolrem.

.i.spacio

Welsh glosses seem to be, are traditional. That, ni other words, hte scribe copied them from his exemplar.43 The origin of such glosses and marks,

and their copying, clearly lies ni a teaching milieu; ti si not surprising ot meet them ni a text of De natura rerum, a work intended as an elementary

textbook# and one whose honoured place ni the monastic schools, beside Bede's other didactic works, si recognized not just by the large number of surviving manuscripts.4 There si no reason ot think that Peniarth 540 does not represent a continuing teaching tradition ni Wales. nI contrast ot some of the examples cited yb Draak and Robinson, the apparatus of Peniarth 540, like its text, was meant for the less advanced scholar. Lindsay who first drew attention to syntax marks in Welsh manuscripts

Qui [sc. arcus| ed celo igneum, ed aquis purpureum, ed aere iacirtum

Eiusque [sc. oceani] omnis cursus ni ledones et malinas di est ni minores

e ledona.. Manila auetm.. esuts etmaoires diuditur. dS Cognate glosses on ledona and malina (neap tide' and s'pring tide) ni the

e second passage link Peniarth 540 with two other "Celtic' manuscripts of D

natura rerum. nI Karlsruhe Aug. perg. 167, a ninth-century manuscript with Irish glosses, ni ledones et malinas si glossed hicontrachtu and

hirobartai,49 there aer no other Irish glosses ni what corresponds ot hte

surviving text of Peniarth 540. Angers 774 si a ninth-century Breton

was of the opinion that they could eb regarded as 'Welsh symptoms'. 64 It si

manuscript which was extensively glossed about hte year 897: ledona and

on the continent as well as in Ireland and England; the question of where they originated is an open one.47 Both Draak and Robinson show that a

Breton words and their cognate forms ni other Celtic languages.51 In the

now evident that they were already by the ninth century ni widespread use

malina aer glossed cundraid and rebirthi.50 Fleuriot has notes on hte two

study of texts with syntax marks can illuminate aspects of the glossator's

477, some of them ni Breton, some of them, interestingly, ni Welsh.52 The glosses ni h te first passage ni Peniarth 540 on the names of the four

mother-language.

late tenth or early eleventh century, further glosses were added to Angers

colours of the rainbow do not share the same significance, though Angers

47 has the gloss glas by one of the later glossators corresponding to the glasliu of Peniarth 540. see also Robinson, Syntactical glosses', pp. 459-61 and 455-7.

44 See Bede's own remarks on De natura rerum in the preface to his De temporum ratione, Jones, Bedae opera de temporibus, p. 175.

84 On the two late Latin words see Jones, Bedae opera ed temporibus, p. 364.

54 See Jones ni Corpus Christianorum, pp. vii-vi. There aer no other manuscripts of

De natura rerum of known Welsh provenance. De natura rerum has been suggested as a

likely source of some of the lines given to Taliesin ni Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita

Merlini (lines 737-824), see .J .J Parry, The Vita Merlini, University of Illinois Studies in . Faral. La Légende Language and Literature, vol. x, no. 3 (1925). pp. 74 8. 122: E arthurienne, 3 vols (Paris, 1929), III, pp. 329-31; Basil Clarke, Life of Merlin (Cardiff, 1973), pp. 9-10, 90-6. Geoffrey's immediate source was no doubt Taliesin poetry in

graphical Society, Series 1, plate 34 and comment.

05 L. Fleuriot, Dictionnaire des gloses en vieux breton (Paris, 1964), pp. 125, 294. On the manuscript see pp. 8-11.

15 Ibid. The word cindraid (which would have been modern Welsh cyndraeth) is not

Welsh, of the type of 'Kanu y byt mawr', J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Facsimile and Text of the Book of Taliesin (Llanbedrog, 1910), pp. 79-80 [see Marged Haycock, Blodeugerdd

recorded ni dictionaries: the specialist [Oxford University Press Reader points out that it si probably present in J. G. Evans, The Book of Taliesin (Llanbedrog, 1910), p. 41, .1

N ' yt wy dyweit geu llyfreu beda' (ibid., p. 36, "the book of Bede tell no lies'), in a context where Bede seems to have been brought to mind by an idea from De natura rerum, reflects the particular reverence for Bede's writings which Jones comments on. 64 Lindsay, EWS, p. 40.

see Edward Lhuyd's notes printed in Richard Fenton, Tours in Wales, ed. J. Fisher,

118

119

Barddas o Ganu Crefyddol Cynnar (Llandybie, 1994), pp. 45-56, for an edition]. The nile

74 Robinson, 'Syntactical glosses', pp. 464, 467-8.

oc rennited or prelime an or siring hte sa at sa1696., wad aet htatorhet m

Cambrian Archaeological Association supplemental volume (1917), p. 3. 52Fleuriot, Dictionnaire des gloses, pp. 9, 29-31.

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

1 Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

Early history of the manuscript

fols 66-93, although lacking much "Celtic' ornament, has in some respects

What follows can hardly be called history. Here si set down what little

can be deduced about Peniarth 540 ni the period between hte decorator's

finishing his work and hte m it e of its acquisition yb Robert Vaughan, no

doubt already a fragment.

The manuscript was bound once, and apparently only once: ti has a single

set of sewing holes. It was sewn on two thongs. The edges of the leaves were never trimmed. Twelfth-century readers seem to have left no tell-tale marks, assuming that the corrections, glosses and added chapter-headings are the work of the scribe, or at least his scriptorium. There are side-notes by a thirteenth-century reader on fols Y1 and 2. The diacritical marks added to some of the previously unmarked is could be of the same century. The hand that wrote a chapter called pestilentia in the margin of

fol. 2 could be fourteenth-century. There are a few light diagonal strokes between words (e.g.

fols 2'.1,

2.18,

2.21) which appear to serve as

punctuation; they are not original but would be difficult to date. There is

the closest affinity with Peniarth 540. It si, like Peniarth 540 and unlike the Ricemarch Psalter and the Corpus De trinitate, written in Caroline

minuscule.54 Lapidge, for this reason, suggests that ti may have been

written by a Norman scribe ni England or possibly Wales.' The copying of Rhigyfarch's Lament, the generally Insular abbreviations,56 and the presence of 'Celtic' ornament, even though ti si no more than a single animal head on fol. 74, seem best accounted for by postulating Norman influence in a Welsh scriptorium rather than a Welsh exemplar in an

English one. In both Cotton Faustina C.i and Peniarth 540 we have

Insular features in association with Norman script. Hybrids that they are, these two manuscripts probably represent the end of the Insular scribal tradition in Wales. The presence of Rhigyfarch's Lament in Cotton Faustina C.i points towards Llanbadarn; with Peniarth 540 we have only

appearances ot judge by, but these, ni so far as they suggest anywhere, also

suggest Llanbadarn.

no old foliation. Many fragments of early manuscripts have survived by virtue of their use

as binder's waste, sa flyleaves or pastedowns or later bindings. That Peniarth 540 survived ni this way seems unlikely ni view of the absence of any folds or

sewing holes other than the original; nor are there any signs of pasting.

Conceivably ti could have been used as padding or stiffening ni a cover.

Through the middle of the foot of the leaves there si a square hole with rust-stained edges, about 3mm. across. fI ti belongs to the time when the

leaves were ni a binding, the hole si probably due to an iron nail ni one of

the boards. One purpose of such a nail could have been to attach a chain-

staple o t the board. I do not know that there si any evidence about chaining ni medieval Welsh libraries, or post-Reformation ones for that matter. Origin of the manuscript That Peniarth 540 originated ni Wales and during the first half of the twelfth century si a reasonable premise. Can its origin be located more exactly?

The three Rhigyfarch manuscripts', the manuscripts associated with hte

sons of Bishop Sulien of St David's, have already been called on several

times. The fairly irrefutable case for regarding at least two of them as

Was the decoration of the 'Ricemarch Psalter' and the Corpus D e trinitate (the same question might be asked of their Insular script) representative of the work of Welsh scriptoria of the eleventh and twelfth centuries? Or of

certain of them? Or only of Llanbadarn Fawr? The decoration of these manuscripts is discussed above in terms of the received view that it is Irish. Sulien's education in Ireland certainly offers a simple explanation of Irishness at Llanbadarn, and Welsh-Irish intercourse was still vigorous cnough in the cleventh century to account for it clscwhere, but is it perhaps family and their background see .J Conway Davies, Episcopal Acts Relating to the

Welsh Dioceses 1066-1272 (Historical Society of hte Church ni Wales, 19468),

. Chadwick, 'Intellectual life ni west Wales ni the last days of the pp. 483-506, and N. K Celtic Church' ni Studies ni h te Early British Church, ed. .N .K Chadwick (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 165-77. [On Faustina C.i, see now Alison Peden, Science and philosophy ni Wales at the time of the Norman conquest: a Macrobius manuscript from Llanbadarn', CMCS, 2 (1981), 21-45.] 43 See facsimile in NLWJ, 2 (1941), plate III [and plates I-VI in Peden, Science and

philosophy']. 55 Lapidge, "The Welsh-Latin poetry of Sulien's family', 73.

65 See Lindsay, EWS, pp. 37-9.

75 David Dumville tells me that the Caroline sections of Bodleian Library, Bodl. 572 are Cornish, not Welsh (cf. Lindsay, EWS, pp. 26-8), and suggests that the nearest we

products of the clas of Llanbadarn Fawr si summarized by Lapidge ni an illuminating article.53 The third of them, BL, Cotton Faustina C.i,

have to pre-Norman Welsh Caroline is the hybrid hand, Bishop's hand C, in the Corpus

. Lapidge, T ' he Welsh-Latin poetry of Sulien's family', SC, 8/9 (1973-4), 68-106, 35 M

IX, col. 1. Cf. D. N. Dumville, 'Palaeographical considerations in the dating of early

especially 70-1 and, on the manuscripts, 76-7. For extensive discussion of Sulien and his 120

Martianus Capella (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 153), see .T A. M. Bishop, The Corpus Martianus Capella', TCBS, 4, (1964 8) 257-75 (263), and Lindsay, EWS, plate

121

A Welsh Manuscript of Bede's De natura rerum

misleading ot think of this decoration as Irish rather than "Celtic? What, for instance, was the decoration ni Llanbadarn manuscripts ni the generation before Sulien? The evidence for answering these questions si largely lacking; such as we have si scant and scattered and not yet

studied.58 The questions are posed here by way of caveat.

8

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The short answer ot our original question si therefore: perhaps at

Llanbadarn Fawr. Such an answer does not warrant much elaboration of conjecture, but a few dates provide points of reference. After the Norman conquest of Ceredigion, the church of Llanbadarn Fawr was, apparently

ni 1111, given as a priory ot the Benedictine abbey of St Peter's, Gloucester. So Anglo-Norman script could be expected at Llanbadarn after this date. It seems that, despite the altered status, the community of

hte Welsh clas may have remained at Llanbadarn." In the Welsh resurgence that followed the death of Henry I in 1135, the English monks were driven out of the priory and Llanbadarn became once more a Welsh

clas, and remained so until the end of the century. Whether a halfbreed manuscript such as Peniarth 540 would have been likelier before or

si hte latter, from cover to cover, which here concerns us.

