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The Welsh King and his Court
Early medieval kingship was exercised in a domestic setting with no divide between the officers of state and the royal household. The Laws of Court in the medieval Welsh lawbooks provide some of the most interesting evidence for the structure and operation of a royal court in early medieval Europe. These are richly detailed but also problematic texts, and their correct interpretation is the central concern of The Welsh King and his Court.
The various essays discuss the composition and functioning of the itinerant royal household, and demonstrate the different ways in which government roles might emerge from the household duties which were the essential elements of dignified mobility, for example the officers in charge of food, alcoholic drink, horses, sleeping-quarters, and the priest. The Welsh Laws of Court shed light on medieval royal government and also exemplify ways in which such a household ordered the rituals of domestic life into a powerful cohesive force.
The Welsh King and His Court not only provides thematic discussions of the royal household, but also presents primary texts along with English translations and, for comparative purposes, an Irish text dealing with hereditary court offices is also included. The