Present-day study of Liber Landavensis, the Book of Llandaf, NLW

after 1135 si a matter for speculation. nI 1137, leuan - arch-priest of

1 92?Cw etbgr a nsheisaondet l aeurleetandw itf

decorated the Ricemarch Psalter and written and decorated the Corpus De

his edition ni some respects may have predisposed later scholars o t accept

Llanbadarn, the man who was most learned of the learned'l - died: the son of Sulien, ti has always been assumed, the man who ni his youth had trinitate. The year 1163 saw the deaths of the last two of Sulien's known

grandsons, Cedifor ap Daniel, archdeacon of Ceredigion, and Henri ab Arthen. The latter, whose very name suggests a crossing of the new and the

old, si lamented by Brut y Tywysogyon as a pre-eminent teacher. 26 To whatever degree Anglo-Norman ways had prevailed, the traditions of the school of Sulien can not have been extinct before that year.

a description of hte book which left much ot be desired.' The excellence of

too readily his judgement in others. The description of LL published by E . D. Jones in 1945 marks a great advance but is flawed by its acceptance of Gwenogvryn Evans's analysis of the hands.* Wendy Davies, who has so enormously contributed to our understanding of the text of LL and our appreciation of its significance, was mostly content not to question

Gwenogvryn Evans's and E. D. Jones's accounts of the book.' If there is one single vitiating concept about LL which was inherited from Gwenogvryn Evans ti is that which emerges ni these quotations: I'n • Christopher Brooke, The archbishops of St David's, Llandaff and Caerleon-on-

8§ Lindsay, EWS, does not discuss decoration. [See above, .p 10, .n 14.]

95 There si some uncertainty about the date, se Historia et Cartularium Monasterii sancti Petri Gloucestriae, ed. W . H. Hart (Rolls Series, 1863-7), i, p. 106, i, pp. 37 f,.

reprinted Aberystwyth, 1979). Henceforth TBLD. The present description cannot be followed without .ti

3A efw better readings have been suggested, see TBLD (1979), p. [vi].

Wales', p. 177.

16 archeffeirat Llanbadarn, y gwr a oed doethaf o'r doethon', Thomas Jones, Brut y

Tywysogyon, Red Book of Hergest Version (Cardiff, 2nd edn., 1973), p. 116. 26 "goruchel athro ar gyffredin yr hol yscolheigonn', ibid., .p 144. 122

*Wey Dar The Bnai otis of a St M yra sWoreser nad het Lbier (Aberystwyth, 1979). 123

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis

the book of Llan Dây proper which contains 84 leaves of vellum . . 6,

refers to BL, Stowe 15 as the only metal binding that might be of English workmanship, but very doubtfully." Steenbock mentions and rejects two

'Liber Landavensis proper begins with signature C . . , and "Liber Landavensis proper contains 158 charters...'8 Or, more fully: The manuscript which at present goes under the name of Liber Landavensis consists of miscellaneous material from Llandaff, bound together since at least the seventeenth century. Liber Landavensis proper is a distinct work, and is now preceded by some philosophical fragments

and part of the Gospel of St Matthew; it si followed by some copies of

papal bulls, forms of profession, episcopal and regnal lists, and lists of ecclesiastical dues and benefices. It is quite clear from the foliation that

both sets of material . . . are nothing to do with the original manuscript.? The idea that buried within LL there exists this 'Liber Landavensis proper'

si one which needs to be eradicated. W e might begin by not opening the

possibilities 21 The lower cover of LL si a rare survivor. Whether ti was of local origin,

from England or imported from the Continent is not a question to try to answer here. The point we are coming to si that this board on its own can suggest what sort of book ti covered. Over half the hundred or so surviving

books listed ni Steenbock's catalogue are gospel books; of the remainder, all but three - a vita, na episcopal list and a cartularyl3 - aer explicitly

liturgical books. Even without opening it, we ought to guess that LL was a liturgical book of some kind, if not a gospel book. Opening it, and finding St Matthew's gospel, it would be perverse to contend that the gospel was not originally intended to be there. And discovering that the gospel was associated with vitae, with a sort of cartulary and an episcopal list, ti would be perverse to assume that the association was not intentional and that

book, by looking instead at its lower cover.

there was no place for such texts in a liturgical book. The early use of

The gilt-bronze figure of Christ in Majesty which used to adorn the lower cover of LL has since 1981 been kept apart from the book. The

cartulary from the gospel book have long been recognized. T h a t LL was

Christ, a latecomer to the cover (see description of the binding below, pp. 144 6), is not the present object of our attention; rather, it si the board

use - for swearing oaths upon, for processions - si very likely. 61

itself.

The lower cover is a thick square-edged oak board with sunken

central panel; it bears evidence of having once been covered in metal and of having had the original central feature of its sunken panel enclosed in a mandorla, very probably another Christ ni Majesty. All features of this board are consistent with a twelfth-century date and hardly suggestive of a

later one. We have probably one of the original boards of LL.

The survival of metal-covered bindings in the British Isles si highly

unusual.° There are no examples of known British origin. G. D. Hobson

gospel books as rudimentary cartularies and the gradual weaning of the used for lections si shown below;!5 that ti might well have had other ritual

One binding excluded from Steenbock's catalogue provides a close

British parallel to that of LL. The book is the Sherborne Cartulary, BL,

Add. 46487.17 Borrie shows that the binding is original. One of the boards,

the upper, has a sunken panel which, like that in the lower board of LL, has lost its original decoration; what survives is a small Limoges enamel of

perhaps early thirteenth century which cannot have been original. The Sherborne book contains not only a cartulary but also liturgical gospels and

collects, written by a single hand, and si al of a piece. The 'cartulary' of LL reflects territorial concerns of the diocese ni the 1120s and early 1130s,

though written perhaps a little later;18 the Sherborne cartulary reflects the

6 TBLD, p. xvii.

"The Book of Llandaff, 127.

&Davies, Early Welsh Microcosm, p. ;7 The Charters of Llandaff, p. 6. ° Davies, Liber Landavensis', 336. The foliation referred to si that of s. xvi/xvii (see

below, p. 126). The antiquarian who was responsible for this foliation might be said to have generated the idea of a Liber Landavensis proper. The medieval foliation tells a

. D. Hobson, English Binding before 1500 (Cambridge, 1929), p. 1. " G i frühen Mittelalter (Berlin, 1965), 12.F Steenbock, Der kirchliche Prachteinband m

catalogue nos. 76 and 77. 31 Catalogue nos. 2, 4and 80.

01 That many such bindings once existed si evident from medieval documentary sources. Clearly the casualty rate among book covers adorned with precious metal and

Wel marn iaal ni het ciembeld yb 3, Cls 183,) Modd .EOwne, T "eh

at least until the sixteenth century are the worm-eaten book covered over with silver plate' with which the feast of St David was solemnized at St David's in 1538, to the dismay of the bishop, William Barlow, see his letter to Thomas Cromwell, Calendar of

Prachteinband, pp. 52-3.

stones would have been high during the Reformation. Welsh examples which survived

State Papers, Domestic, 13 March 1538; and the jewelled "Tiboeth' from Clynnog Fawr seen by Thomas Wiliems, see D. Rhys Phillips, "The Twrog MS,' JWBS, 1(1914), 124

61 On the use of liturgical books for such purposes see Steenbock, Der kirchliche

71 F. Wormald, 'The Sherborne "Chartulary" ni D . .J Gordon (ed.), Fritz Saxi

M em oreChaie ont )h a m 1ua198, 2168),96-6,Thebindingofthe 18 See below note 28 and also p. 156. 125

The Making of Liber Landavensis

quarrel between hte abbey and the bishop of Salisbury during 1142-5 and was compiled soon after that. The two books have ni common not only their unusual once-sumptuous bindings and their archaic conjunction of gospels and cartulary, of the liturgical and the forensic, but also a geographical and chronological closeness striking enough to make one wonder whether their resemblances may not be due to more than chance.

hard to absorb. There si much to eb said for turning first to the Summary (pp. 154 5) and Table 2 (p. 129).

The book was foliated ni pencil ni 1980 i-ili, 1-129. Folios i-ili and 128-9 are

[9]

14

[10]

51

[11)

16

12

81

41

19 20 21

51

22 23

19

24

20

tried to make good the medieval foliation, incorrectly on fols 57-8 and

26 27 28 29

foliation on fols 29-31. Folios 29-113 (quires 5-14) are foliated 1-85 in the lower right-hand corner by another hand of .s xvi/xvii (not later than 1612, see below, p. 153). Gwenogvryn Evans continued this foliation from fol. 114

to the end. The numbers of this foliation are those printed without explanation in the top inner corners above the text of TBLD. Folios 119-26 (quire

16) are paginated 1-16 by a hand of perhaps .s xvii (though the signatures show that this quire was already part of the book, see below). A faint pencil foliation of .s xix/xx in the top right-hand corners begins with fol. ili and 126

23

13

24 25 62 27

33

29

34

30

30

28

35

36

13 17 12

25

23

8 29

10 73

Q Fol

74 45 177 75 46 181

14 108

Y Col 109 80 317

34

10

37

110

81

35

11

41

47 75 76 47 185

109

39

110

111

82

325

40

36

12

45

76

77

48

189

111

112

83

329

193

112

[1 84 333

14

37

13

49

77

78

49

42

38

14

53

79

50

43 4 45

39

15 40 16

75

42

18

69

78 79 80 81 28

43

19

73

83

4[1] 17

61 65

1

12

13

127

197 80 51 201 81 52 205 82 53 209 83 54 213 84 55 217

흐트와B프트로S 의

52

8

33

8 0 0m 1 33 1 ¥ 1 61

the corners of leaves are defective a hand of s. xvi/xvii has here and there

probably fol. 56. Another hand of hte same period has made good the

16

71 81

3

Y

X

113 [ 1 85 116 15,114 115 [117] 116 118 17 119 118 120 16 119

127

321

337

341 343

345 347 349

32 34 3 3 孤验孤3

first and third real, the second perhaps not, see below, pp. 132, 133. Where

313

Q. Fol

73 38

46 74

8

Y Col

aztio¾ m w

medieval numbers on fols 112 and 113 do not survive); on these losses, the

1

X

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 6 67 68 8 8 7 7 3 7 3 8 7 8 p 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 9 95 96 97 98 9

do not survive) and the loss of one leaf between fols 111 and 114 (the

ュ

@ Fol

21 3 11 1 1 91 31 51 4 44 91 31 51 11 61 913

somewhere between fols 54 and 57 (the medieval numbers on fols 55 and 56

X Y Col

84 85 86 87 8 89 90 91 22 93 94 95 96 97 98

het opt rgiht hnad +20 m

149-50). Quires 3-15 (fols 13-118) are foliated [9]-120 ni the top right-hand

corner by annotator B/C of c.1476 (see below, p. 151). Folios 5-12 (quire 2) were numbered 1-8 by a hand of s. xv or xvi, probably when this quire replaced the original quire 2 (see below, pp. 131, 147). The medieval foliation points to the loss of three leaves after fol. 47, the loss of two leaves

Fol

7 8 $ 8 9 9 11 1

fol. ili (see below p. 146); fols 1-4 and 127 are leaves from other medieval

manuscripts reused as flyleaves, perhaps in .s xv (see below, pp. 131,

Col Column number of first column of each recto (given ni TBLD)

48 49 50 51 32 33 54 5 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 6 67 68 69 70 71 72

modern paper flyleaves, with a medieval parchment fragment guarded on

Fol Folio number (1980 foliation) Folio number (medieval foliation) Y Folio number ni foliation of s. xvi/xvii (given in TBLD)

1 38 39 60 61 62 63 64 65 6 67 86 69 70 71 72 23

The parchment si mostly stiff, a few leaves have original holes and flaws. Leaves measure 310 ×215 mm. except ni quire 16 which is c.255 x c.175 mm.

Q Quire number

20 21 2 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 3 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Material and foliation

TABLE I

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 =1 12

A description of LL now follows. It si arranged under the headings Hands, Rubrication, Binding, Contents, Later U es and History. The description is followed by a Summary and an Appendix by Neil Stratford on the gilt-bronze figure of Christ. For most readers the unalleviated detail of the description wil be Material and Foliation, Ruling, Quiring,

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis TABLE I

The Making of Liber Landavensis omits fol. 43 and coincides with the 1980 foliation from fol. 44; ti seems

nowhere ot eb referred ot ni print. Column numbers 1-367 were written yb Gwenogvryn Evans from fol. 29 col. 1 ot fol. 126. Table I provides a

concordance of hte three significant foliations and the column numbers. Ruling

Quires 3-14, as wil eb seen, represent the original book. They have written

space 245 × 160 mm., two columns, normally 35 lines, with double vertical

bounding-lines.! Ruling si by hard point, always on the hair side. Quires

are gathered regularly hair/flesh, flesh/hair etc. Leaves are pricked ni the

outer margins only; most of hte pricked holes are cut of. Folio 114, an

anomalous leaf (see below, pp. 133 4) si ruled in the same way as quires

Folios Column Scratched nIk signatures* signatures

Quire

14

°1 (flyleaves) Quodlibet of Simon fo Faversham, s.xili/xiv (frgt.).

5-12

+

St Mathews' Gospel, .s xv.

82

tS Mathews' Gospel (continued), s. x.i

13-20 21-28

29-36

37-47

. Vitae: Elgar &Samson, Hand B

85

Additions yb Bafter rubrication.

^16 wants 1 2, Urban documents 1126-32. Hand B 13, 41 see Additions after rubrication yb B , Eand

3-

3-14, but is written in long lines.

diagram

Quire 1(flyleaves) has written space .c 290 x c.290 mm., two columns, .c 70 lines, single vertical bounding-lines. It si ruled ni plummet.

Quire 2 has written space 245 × 160 mm., two columns, 34 lines, single

56-64

77- Vilvii vil/vili 109-

Quire 15, apart from fol. 114, has written space .c 260 x 180 mm,. c.40 long

65-72

145-

x× /

g

73-80

177-

xi/xi

h

81-88 89-98 99-107

209241281-

xili/

xv/

Quiring

108-13

317-

xvi/

The leaves of the book are all now overcast or are on guards, leading one

114-18

341-

48-55

e

78

f

85fo.l 36 inserted

vertical bounding-lines. It is ruled in plummet.

lines. Ruling is in plummet.

Quire 16 has written space 195 × 130 mm., 47 long lines. Ruling is ni

plummet.

to conclude that the whole book must have been cut up into single leaves, probably at its last binding in 1892. It is impossible therefore to ascertain

bifolia with some confidence. Taking the signatures into account we arrive

501

E a ni collaboration; later yb E ; later yb .C

bnar chase co oir w hti U udoY ocuments ot 1119), Euddogwy etc. ot

, Herewald ni sequence. Hand A uninterrupted. Rubrication yb hand B . Additons after rubrication ta end of quire 41 ybBand insertion of fol. 201

(probably yb hand A .) Additions yb Fc on

fo.l 102, s. xili, Later additions no fol. 113.

18

812

831 fol. 102

mars7, 14

51fol. 114 Fo.l 14, papal buls etc, band L,.s xi. ?early flyleaf fols 115-18 Fols 115-18, Llandaf matter, .s xili-xv. ot? bifolia w

the collation by looking for the sewing of each quire. We are helped however by the regularity of the make-up of quires with regard to fleshand hair-sides, and of the ruling. Observation of these features and of the quality of the parchment makes possible the matching of the leaves of

Contents

119-26

721

352

165

Llandaf matter c.1350.

flyleaf

Decretals of Alexander III, .s xii/xii.

*The scratched signatures ear gvien sa found athet beginning nad end of each quire.

at the collation represented in Table I.

There are two sets of signatures. Scratched large and crudely in hard point at the foot of the leading recto and last verso of quires, though not

always visible where it is expected, si a series of signatures ni roman numerals which probably began with the original quire 2 and ends with 91 The bifolium fols 24/25 is ruled for 34 lines; quires 5 and 6, the two which were begun by hand B (see below) show inconsistency, bifolia being ruled sometimes for 43

quire 14. The first clear signature of this series si ni quire 4;that ni quire 3 si visible but unclear. It si possible therefore, if very unlikely, that this series of signatures does not antedate the replacement of quire :2 one cannot put too much weight on the absence of a visible scratched i ni

present quire .2 There appears ot be no evidence other than the absence of

vini the series of scratched signatures ot suggest the loss of a quire between

and sometimes for 53 lines and, once, fols 43/46, for only 32; the bifolium fols 81/88 si

quires 6and .7 That there si no continuity of text between these quires does allow the possibility of a lost quire at this point. If a quire has been lost, ti

128

129

ruled for 36; fol. 109, which lacks its once conjugate leaf, si ruled for 34.

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis was lost before foliation of the book. The omission of vi ni the series may

however be mere error on the part of the scratcher. That eh could err si shown ni quire 8 where he scratched viii at the beginning and viiii at the end of the quire, and likewise in quire 10; the last leaf of quire 6, had it

survived, might well have shown a similar error. No loss of quires either here or elsewhere is indicated by the medieval foliation.

There is however

Quire 1. If, as seems evident, the original of quire 2 had to be replaced

because ti had become damaged, ti seems probable that quire ,1 four leaves from an outmoded and discarded scholastic book, was added by the binder ot protect the replacement quire 2.This (see below) probably happened at the second rebinding.

annotator B/C (see below p. 151) we read 'quaternus extractus unus'. There

Quire 2.This quire, written probably late ni .s xv, must have replaced hte original one (see below p. 147). The evidence of the foliation and hte signatures points ot a date after 1476. The replacement probably came at

natures? Or could the annotator perhaps have removed the quire for some reason? Unlikely, but, fi so, the book must have been at least partly

Quire 6. The original make-up appears ot have been that shown ni the diagram below. It si odd but seems ot be the only one that wil suit the

one other piece of relevant evidence, of uncertain import. n I the bottom left-hand corners of fols 64' and 65 ni a hand of .s xv?, apparently that of

si no break in text. Was it simply that the annotator, disregarding the continuity of text, had noticed the discontinuity of the scratched sigdisbound at the time.

the second rebinding.

t o sewings. evidence. tI would have required w

In some quires (e.g. quire 6) there are scratched leaf-signatures, apparently the work of the same scratcher, on the leading leaves of quires. Leaf signatures are unknown in s. xi and rare before s. xiv; if the scratched

4

42

quire-signatures are indeed the work of the same hand they cannot be associated with the original binding of the book. Yet ti is hardly possible

45

46

41 40,

that they are later than the ink signatures of .s xv/xvi described below. If 39.

we suppose that the original signatures were cropped by the first binder,

the scratched signatures could be associated with a first rebinding and dated s. xiv or xv.

The second series of signatures si written ni ink by a hand of .s xv/xvi ni

37

the lower right-hand corners and provides leaf signatures for all the

leading leaves of quires. The signatures run + for quire 2 followed by a o for quires 3-16. The use of +for quire 2 does not necessarily mean that this quire was signed later than those signed a-o. Scribes of .s xv and xvi quite

often signed the first quire + and then continued a, b, c etc. In our case the nik of the +looks hte same sa the ink of the series a o. The ink signatures were probably associated with a second rebinding.

Two short anomalous series of ink leaf-signatures appear. The first,

small and faint at the foot of rectos ni quire 5and ni no other, runs i ot vii

(and could be regarded as foliation). The second runs b i to b vi on the

leading leaves of both quires 3 and .4 nI the former ti si probably a mistake; ni the latter it merely repeats or anticipates the main series of ink

The scribe (hand B - for the hands see below), beginning with fol. 38, seems first ot have written a regular quire up to the verso of the fifth leaf, meaning to return to the quire later and fil ti ni an orderly manner. He then took two bifolia, fols 43-6, and wrote ni them on the first three pages matter which he realized ought to precede fol. 38, meaning to wrap these

signatures. These anomalous series probably date .s xv/xvi, as does a faint

two bifolia round the quire; instead, however, the two bifolia were inserted

catchword on fol. 20%.

in their present position. Three scribes, E, B and Ea, in loose collaboration,

Setting aside quires 1, 15 and 16, which are later additions, all quires ni the book appear ot have been first intended as regular ones of eight leaves. The added quires and, more particularly, the irregular ones among quires

then filled the remainder of the expanded quire, beginning on fol. 4%.

2-14 call for comment.

130

Later still, E crammed text into the space left blank on fol. 44. Later too, B took another extra bifolium, of which only fol. 37 now survives, ni order to write ni the second column of fol. 37° texts of two documents omitted in 131

The Making of Liber Landavensis

the body of the quire; this bifolium was wrapped round the quire.20 Folio 37 and the first column of the verso were later filled by hand .C That C wrote later than B is confirmed by C's reruling (in hard point) the lines of

the first column of fol. 37° while B was satisfied with the original ruling; and also by the way C begins to cram his lines towards the foot of the first

column of fol. 37 and, even so, fails to accommodate his text and is obliged to rule one extra line at the foot of the column.

That quire 6 consisted of fourteen leaves and that a sewing was required between fols 44 and 45 (which must have been a second sewing) is confirmed

firstly by the leaf signatures (fols 37 4 are signed ni ink d i to d vii, the

regular practice of the writer of these signatures being to sign each leaf up to the sewing) and secondly by a note written by annotator B/C of c. 1476 on

fol. 37 (at that time numbered 33):21 Istud melius est scriptum ni fine istius quaterni, videatur bene. fo. 46.' One or more of three leaves now wanting at the end of this quire had gone astray soon after this when a hand of .s xv? (also looking like annotator B/C) wrote 'nota hic non sequitur at the foot of fol. 47*, and all three had gone by c. 1600 when the hand which tried to make good the foliation (see above) wrote on the same page 3' folia deficiunt. Quire 8. The medieval foliation shows a loss of two leaves between fols 54

and 57. Quires 7and 8 both seem to be intact and there is no interruption of text. Probably the foliator made a mistake.

The hand which tried to

make good the foliation noted a discrepancy and wrote, incorrectly, on fol. 58°: 2' folia deficiunt.

On the grounds of their both being ruled on the verso, either of fols 63 or

64 could be the inserted leaf in this quire. Three considerations, quite apart

from that of the text, make ti clear that fol. 63 si the insert. The parchment

of fol. 56 si better matched by that of fol. 64 than that of fol. 63; the writing of fol. 63F-r, though by the same hand, si more careful than that on the adjacent leaves; and nine lines at the foot of the second column of fol. 63v

were left blank by the scribe.2 The significance of the insertion of fol. 63 becomes clear from the fact that what it contains si Braint Teilo.23 02 This explanation of hte formation of quire 6 may eb clearer fi put ni terms of its contents. On fols 38 42' are documents dated 1128 9; on fols 43 4documents relating to the 1125 Council of Westminster (which hand B evidently took to refer to the Council

of 1127, witness his rubric on fol. 43, TBLD, p. 29) followed by notes relating to events

, Band Ea, collaborating, but without paying much heed to of 1128 and 1129. Hands E

alouthents lated so Bad, dedl he ures daetd hteni ba r space noot whti. The two documents copied by B on fol. 37* are dated 1129.

12 Referring to the Woodstock concord of 1126 added by hand C. 2 See the facsimile facing p. 120 in TBLD.

32 See Wendy Davies, 'Braint Teilo.' That Braint Teilo si written on an inserted leaf

adds force and interest to Wendy Davies's analysis of the text. 132

The Making of Liber Landavensis Quire 12. A bifolium was added to this quire, for what reason si not

evident. The leaves 3/8 and 4/7 (fols 91/96 and 92/95) have the hair side

outermost; either pair could have been the irregular bifolium.

Quire 13. Folio quire had been second column rewritten at the two-line initials

102 is an inserted leaf. The insertion was made after the rubricated (see below p. 144). The last four lines of the of fol. 101', including the red initial, were erased and foot of the second column of fol. 102'. The spaces left for on fol. 102 remain blank, though some initials within the

text on fol. 102 were touched in red. The scribe of fol. 102'- whom we shall call Aa (see below p. 142) only filled the first and part of the second column on the recto and part of the second column on the verso. Hand Fc later used some of the space left blank.

Quire 14. Two of the last three leaves of the quire are missing. Folio 113 is ruled on the verso; it could have been the sixth or eighth leaf in a regular

quire. Given the break in text at the end of fol. 112" we must assume that

the sixth leaf si missing. Folio 113 would therefore be the eighth. The

seventh must be gone. The medieval foliation shows that since c. 1476 one leaf has been lost between fols 111 and 114; this must be the seventh, the sixth being gone already. The sixth may have survived into .s xv, though perhaps not in situ, witness what appears to be the conclusion of the

interrupted text of fol. 112" written by hand Pb on fol. 115v24 B y .c 1476 / noted at the foot of fol. 112° *hci desunt. when annotator BC

Nescio

quantum', the sixth leaf can no longer have been ni place. Quire 15. This quire is of altogether uncertain make-up. It si taken to begin

with fol. 114 on the strength of the signature n i written on this leaf. Folio

114 (one of considerable significance, see below pp. 143, 148) hardly looks as though ti belonged originally to the same quire as fols 115-18. The ruling of fol. 114, on the recto, unlike that of the other leaves ni the quire, is uniform with that of quires 3-14, the original book; but the several scribes of fol. 114 write long lines and, indeed, pay only limited regard to the ruling - their aim si not to waste space. Where did fol. 114 originate, we must ask, remembering too that its first text si acephalous. Conceivably it could have been the seventh leaf of quire 14, already out of position when the book was first foliated; or it might be the only survivor of an otherwise

vanished quire; or, more probably, ti may have been an original flyleaf of the book. fI a flyleaf, ti was binder's waste, a leaf originally ruled for LL or

another book of the same dimensions. The question which must then be

24E ' t ni eodem edi simul ni vila.,'

es TBLD, pp. 280 and 295. 133

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis

asked is what its condition was when it was first used as a flyleaf: was it blank or was it waste from a transient record (an unbound quire perhaps) discarded because its contents had been safely copied into LL?25

column 2 lines 10-35, all si written by one hand, not given a letter by

That fol. 114 came next to a board at a time when fols 115-27 were not

present si shown by its worm-holes, to which no holes correspond ni other leaves of quire 15.

There are worm-holes in quire 14 but these do not

match those in fol. 114. Perhaps, before the first rebinding, fol. 114 was a flyleaf at the other end of the book.26 Running vertically up the inner margin of fol. 114 are parts of two lines of off-set writing of a document of

.s xili/xiv, hard to read; there must once have been a guard or reinforcing strip of parchment holding fol. 114 ni place, provided not before the first rebinding. A few words of similar off-set writing are on fols 113% and 115. Folios 115-18 are now all on guards. Possibly they once constituted two bifolia. No signatures show on any of them to confirm that they were part of quire n. The main hand of fols 116-18 was writing, ti seems, soon after 1354. These four leaves are comprised in the foliation of c.1476 and probably joined the book at the first rebinding. Rust-marks on these leaves

show that they came next to the board at a time when fols 119-27 were not

present. The leaves of quire 15 are all badly worn. The order of the four leaves ni 1868 was 118, 117, 115, 116.27 The rust-marks and medieval foliation show that the present order has restored the earlier one. Quire 16. This quire is not included in the medieval foliation. It was

probably added at the second rebinding, witness the ink signatures. The annotation of this quire by annotator B/C who annotated LL so extens-

ively after it had been foliated (c. 1476, see below, p. 151) must have been

done before the quire was incorporated in the book.

Hands

The hands of quires ,1 ,2 51 and 16, later additions ot hte book, aer commented on ni connection with their texts (see below, pp. 146-50). The present analysis si of the hands which contributed ot what survives of the original book, quires 3-14. The analysis differs from that of Gwenogvryn Evans (TBLD, .p xxix) but, ni order ot avoid confusion, the letters used by him for identification of hands have been retained.

Quires 3-4 (fols 13-28). Excepting fol. 22°, column 2 lines 1-20, and fol. 24,

Gwenogvryn Evans; let him be Y . Y si a stiff, heavy book-hand with a slight forward slope and a tendency to break his curves; a is often headless; towards the end of quire ,4 the writing becomes larger and more widely spread. The intrusive hand on fols 22" and 42 (let him be Z) is more rounded and easily distinguishable by his a, g and ampersand. Neither hand contributed any other text to the book; Y however might be that which corrected the text of hand A on fol.

48 (statutum est,

note the

suspension mark and est symbol, Plate 16b). The only correction of their

text appears to be self-correction. Date: .s xi med. 82Facsimile: Plate 16a.

. Wrote quires 7-14 (fols 48-111, including, I propose, columns Hand A 100-10 which Gwenogryn Evans gave to hand Db). He left blanks for rubrics, often much more than was required (such as the eleven lines on fol.

111 of which only two were used for a rubric), for most but not all of which rubrics were provided, by hand B; he left a blank on fol. 55 for the diagram

of the rota, later provided by hand B (Plate 17a); at the end of fol. 50 and beginning of fol. 15 he left the space of almost a column, for text, most of it

later filled yb hand B,? and he left quire 41 incomplete beyond the recto of fol. 111. He wrote the inserted fol. 63 but perhaps not the inserted fol. 102

(see hand

Aa).

A writes a consistently

He is usually

distinguishable from B by his a (which generally has a head), his g and his y (composed of three strokes and a dot); and always by the form of his

cedilla on .e He occasionally uses Insular forms of ,f g, r and ,s mostly when quoting the vernacular. Apart from the correction on fol. 48" which appears to be by hand Yand correction on fol. 108 which appears to be by

hand B, I have not noticed contemporary correction which looks alien.

Date: .s xi med. Facsimiles: Plates 16 and 17 and TBLD plates facing

pp. 120, 230, 255 (fols 63*, 96", 104). The punctuation of hand ,Aas si that of his contemporaries B , Y , Z, E and Ea, si by point and punctus elevatus. Al these scribes correct

yb interiming nad marknig whti acare. None fohte scribes provdied 82 "Saec. xii med.' is the not very precise date offered here for all the main hands of

LL. This may appear unhelpful given the more precise dates that have been previously

52 B y hand ,E see p. 148. Ewas able ot copy ni its entirety the acephalous bull on fol. 114.

62 Asmall round impression ni hte recto of fol. 114, coloured green, as fi yb verdigris,

looks as though ti may have been caused by a brass nail head. This too could be taken as

evidence that fol. 114 was once a flyleaf at the beginning of the book.

72 A . W . Haddan, Original M S of the Liber Landavensis, AC, 3rd Series, 41 (1868),

decide whether this addition si yb hand B writing ta his best or hand Areturning later with blacker ink.

134

135

311-28 (320).

refpondeur duat arlickar her omib; gurabuf:'& omia: Amandico uob.i run confumano.Cym hommatione defola quet bic lapi fuplapidem: quinon defuat ducem co fup moncem olca:

Duct niot qui

Tuno quitudcaft

I to d icen sD ienot q u obgc monal.&quinto CruN: a'quod figni aduenaur

au. pconfumaaomt kli.font

pondent us dyne er Yidece

dat collare aliqui

dquanagro nonn

cunica fuam. Ug a abuf a nuaenbu

16a

Guy ug aditulam Iath.

tum or Quiance abeccat

e fepamuert: nachem: ter frate luã dpdicatone p m á bea paloril areale par V.i coter.

Lam fua plure code cum fu

bofto cram puf

L m aiugdbn

yug ll.

ub; deamoblazoneb; fepu cynfallm.lanumocha

ari date ufme fibr eacet Lan

&&fuccellomb; fur omib: arr

. Lamndimul i pallar. V

f u r n . Vu . Olable.

&prinamb; waul ream dex

haul filufdeuon imm

ta re. S t aru nis m i n ap tica

ao pralute amme fue7m

briannic &cum pota du V1. ecclár muna die deo 7af

Plate 15 NLW 17110 (Liber Landavensis): lower cover with Christ in Majesty

corate tauf ectopulenut 166

g r e a c t l e yommb; fuccel 16c

Plate 16 NLW 17110 (Liber Landavensis): 16a, fol. 2" (hands Yand Z); 16b, fol. 48" (hand A); 16c, fol. 78° (hand ,A rubric by B)

min nirbaxpr. quaanuf&hc fruct bone actromi paprane

bean Peart

pra edlandauo wi factorpe ept

e notare. &

. m

ri.

XIVS

t um

cu

CALI

defendere! tenufadeo

Laul cacho

Scs S a s

PETR PAVI?.

poltu. doc; fir

dam. quaten iplo

cundu data

Ego Ca

pamme fuere

ulce cocot фрг.

•II•

Kundul yor Remi. Xil Міхти! Venifi

N I

fr archieão.

S iefrui +

G e strel damar geray eportorb; infar fat zaptica ben y aor y coyali pmiabat c o

copdia fa f u i pfema ngư ber. confpectu querelã 18a

17a

marchaunfarchble. Caman fracouan. &cum daca be nedictone omib; f e r u a n o ;

& f e r u a t u r t h a n c d e m o fi n a

Taduparrounfotomg

Ea todbt ran ue: zl

f daotameng mr

cum o w n d o n a t tuay ub-

hen oyanur@unr

decroncaut am ppearo ana autabla

i patez quer; Set

t a t e c t a landame male

themate m o l a a m

auric l a z a l u . a u r a l q u a a

plur m a te a f e c o p a c vann

1.

paratum adfeputauram fepcl 0 0 ildimo cemefo.uge

bucralio; anno nonifmaii &

farra t a n fl a a fime d a r e i l

mula ent die alla qua rela

ãf Dubrar danlate funcadl

catholica un me ral s mm da que r i t a t teder eAt aba

b u ui tr adei zd i

mam. &ab vrbano aidem e ommuis bomay dea cagna confenfu Badulfi cancuarra

* %122pleroapt oo

archiept. &affenfu daud ba entf qór &orfudi ngu qua

ส นสร ง1redga ad ganone amboz; zur

17b

Plate 17 NLW 17110 (Liber Landavensis): 17a, fol. 5 (hand A , rota by B); 17b, fol. 102 (hands Aa and Fc)

con tra rof ur fua m ece ti an

tufecom conferuon Kiqui

none adca ma kale ndifi n

ram getm t t nouer: ni comfiho adrestraudind

186

18c

aedwanfdarpopul colli

Plate 18 NLW 17110 (Liber Landavensis): 18a, fol. 37° (hands C and B); 18b, fol. 30 (hand B); 18c, fol. 40° (hand B)

Mocent eps feruuf feruozz ai.

b ul ef 1.s o.camouat a r c h ep‹ rabili f e . Vr o . Landauenti eps

R eetraut cos ermaidi t orr it e a r Fl it t ros poptopparod duen-Eaucrebachan• CAraceu Cn gm .co n/u al salö

zamcam.un.

Matorni fetermemose: pPHor a ot pEoga,fuamandeno+ yaplica bind. Religrofos ann et cognolat ut q'aplant t r e mpot ulac.qmdi mdut. Srbana Landarent epo obedweat to tuof qq; ul madamuf urer ppal a bbrid = tr oa complatoit vegem p t ol ader a7revereroabui l dofereaf Dat .a• Evastian nozar rbengne tear defid u T ubecotfu nul l g uanm!ualebrr. f r ped e &fi k me tura cua tanone urogare o wrif finc parrochaler imin. đạt. Fi ohếdn, c. Landaus i b; mt r ey 3.c omc d da

o r a nti cecar ooi bi ohasplenecognol at.Locol r obrame truf deureneucl eofofRemt pormaf efrure 19a

19b

rochan imulypulegio. oãD le

Micquena amo predicte memo.

1

20a

li da( aftt o; ni .G. o r

c a be m H onon oa poit olice

(cof aptico am pralegu fuf7 ana

Serua parrschta Jugu

affirmanab, slam muefouram

Jalog-ich belte audi

ร า ะ me k f ba gefin am L a ple noforenifi

F ilhuranebiluseprunufut anmeSn utP laoBe pt rai Coppt t na ndoน

finuocitoun t anot habutho t ha efAa np erat ruenalv olu t r af eruet p aceu a t erpr eb of e eL SeparoCarals uralabonel

і цена терв ра. аД повй

19c

Plate 19 NLW 17110 (Liber Landavensis): 19a, fol. 54 (hand E); 196, fol. 47° (hand Ea); 19c, fol. 4 (hands Band E)

n ak H t he a

+/n

h on a me L ut z li t ma nc ent 20b

Plate 20 NLW 17110 (Liber Landavensis): 20a, fol. 114 (hands La and Lb); e and Ld) 206, fol. 114 (hands L

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis

guide-letters for the rubricator, unless, as seems unlikely, the letters were in

Hand C. Made an addition which filled the three columns left blank on fol.

the outermost margin and have all been cropped off by a binder. Hands A

37, the two on the recto and the first on the verso. He frequently though

and B both tend not to separate monosyllabic prepositions and

conjunctions from the following word.

Hand B. My B subsumes Gwenogryn Evans's hands B, Da, Db (apart from columns 100-10 which I give to hand A) and Fa. He wrote, in the first

not invariably writes an Insular ,g r and ,s and a wyn for .w Punctuation si by point and punctus elevatus. Date: .s xiii.

An archaizing hand whose

lateness of date is most apparent from the well-developed biting'. Facsimiles: Plate 18a and TBLD plates facing pp. 27, 92 (fols 37, 37").

place, quire ,5 leaving the last verso blank, and part of quire 6 (see above

p. 131). He completed A's text on fols 50'-1, added to it in a blank left for imor, TBLD, p. 191), drew the diagram a rubric on fol. 84* ("Fin imain..

. Subsumes Gwenogvryn Evans's hands E (apart from fol. 47%, see Hand E hand Ea) and Fb. Collaborated with hand B in adding to quire 6 after rubrication. He wrote fols 44°-6. A good, slightly backward-sloping book-

of the rota in the space left blank by hand A on fol. 55 and rubricated the

hand, easily distinguished from A and B by a cup-shaped abbreviation

quires written by hand A and probably quires 3 and ,4 besides the quires which he wrote himself. Later, after rubrication, he made additions on the blank leaves at the ends of quire ,5 of quire 6 (in collaboration with hands E and Ea) and quire 14. Al this work, after hesitation, I attribute to one

hand. First impressions suggest several hands but any features yb which to distinguish them turn out to be elusive. Granted that it is one hand, B si

mark and the form of cedilla. On fol. 44, when fol. 4Y must already have been used, he filled a half column left blank by B and himself, running his text on into the lower margin. Because he was here having to compress his

text, the hand takes on a more cursive look. He makes his own corrections; once, on fol. 44, he corrects hand B. Date: .s xi med. Facsimiles: Plate 19.

capable of very careful writing, e.g. on fol. 30 (Plate 18) and of rapid deterioration, e.g. fol. 40' (Plate 18c). Moreover, at his best he si remark-

Hand Ea. Wrote fol. 47', given by Gwenogvryn Evans to hand E . The two hands are very similar. I distinguish Ea from E by its consistently upright

ably close ot hand A ; a tenable hypothesis (which I wil not adopt) would be that A underwent a transformation, hinted at ni the later stages of his

Date: s. xi med. Facsimile: Plate 19b.

work, and after an interval re-emerged as B, a bolder and less patient hand

with one or two new mannerisms, such as his cedilla. Characteristic of

hand B are a headless a when writing hurriedly, the hooked form of his

cedilla on e, a g with a single-stroked hook at its tail, both two- and three-

stroked forms of y and a final t with a cross-stroke tending to curl

upwards. He occasionally uses insular f, gand r ni vernacular words, even

in papal documents, e.g. on fols 38 and 41. All correction of ' s text

appears ot be his own apart from one word corrected by hand Eon fol. 44.

Itake hand L c (see below) ot eb B writing cursively, but ti simplifies hte

discussion ot keep the two apart. Date: s. xii med. Facsimiles: Plates 16, 17, 81 and 91 and TBLD plates facing pp. 29, 31, 43, 275 (fols 37', 38, 41%,

stance and its use of an angular form of the common abbreviation mark.

Hand Fc. Made one addition using the space left blank on fol. 1025 ("Istud hic scriptum. deposita est. Valete?). Tall ascenders as ni contemporary cursive hands. Date: sxiii. Facsimile: Plate 17b. The only other hands to which attention should be drawn here are those

represented by Gwenogvryn Evans's .L His L comprises the four hands which made additions ni informal script on fol. 114F-r. They aer al .s xi

med. and wrote earlier than E , see below .p 148. Hand L e I take to be the cursive hand of B . Facsimiles: Plate 20. Rubrication

Hand Aa. On fol. 102, a leaf inserted after rubrication, he wrote the first

and part of the second column on the recto and the second column on the

verso, leaving the rest blank. Probably (as Gwenogvryn Evans takes him ot be) he si the same hand as hand ;A if so, he has taken ot making the cedilla , we have proof that A on e ni the same way as hand B. If Aa si indeed A

Quire .1 Blanks for two-line initials. No rubrication.

Quire .2 Five- and three-line red initials on fol. 5 with infilling and flourishes ni greyish ink; elsewhere, w t o- and one-line plain red initials. Quires 3-4. Irregularly used two- and, once (on fol. 28), three-line plain red initials with one-line initials ni the text. Probably the work of hand B .

and B were collaborators, that A's activity spanned B's. [Aa should now be

Quire .5 Two-line initials on fols 92 and 30.' Heading ni red on fol. 30%. Al apparently by hand B . Initials touched ni red on fol. 36. Blanks for w t oline initials on fol. 36" not filed.

142

143

, see Note on p. 157.] Facsimile: Plate 17. identified with B

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis

24 have two-line red initials, rotae ni red (fols 38 and 42) Quire 6. Folios 38 Y and initials in the text touched ni red and in inconspicuous yellow. Folios

In the centre of the panel, attached in 1946 by two of three early rivets,13 ni 1981 by three screws (and since 1981 kept separate ni its own box) was a gilt-bronze figure ni relief of Christ ni Majesty, of .s xili.32 Robert

43 4 have the same except that the yellow paint is bright and that there are

headings in red. Al apparently the work of hand B . In the remainder of the quire, the scribes allowed for rubrication but ti was not done. Quires 7-14. Three-line initial on fol. 48, and elsewhere two-line plain red initials and occasional one-line initials in the text; a few initials (e.g. fols

65%, 66') with infill design ni blind; headings ni red, rota ni red on fol. 55. . A poor-quality red ink tending to rub Al apparently the work of hand B off. Haphazard touching of initials ni the text ni red, some of this later than the main rubrication since it occurs also on fol. 102, a leaf which was added after rubrication. Quire 14 is not rubricated beyond fol. 111 except for paragraph marks in the fifteenth-century additions on fol. 113.

Quires 15-16. Hand Q ni quire 5 1 and hand G ni quire 16 both provide

two-line initials and headings in red for their respective texts.

Folio 127 has plain initials ni red and green, with headings ni red.

Vaughan's drawing of the figure ni NLW, Peniarth 275, on p. 183, folow-

ing his transcription of the text of LL (see below p. 154), carries back the

association of figure and book to 1659. The association si very likely late medieval in origin. Considerations which led to the restoration of the

gospel text and to the evident rebinding of .s xv/xvi could easily account for the replacement by the gilt-bronze Christ in Majesty of lost or damaged original decoration of the lower board. For a description of the figure, and

the suggestion that its original use may have been on a house-shrine or an altar antependium or retable, see the Appendix, below pp. 156-7.

Attached to the back of the figure were remains of thin silver-plate (now preserved in the same box as the figure). Nail holes, some with brass nails still in situ, show that the sunken panel, its frame and the outer edges of the board were all once covered, latterly in the silver-plate of which fragments

survive. Inside the panel, touching all four sides, faintly incised ni the

Binding

wood, is the outline of a mandorla; within the outline and following it is a series of holes, suggesting that the earlier ornament may also have been

The evidence for the earliest order ni which the book was bound is presented

a Christ ni Majesty, of metal or possibly an ivory or enamel. Christ ni

above; there seems no reason to think that the order represented by the medieval foliation is a disturbed one. The lower board of the present binding

si probably original. It is of oak, 320 x 230 mm., 18 mm. thick, square-edged

Majesty was commonly represented on one cover of metal-covered bind-

ings and the Crucifixion on the other. But it does not follow that the original upper cover of LL was also decorated; sometimes only the lower (which would have lain uppermost) bore ornament. 33

along three sides and rounded along the spine. 03 The board si now slightly larger than h te book-block but originally no doubt they were flush: there si evidence of cropping of leaves at their top and outer edges, not before .s xv. Cut into the board is a sunken panel 283 x 187 mm. (outer frame), with a

These entered the thickness of the board and emerged on the inside. The

what I take to have been its original attachment, ot three thongs. The thongs must have entered the board not ni its thickness but on the inward edge; the entry-holes are entirely hidden by a replacement strip of repair wood, half the thickness of the board, which extends along the length of the board to a

.s xv/xvi.34 Both boards show two matching sets of nail holes: one comprising nine iron nails still ni situ running evenly spaced down the outside of each board 01 mm. from the inner edge, the other of eight holes,

their ends would have been hidden by the metal covering. Head- and tail-

. 23 See Plate 15; TBLD, frontispiece; and NLWJ, 4(1945-6), plates 61 and 17. The

chamfered edge stopped on the inside by a bead. This board was attached, ni

distance of 55 mm. from its edge. The thongs emerged 75 mm. apart in the chamfered edge of the sunken panel (as in the Sherborne Cartulary) where

emerging on hte outside only some 01 mm. from the inner edge of the board. Possibly these are to do with the first rebinding.

03 Many of hte features described can eb seen ni Plate 15, also ni NLWJ, 4(1945-6),

plate 16.

144

The lower board of the binding of LL was later used on five bands.

upper board, made ni rough imitation of the lower, with a similar sunken panel, was first used for the binding on five bands. This was perhaps the

second of the two rebindings suggested by the quire signatures, that of

13 Jones, "The Book of Llandaff', 127

figuer mascennal inding foL . es osal p. 421 ,5nad nomeatl coveerd bnidnigsni general see Steenbock, Der kirchliche Prachteinband. On decorating the lower rather than hte upper cover see B . van Regemorter, 'Évolution de al technique de al reliure du VII* au XI*l siècle,' Scriptorium, 2(1948), 275-85 (284-5).

43 The fact that this second rebinding was evidently associated with the replacement

downwards. Perhaps during a period of neglect ti rested on a damp stone shelf.

145

The Making of Liber Landavensis four of them dividing the spaces between the holes for the five thongs, one hole with remains of an iron nail, in the thickness of the inner edge of the

The Making of Liber Landavensis

fols. 5-28

board. Both sets of nails must have served ot attach some form of covering

Euangelium sancti Mathei euangeliste. Matheus ex Iudea qui et Leui, sicut ni ordine primus ponitur, ita euangelium ni

Iudea primus scripsit, cuius ocacio ad deum ex publicanis

for the spine.

actibus fuit.. diligenter esse disposicionem querentibus non tacere. Inicium euangelii domini nostri Ihesu Cristi

Robert Davies of Gwysaney had LL re-bound ni 1696. An inscription ni the sunken panel of the upper board reads: 'Librum hunc temporis injurias

secundum Matheum. Liber generacionis Thesu Cristi.

.. /A ° 1696.' The inscription passum novantiquo tegmine muniri curavit / RD si formed of small brass nails, their heads flush with the board, a few of

consumationem seculi.

ad

them with traces of red or green enamel; ti fils the upper part of hte panel.

The Vulgate, with a prologue which appears to be a variant of Stegmüller no. 590.38 The text of quires 3 and

made; ti has oto many marks of use for os recent na origin ot seem likely.

of quire 2 is written ni textura of s. xv/xvi. The break

Robert Davies's words have been taken to mean that he had the new board

4 (fols 13-28) si by hands Yand Z of .s xi med; that

between quires 2 and 3 comes at cap. xii.23. Quire 2 clearly must have replaced an earlier quire containing the corresponding text. The spacing of the text of quire 2, running without any awkwardness into that of quire ,3 si

Two modern tabs of leather are fitted into a notch ni the thickness of the

outer edge of the upper board. They cover hte remains of two iron nails

which may once have anchored leather straps; opposite, ni the thickness of the lower board, are two brass pins.

L was re-bound at the British Museum ni 1892.35 The book was

done os nicely as to suggest that the later scribe had the

form quires no five raised bands and glued ot a leather back. The binding si so tight that some words ni the inner margins cannot be read. The

than lost. Haddan refers to traces of familiarity with the

evidently cut into single leaves (see above, p. 128) which were overcast to

original quire 2 before him; that ti was damaged rather

Old Latin shown yb words interlined ni the gospel text.93 The words he cites are written yb a hand of s. xv/xvi,

leather si glued ot the inside of the boards. It was an unfortunate piece of work.

Contents

fol. ili

Fragment of unidentified text, largely illegible, probably

fols 1-4° (flyleaves)

Evidently part of a quodlibet of Simon of Faversham.37

fol. 28r

fols 29-112° fols 113

. de fau.' Begins abruptly Headed on each recto 'Quolibet S

in the second question. The third question begins on fol.

4": *Utrum ni deo relatio ni quam relatio sit distincta ab essencia ni quam essencia. nI a university hand of .s

fol. 113

xili/xiv. Some contemporary annotation by another hand.

wide. Probably once part of a pastedown.

73 On Simon of Faversham se Eden, BRUO, and A . G. Little and .F Pelster, Oxford Theology and Theologians, c. AD . . 1282-1302 (Oxford Historical Society, xevi, 1934), pp. 262-5 and 370. Simon died ni 1306. Many of his commentaries on Aristotle survive but not apparently any theological work other than hte present fragment. An Oxford theologian contemporary with Simon was John of Monmouth, bishop of

ietionofbatinofom mu, G i opofThandar,267-37 Ltd. 2er aTheG Morgannwg, 5 (1961), 3-22.

146

Blank. The main text of Liber Landavensis as printed ni TBLD,

pp. 1-280. 'Omnipotens sempiterne d e u s . . Acollect for the feast of St Teilo. TBLD, p. 281. Hand Ha, .s xv.' A strip of parchment now lost must have been pasted over this text

soon after its writing, the following text, by hand Hb, beginning on the laid-down strip. "landauen' ni atnutm…. Dues of the archdeaconry of

Llandaf. TBLD, pp. 281-3. Hand Hb, .s Xv?, paragraph

marks ni red. Written ni pale ink later overwritten ni

blacker ink. The beginning imperfect because of the loss

53 TBLD, p. xi note 18.

63 The fragment measures .c 190 x 140 mm. nI two columns, written space 120 mm.

a hand which wrote ni chapter numbers for the whole gospel but added variant readings only ni quire 2.

fol. 13*

of the laid-down strip. H ' ee beneficia collata sunt Landauensi ecclesie per Henricum landauensem episcopum.: TBLD, p. 284.

Henry was bishop 1193-1218. Written yb a contemporary

hand, Ia.

83 F. Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medi Aev,i 11 vols (Madrid, 1950 80).

Haddan, Original MS. of Liber Landavensis,' 316. 39 147

The Making of Liber Landavensis fol. 113Y

N ' omina regum Britannie.

T o 1199. TBLD, pp. 285-6.

Written by hand Ib. He appears ot be the same hand as la,

fol. 113Y

writing on a different occasion. 'Hee sunt estimaciones ecclesiarum commune landauensi

?. TBLD, pp. 284 .5 Hand Ka, .s xii?, filling hte bottom part of the two columns. Summa added by

The Making of Liber Landavensis

fol. 115°

fol. 1165Y

taxatio.

fol. 114

Transcripts of bulls added at different times by several

copied by hand Eon fols 44°-5' (TBLD, pp. 55-8), from Kaircaiau ni Innocent's bull ot Bernard (Lb has two

fols 116°-17° fol. 118

successive lines beginning au).

"Tritum. apud Palladium!' TBLD, p. 286. Hand La. "In]nocentius clero TBLD, p. 286. Hand La.

'Innocentius Bernardo..' TBLD, pp. 286-7. Hand Lb. 'Innocentius H. regi..' TBLD, p. 287. Hand Lc. . cantuarensi TBLD, .p 288. Hand W 'Innocentius

fols 119-26

fol. 115

fol. 115° fol. 115°

reseruamus.' Statutes of

TBLD, pp. 298-302. Hand Q

'Subscripta sunt nomina Episcoporum ?…Names of the bishops of Llandaf from Dubricius ot John Paschal, consecrated 1344. TBLD, p. 303. Hand Q. The list si

of some dates ot the original list, ot Theophilus Field, consecrated 1619. TBLD, pp. 303-5.

Various memoranda relating to the diocese of Llandaf,

TBLD, pp. 306-34. Al written yb hand G (facsimile ni and probably before

1354 (since the statutes of John

Paschal are not included). Comprises: forms of oaths as on fol. 1165v (fol. 119); statutes as on fols 116"-17*

Eleutherius na)tione grecus. TBLD, p. 289. Hand Lc. Also copied by hand Bon fol. 36°. 'Sub Innocentio heresis.' TBLD, p. 289. Hand Lc.

excepting those of John Paschal (fols 119-20); list of bishops to John Paschal, with later additions to Nicholas

' omina episcoporum qui fuerunt ni Ashby (fol. 120); N

'Memorandum monstarunt.' TBLS, pp. 289-90. Dated . 1332. A contemporary hand, M 'Pater n o s t e r. Hand of .s xi. TBLD, p. 344.

Ecclesia Landauensi... Fet a rembrer ke en le tens de ces

xl Eueskes.

M°CCC°xlvii. Et obit apud (fols 120"-1');

'Omnibus] Pauli? TBLD, .p 291. Dated 1245. Hand

D ' e procuracionibus annuis debitis domino Episcopo Landauensi. ? (fol. 12251); 'Synodalia debita (fol.

Knaytha et multis alüs.' TBLD, pp. 291-2.

opus domini pape vel domini regis Anglie (fols 125-6);

Na, .s xii?. fol. 115

'Hec subscripta fuerunt statuta

bishops William de Breuse, 1275, John of Monmouth, 1323, John of Eglesclif, 1326, and John Paschal, 1354.

and rubrication being the same throughout, after 1347

"Gregorius [V episcopo TBLD, pp. 288-9. Hand

fol. 114* fol. 115

and before the death of John Paschal ni 1361, see below.

TBLD facing .p 327), apparently at the same time, the ink

Johannes presbiter cardinalis? TBLD, p. 288.

fol. 114* fol. 114*

defunctus.'

Forms of oath of bishop and canons. TBLD, pp. 296 .8

continued on fol. 118" ni many hands, with the addition

Hand Ld.

fol. 114°

Forma iuramenti Episcopi Landauensis.

- ink and rubrication are the same - presumably after 1354

hands, all of .s xi med., as below. These documents were

fol. 114: notice E's omission due to homoeoteleuton after

TBLD, p. 295. Refers

Hand Q. He apparently wrote fols 116-18 at the same time

another hand, Kb, s. xiii/xiv, which has also erased and

reduced ni amount many of the figures ni the original

"Nos auctoritate assignamus.'

perhaps ot the consecration of Nicholas Ashby, 1441. Hand Pc, s.xv.

"Mniuersis].

Hand Nb, .s xii?.

Carta Johannis de Hybernia….

1328. A contemporary hand, O.

TBLD, pp. 292-3. Dated

L ' a Newelonde … Anno xxxiii.' Extracts from plea rolls of the Exchequer of Pleas, 1304-5. TBLD, pp. 294-5. Hand Pa, .s xiv.'

'In villa Wintoniensi … ni episcopos.' TBLD, p. 295, o.f . p. 280. Hand Pb, .s XV 148

122° 4"); N ' omina prebendarum' (fol. 124'); 'Decima ad

fol. 1271v(flyleaf)

Q ' ua beneficia ecclesiastica spectant ad collacionem Episcopi Landauensis' (fol. 126'). A leaf from a collection of decretal letters of Alexander

II, mostly addressed ot English bishops, and interspersed

some of Gregory I and one canon of the third Lateran

Council of 1179, viz: Jaffé,40 nos. 13880, 13816, 1607, 04 Ph. Jafé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum (Leipzig, 2nd edn,. 1885-8). 149

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis

14191, 13868, 14103, 13832, 13159, canon 21 of the third Lateran Council, 1874, 1136, 14041, 14131, ?14114. This

identified ni TBLD by the letters B and C or by one of these letters combined with a superscript number, al of them writing a self-assured secretary script.43 While the hands designated B and C appear to be readily

collections analysed by Duggan.* A hand of .s xii/xiii. Marginal apparatus, by the scribe, with references to the Decretum of Gratian. A few contemporary notes in

distinguishable from each other, their variants are not; ni particular, C',

series does not

correspond to any of

the

English

plummet. Later use a n d history

Marks of use before s. xv are scarce. There are a few glosses of .s xi, e.g. fols 74, 82, 86; these are printed interlined ni TBLD. On fols 37, 38', 41Y and 53 are nota marks of probably s. xili. A hand of s. xii corrects the text

ni a few places, e.g. fols 57%, 58, 60; these corrections are noted ni TBLD

which makes many appearances, is hard to distinguish from B on the one

hand and from C on the other, allowing for changes of nib and ink. I take these B and C annotators (other than B whom I equate with L) to be a single hand which I shall call B/C; F , H , M and Tare also subsumed under B/C. The question of the identity of the many hands which are here all

treated as one may not be of great importance; whether they are one or several, the writing si all of .s xv?. Granted that they are indeed one, w e

may be more precise about its date. The hand which added the name of

John Smyth (and no other) to the list of bishops on fol. 118 looks like B/C. This gives us ground to date his activity 1476 x 8. / appears on almost every page of LL between fol. 29 Annotation by BC

and fol. 112 and again ni quire 16. Matter which attracts his attention may

conveniently be picked out on pp. 335 44 of TBLD. He si mostly con-

s. xili (see below). Sketched ni hard point ni the lower margins of fol. 20

and fol. 68* si foliage design, probably .s xi. The heavy annotation of LL belongs to .s xv and xvi and to many hands. The letters assigned ni the section Marginalia in TBLD are used here,

despite the present coalescence of many of the annotators given being by TBLD and the fact that there are other hands which are overlooked by TBLD. It needs to be said that TBLD omits many marginal notes no less

insubstantial than many of those which are printed but that none of these

omitted notes seems very significant; they are mostly fi not all of s. xv.

The earliest of the main annotators, all three of .s vx med,. are Dand P , both interested ni the identification of places and boundaries, and I, interested ni the life of Teilo. Both D and I appear ot be writing before

there was foliation. * Much the greater part of the annotation si yb hands 14 C. Duggan, Twelfth Century Decretal Collections (London. 1963).

24 D on fol. 100 (TBLD, p. 342) and 71 on fol. 62 (TBLD, p. 39, c.f fol. ,75 TBLD.

p. 338) fail ot make use of folio numbers for reference where they might conveniently

/ (see below) is have done so. That the notes of D and I preceded those of annotator BC

cerned with the rights and privileges of the diocese of Llandaf; he draws

attention, for instance, to lands no longer belonging to the diocese;44 he

reads with the knowledge of the bishop and perhaps at his behest;45 he knows Welsh; he has a critical eye;46 he si fond of drawing hands with a

pointing finger; he provided foliation and uses it for cross-reference; he refers to LL as graffus beati Teliai:47 he has at least one good joke.48 His

notes, perceptive as they are, are in the main mere echoes of the text but

occasionally he introduces information from the outside, most surprisingly

his reference ot the chronicle at the college at Warwick.49 This last reference strongly suggests a connection with the antiquary John Rous, one of whose coups was ot make Dubricius bishop of Warwick. 5° Rous ni turn leads us back ot Llandaf and offers a likely name ot put ot B/C, a

*« F ol B:DD. cing p. 27,29, 43,120,30,52 nda 275. Fo.l 72; TBLD, .p 340.

evident from their relative positions on some pages, e.g. fols 57, 62, 98, 100. A knowledge of LL at about this time is reflected by references ni BL, Cotton Titus D.xxii, written not long after 1429, and NLW, Peniarth 50 (Y Cwta Cyfarwydd, written about 1450. The former on fol. 24° cites graffo sancti Thelvai (see W. J. Rees. The Liber

Landavensis (Llandovery, 1840), p. 227); hte latter, pp. 131-2, gives a translation into

nobi Fo.l ;15 TBLD, .p337.

original (see .J Gwenogvryn Evans,

150

151

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis

name of some interest to Welsh historiography: David Llywelyn, treasurer

The glosses on the gospel (see above, p. 147) belong to .s xv/xvi. On fol. 3 is a pentrial temp. Edward VI. The two englynion to William Bleddyn when he was bishop of Llandaf (1575-90) on fols 20 and 21 are in the

of Llandaf.51

The liturgical use of three of the vita in LL calls for separate comment. Only the vita of St Teilo has signs of early use. The whole vita, fols 56'-62%, is divided into nine lections by a hand of s. xili if not s. xii. A hand of s. xili or possibly .s xiv then divided the vita (fols 56*-9) into nine short lections

followed (per ebd' in the margin of fol. 59) by lections for weekdays; the divisions of the latter, however, he seems not to have marked. In .s xv the beginning of the vita (fols 56'-8) was divided into nine yet shorter lections followed by the division of the remainder of the vita into 3, 3, 3, ,3 6 and 6 lections for weekdays within the octave. Annotator B/C wrote ni the margin at the beginning of this sequence on fol. 58 'pro octavis sancti Teliai

legende. The other two vitae, that of St Dubricius and that of St Odoceus, show no marks of liturgical use before s. xv. It was a hand of s. xv, an-

notator ,L writing earlier than annotator B C / (see fol. 68), which wrote the headings 'Lectiones de vita sancti Dubricii (fol. 51) and Legenda de vita sancti Odothei (fol. 68). The hand which made the last division into lections of the vita of St Teilo also divided into nine lections the vita of St

Dubricius and the beginning of that of St Odoceus (fols 68-9'); the later

autograph of the poet Dafydd Benwyn.53 Agood italic hand of s. xvi/xvii wrote a few words ni the margins of fols 38" and 51. Annotator V (and A seems to be the same hand) also of .s xvi/xvii wrote many notes in

yellowish ink showing interest ni saints' lives and history. Another hand of

this period tried to make good the foliation and noted missing leaves (see above, p. 126).

There si some external evidence of use of LL by antiquarians in the period .s xvi/xvii before it left Llandaf. Rice Merrick refers to it as "Teilo's

Book;54 NLW, Brogyntyn II.8 has extracts from L ni an unidentified

secretary hand with annotation in the hand of John Dee;55 John Lewis of

Llynwene cites ti ni NLW, Peniarth 252:56 Francis Godwin made use of it for his Catalogue of the Bishops of England;57 BL, Cotton Vitellius C.x, dated 1612, abstracts the historical material from LL, ni a fluent secretary hand, giving references by the LL foliation of s. xvi/xvii (see above,

.p 126);5 John Jones of Gellilyfdy, also ni 1612, copied extracts from L which he recopied ni 1641 ni NLW, Peniarth 267, pp. 321-31; Richard

part of the vita of St Odoceus (fols 69°-70, 'Rex Teuderic ...) si divided into six lections. A t the beginning of these three vitae there were once tabs,

Parry of Cwrt Gilbert ni NLW 1598D, fol. 16, records some stanzas ni

witness the cuts and marks visible on fols 51, 56 and 66. The making good

family of Glamorgan to the monasteries of Tewkesbury and Newenham, taken he says from 'llyfr parsm' Teilo Escob Llandaf": if, as the note suggests, this refers to LL, we have evidence of the somewhat unexpected

of the gospel text, by replacing quire 2, was perhaps associated with the

greater liturgical use of LL. All other annotators to whom letters are assigned ni TBLD, apart from

Welsh by 'Prior Duy' ('the Black Prior') about lands given yb hte Raleigh

contents of a lost leaf. 95

those mentioned below, appear to belong to .s xv and to lack any note-

worthiness. There are also a few other hands of s. xv which do not feature

in TBLD, e.g. on fols 53, 54 and 107'. The bottom of the second column on fol. 63" is filled by a hand of s. xv' writing a poor textura with a note of a sentence of excommunication dated 1410.52

this period was evidently used by Sir Henry Spelman, Sir William Dugdale 35 Text in TBLD, p. .x

15 Rous, Historia Regum Angliae, p. 45, and, according ot Leland, ni hsi lost De antiq-

uitate academiarum Britannicarum, makes acknowledgement as a source of information

to David LI' alias Fluellene, treasurer of Llandaf; David Llywelyn has been equated with David Landavensis alias Tavensis alias Morganius, an author mentioned by Leland and

Bale (who names two of his works, Antiquitates Cambriae and Geographia Cambriae), sec G. .J Williams in LIC, 4 (1956-7), 25. .J Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1300-1541,

XI, compiled by B. Jones (London, 1965) names no treasurer of Llandaf between 1402

and 1534, rejecting the previous Le Neve-Hardy listing of David Morgan in 1480 (deriving from Browne Willis and in origin no doubt an intelligent guess based on the

reference by Rous); it does however accept that David Llywelyn was a canon of Llandaf

Llandaf 1601-17. His hand is that which added his name to the list of bishops on fol. 118" and probably that which wrote menda vide fo: 100' ni the margin of fol. 93. 85 Gwenogfryn Evans, TBLD, p. xxx, notes that the hand of this manuscript

Glamorganacia pertinent, 6 vols (Cardiff, 1910), V , 1700-1. Rous's Historia was written

hands are certainly not identical.

in 1473 on the strength of G. T. Clark, Cartae et alia munimenta quae ad dominium de

sometime after 1480, see Kendrick, British Antiquity, p. 22.

25 *Nota quod sancti Teliai..', se TBLD, p. 350 and plate facing p. 120. 152

to . While they may eb said ot resemble each other, hte w resembles marginal hand V 59 On NLW 1598D, written ni 1615, es D . Huws, 'Richard Pary of Cwrt Gilbert,' NLWJ, 71 (1971-2), 410-14 (411).

153

The Making of Liber Landavensis and Archbishop James Ussher, and drawn on directly or indirectly by

Richard James, Bryan Twyne and Sir Mathew Hale.60 By 1655 Robert Vaughan of Hengwit was trying to borrow LL from John Vaughan of

The Making of Liber Landavensis

4. s. xii med.

Trawsgoed, one of Selden's executors; his application succeeded ni 1659.61

Robert Vaughan made a transcript for himself, now NLW, Peniarth 275, Llandaf at the end of.s xvi was also made yb him.62 LL itself, although and possibly a second, fi the handsome transcript known to have been at

intended for the Bodleian Library together with Selden's other manu-

scripts, next appears ni the possession of Robert Davies of Llannerch, who had it re-bound 1696 (see above, .p 146). His book-plate si laid down inside

.5 .s xi med.

references to Dugdale's Monasticon and Wharton's Anglia Sacra (1691)

[=B]; B made additions ni blank space ni quires ,5 6 and , transcribing from text written 14; E, collaborating with B by L on fol. 114, made further additions in quire 6, as did

7. s. xi med. 8. s. xili

1740 and 1778.65 In 1892, after Gwenogryn Evans had prepared his

edition, L was re-bound at the British Museum. It came by descent ot

P. R . Davies-Cooke of Gwysaney who ni 1959 sold ti to the National

Library of Wales; ti had been ta hte National Library deposit snice 1942.

.1 .s xi med.

2. .s xi med. .3 .s xi med.

B wrote quire 5 and the beginning of quire 6. An

inconsistent but thinking hand.

Before stage 4 but not necessarily after 1 and 2, Y and Z and perhaps other scribes wrote the original (lost) quire 2

and quires 3 4.

06 On the use by these scholars see W . .J Rees, The Liber Landavensis, pp. xi-xxi, and TBLD, pp. viii-xii.

6 Se the correspondence ni TBLD, pp. xiv-xv, and se also Jones, "The Book of

Llandaff, p. 124.

26 See discussion ni TBLD, .p xvi.

36 TBLD, pp. 336 43 where they are identified RD .. 6 Lhuyd, AB, p. 259.

6 H.D. Emanuel, The Gwysaney Manuscripts,' NLW], 7(1951-2), 326 43. 154

metal cover.

c on fol. 102, hte last C made additions on fol. ,73 F substantial additions ot the original quires. Lections for

9. s. xiv? or vx Scratched quire-signatures probably ni connection with (post 1354) the first rebinding. Quire 51 added.

10. .s ?vx

1. .s xv/xvi

Awrote quires 7-14 uninterrupted. His was agood hand but not always a thinking one. He did not rubricate. He

inserted fol. 63.

Ea; E made a still later addition on fol. 4. First binding, including the surviving lower board, with

Teilo marked.

The making of LL: a summary

Tchi amar basters one ordence on, setani not descri posbiel on,e

At some time prior to stage 6, L (all four of him) wrote

fol. 114, either before inclusion ni the book or after

.6 .s xi med. After rubrication (stage )4 fol. 102 was inserted by A a

daughter of Sir John Vaughan of Trawsgoed. Gwenogvryn Evans suggests are by Robert Davies;63 fi so, they are not in his usual hand. While ti was at Llannerch, LL was seen by Edward Lhuyd and listed in catalogues dated

may wel have been hoped for. Some spaces left by Afor rubrics were not filled.

inclusion as a blank leaf.

the upper cover. Robert Davies (1658-1710) had married a grand-

that the notes in LL written in a careful hand and black ink which give

B rubricated quires 5-14 and probably the original (lost)

quire 2and quires 3 .4 Amore skilled rubricator than B

Lections for Dyfrig and Euddogwy marked; greater liturgical use. Foliation apparently c.1476. Three leaves

subsequently lost after fol. 74 had gone by .c 1600. Heavy annotation, legal and antiquarian, much of ti perhaps by David Llywelyn c.1476.

Loss or damage or original quire 2and poor condition of quire 15 suggest that the binding was ni poor shape. Ink

quire-signatures probably ni connection with second erbinding. Replacement quire ,2 quire 61 and quire 1 (as

flyleaves) added. ?Replacement of figure of Christ in Majesty on lower cover. 12. .s xvi?-xvii Heavy antiquarian use.

13. 1619 x 1627 Left Llandaf for John Selden's library.

14. 1696 15. 1892

Re-bound for Robert Davies. Re-bound at the British Museum.

o fthetextoftedbylandALishandE.ivescentogeragi bectit

logic ni the arrangement of quire .6 His intention must surely have been that quire 6 should follow quire 14, ni chronological sequence. One must

conclude that eh was not abel ot supervise hte binding of the book and perhaps had failed to provide quire signatures. Molly Miller ni her unpublished study of L gives attention ot hte role 155

The Making of Liber Landavensis

The Making of Liber Landavensis

of hand B06 She makes the point that B's mistaking of the Council of Westminster of 1125 for that of 1127 (see .p 132, n. 20) suggests that he can

APPENDIX

Llandaf cause and that he may have been writing at some distance ni time

I MAJESTY THE GILT-BRONZE CHRIST N

hardly have been one of the clerics involved ni Urban's promotion of the

from the events of those years.

Copper-alloy, cast, engraved and gilded: height 17.1 cm.; width 114. cm.; depth 3

cm. The aloy si Cu. 931.%, Zn. 14.%, Pb. 13.%, Sn. 38.%, similar ot other mercury-

NOTE TO CHAPTER 8

' iber Some of hte argumentsni this chapter are extended by John Reuben Davies, L Landavensis, its date and the identity of its editor', CMCS, 53 (1998), 1-11. H e

a si to be examines the role of scribe (hand) B as editor; shows that my hand A identified with scribe B ; and makes a strong case for identifying scribe B with Bishop Urban himself (d. 1134).

gilded twelth-thirteenth century 'bronzes".! The gilding si not original, as ti occurs

ni scratches, but hte figure was probably gilded from the start. Christ si seated on a

rainbow, blessing, a book on his left knee. Hsi feet rested on a rounded shape,

probably a smaler rainbow. The form of hte ends of the longer rainbow suggest that there was a framing mandorla, cf. the Majesty image ni hte Westminster Psalter.? Such a large-scale bronze' Majesty would be appropriate ot hte gable-end

of a house-shrine or the centre of na altar antependium or retable. The youthful head of Christ, o s delicately chiselled with minutely rendered

features, would not eb out of place ni manuscripts associated with the Sarum

Illuminator,' but hte broadly treated surfaces of hte drapery whti softly moulded knowledge of hte new Paris style of hte third quarter of hte thirteenth century. nI os far sa hte reception of this new style ni England can eb dated whti any certainty, ti seems first ot appear ni the 1250s with the Westminster Transept sculptures and hte 1259 Seal of Henry III. But there aer on realy co lse parallels ot hte style of hte

channels aer now broken up yb hard edges and V-folds, which presuppose a

magnificent Llandaf figure, os different from its French contemporaries such sa hte

Evreux shrine;' it si a unique survival of major English bronze-casting of the third quarter of the thirteenth century, probably .c 1250-65.

eg of [See also the description and colour-plate of the Christ ni Majesty ni A

Chivalry: Atr ni Plantagenet Britain 1200-1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London, 1987), pp. 308-9.] Neil Stratford

Keeper of Medieval and Later Antiquities, British Museum

(M laboratory). C.f W . .AOddy, Romanesque Metalwork: Copper 1 XRF analysis B

dCambridge elivere ani p19a83p.erot try caterent of Anesgl Then,bese nda the studiesat 156

5 La France de Saint Louis, Exposition nationale organisée par el Ministère des 157

The Tintern Abbey Bible

9

The Tintern Abbey Bible

thirteenth-century bibles is information about their origins and early

ownership. What distinguishes NLW 22631C si its Tintern abbey provenance. This si recorded yb an inscription at the foot of fol. ,2 erased, but not erased so much sa to make it illegible under ultraviolet light. Under

the lamp, ni script of probably the first half of hte fifteenth century, hte inscription reads: Ista biblia olim Abbathie de Tinternie. The usual inter-

pretation of these words would be This Bible used to belong to Tintern Abbey'. But antiquarian concern for recording the names of previous owners of books was not characteristic of the Middle Ages - erasure of ownership inscriptions was rather more so - os perhaps we should give olim in the Tintern inscription its less common connotation, 'this long time

past', and take it that someone ni the fifteenth century was recording that

abbey, the books of its library, have been far less fortunate ni their survival. Until 1988 only one book was thought to have survived but at a

The only other manuscript which offers evidence of a likely association

with Tintern si BL, Royal 41 C.vi, Flores Historiarum, the abridgement of

sael at Christie's on 7December 1988 a second Tintern book surfaced, a

Matthew Paris's Chronica Maiora with continuation. This manuscript, whose main portion was probably written at Holme St Benet's abbey about

and si now NLW 22631C. During hte thirteenth century hte Bible first became a popular book.

This bald statement is not meant to raise questions about the place of the

1304, includes additions relating ot Tintern abbey for the years 1305-23 which suggest that Tintern had become its home.? What may be more surprising than the fact that the NLW Bible si the only known manuscript with a Tintern ownership inscription, and one of only two which si attributable to

Before the thirteenth century small single-volume bibles were unknown.

monastic provenance. The only other thirteenth-century Bible from Wales is BL, Add. 54232 from the Franciscan friary of Llan-faes in Anglesey.

thirteenth-century Bible. tI was bought for hte National Library of Wales

Bible at the heart of Christian doctrine and liturgy from the days of early Church, simply to make a point about the history of book-production.

Those who studied the Bible would generally have done so from large

multi-volume library sets. For liturgical purposes the requisite scriptural

texts were more conveniently found in missals, breviaries, psalters, lectionaries and other service books. The making of small bibles intended for private reading was a novelty, one which was closely associated with the rise of universities. The first university was that of Paris, emerging at the end of the twelfth century. Christopher de Hamel has written: The way that the Latin Bible was redesigned and promoted from the Paris schools

was one of h te most phenomenal successes ni hte history of book production.''

Single-volume bibles of the thirteenth century are among the commonest types of manuscripts to have survived from the Middle Ages.

Those ni British libraries alone must number many hundreds. It si with this multitude that the Tintern Bible belongs. What is uncommon ni our 1 Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (Oxford, 1986) [2nd edn., 1994], p. 110. Dr de Hamel on pp. 107-17 gives an admirable account of the

developments which here are only briefly touched on.

158

Tintern at all, is the fact that it is the only known medieval Bible of Welsh

The Tintern Bible si complete and undamaged. Apart from the paper

flyleaves (fols i, i, 340 and 341) which go with hte post-medieval binding, ti

comprises 339 leaves measuring 235 x 170mm. with written space, ni two

columns as was standard ni these small bibles (three for the Interpretation

of Hebrew Names'), measuring 150 x 100mm. Bibles much smaller than this were made, some with written space no more than 90 x60mm. One of many regular features of the Tintern Bible, characteristic of a standardized

product made by practised hands, is the number of lines to the page, a

constant 65, apart from the psalter which si written larger, mostly 94 lines to the page but varying 49-54. The collation of a manuscript, the analysis of the make-up of its quires

(gatherings' or 'sections') si often revealing. The Tintern Bible, as one would expect, si more or less regular in its make-up. Its quires are of twelve

leaves with the exception of quire ,5 which has fourteen leaves (fols 50-63); 2 G. F. Warner and .J P . Gilson. Catalogue of Western Manuscripts ni the Old Roval and King's Collections, 4 vols (London, 1921), I, pp. 134-5. Julian Harrison. The Tintern abbey chronicles', The Monmouthshire Antiquary, 16 (2000), 84-98, shows that the Tintern continuation in Royal 14 C.vi is a cory made ta Holme St Benet's.]

159

The Tintern Abbey Bible

⽟

quire 11, which has a single leaf added at the end (fol. 136); and, at the end

of the book, quire 26, which si of six leaves (fols 305-10), quire 28, which si

of ten (fols 323-32), and quire 29, again of six (fols 333-8). Folios 1 and

339 are original parchment flyleaves. The extra bifolium in quire 5 was

evidently added because either the scribe or his supervisor had decided that

1 Kings ought to begin a new quire (on fol. 64) and calculated the size of the previous one accordingly. The additional leaf at the end of quire 1 was likewise to enable completion of a book within the quire, Job ni this case, so that Psalms might begin in a new quire (fol. 136, the added leaf, si blank apart from a third of a column of text). A new scribe takes over on fol. 137 for the psalter. The short quire 26 was calculated to bring the text of the

Bible to a close at the end of a quire, on fol. 310. What follows ni quires 27-9 si the 'Interpretation of the Hebrew Names'.

Scribes or their masters had to ensure that the leaves and quires of a

book could be assembled in the right order by the binder.

This they

commonly did by means of a series of numbers or letters, or combination

of both, which we call signatures. The makers of the Tintern Bible were not consistent in their practice. In so far as the signatures survive (being close

ot hte foot of the page, many are cut away yb the binder), we see that ni

quires 1-8 the first six leaves were signed on the verso of the first leaf and

โด# ยอfet Gua n a u cho @c

on the rectos of the next five: a, ,b ,c d, e and f: while each quire itself was

distinguished by a mark of some sort (e.g. a cross, a circle, a line) above the letters. In quires 9-11, numbers (written ,i i, i, ii, iii, i ) replace letters, while the marks (such marks have been called 'ad hoc marks') persist. In quires 12-29 signatures survive rather thinly, but those which are to be seen are again the letters a to f, not here always associated with ad

ไร? c o a r t a t e l e m i t t e

hoc marks. Another device to link quires was the catchword. In the Tintern Bible there si one, on fol. 160,' and what may be the remains of others on fols 13 and 75'. Possibly they were written on each quire and have, with

one exception, all been cropped off by the binder. The Bible si the work of two scribes, their script suggesting that they were active around the third quarter of the thirteenth century.

Co reliogo Foci

The first, whom

, wrote fols 2-136. On fol. 136, at the end of Job, he registered e shall call A w his relief by signing off with the remark: Explicit expliceat; ludere scriptor eat. Folios 137 (beginning with the psalter) to 221" are written by a second scribe, B. On fol. 222, scribe A resumes and continues through to the end on fol. 338°. While the change-over between fols 136 and 137 corresponds to

r o o t i n a

110 เ อกร ม ,1 0ิ 1 น 20c o ar

Rone not q u o v a m i

the start of a new quire, allowing for the possibility that B may have been at

work before A had reached fol. 136, the second change-over comes within a quire. B wrote the recto and verso of the first leaf of quire 19 and A took over in mid-sentence at the top of the recto of the second leaf; this time it is clear that the two scribes were collaborating closely. 160

Plate 12 NLW 22631, fol. 96

Og L P

The Tintern Abbey Bible The hand of scribe A is a fine example of the small rounded script

M opt opเ Fอg t ioma egr transcopur

! นบอก ลงเ อ

r esin , o Lo cemona inynd amanur eog

amrin me de monte (oo fuo E g o dee ni i t a f o a m i n o grantee qua od

and percetorm non

B et i oc om endyed

aminennenonte

Betmiegeto

tit aft-Calme:

De pimmum bencitio tha, amins

lignitm god plans

v hsa ppor nn a f n t

temporelo.

small size (see Plate 21). A fondness for decorative extensions into the

margin of the ascenders and descenders of letters is evident ni some parts of

um me facis m6. © nomem m u g a r i t onun e Af i nz oef m it he Amecant orber

cor nl oge tties mod n abtt ur dhear uod e G o e sp a ngna m

As' text, and gives ti some individuality, e.g. fols ,1 37°, 124 and 222-38;

ift

H oneสำ สอราแมลง/ w r mel e g

f huma bit

1 1002 1- 1 1 10h o m t r amt i r

Coolum ems nondefia

2 11-4 g

ma d ac

. C o t meoc

H นm s hear nodh eI onCoun 2dhr ens

2 0 n frimpil not fer totaquam put

i f quem p i o n e m u t a f a r e t e

w he ot ea u d n an oa n eu r

t on. t granomaptt. n.a dt n o: h er gp r

a m a s nolte poster que dum t o g โ กง น ะว con 2

o ntopet m onfitt owif or ane • t o m a m

ส า ม ส ยot ent e1 0b bona

S p Tt ne dc ha n a

fare femuermogeuro.opti time m a r n .

Mo C s u cn t

l tu Ct tt oo

ineirtat

1àmên tomeusum a deim mug 1 16t r Toc t co t ?c o a n s n bt an abut cos.

G l actoqurt te aneooa nne05

8

confinent hun ace ab co tpl

pen Con c ha n cm P o d t on s B o p a u n c f

© n od u t o a d m eni m fn oe rmu ?c g o

b odheg emin t ty 9 o f hi a a n e o on e o

g rane J nhtaronmm:!@potiet tone mam dunnot is. R g

et o r u a y a f

H hi e: n enettegec olm oneusw et Ti net oeu o ct o oa t oi n f t t ee : t oe t i s a hi e

เ อ• O n om om a nt em ot oa i et m ant ec r ก าร นต 1 0a m em -Ch ane Al a t or b t อย

อดไ ซะคM บท o r a bu o t e e f m t e m nt e

t a g p t t a n e o m t m in i xd mt e o c st of t

w : notonguar varaguh.om e mge

cos. E vimme taget utengu e: crutl

itunge? co centimeet cam tremore

• a cnitte dilmimam nequetbo trate

( f et t ect nc us: ent om iCqui )อสแลสม-ตชโบลร ในปลาก5ม

6 เขลาให9ลน:นละ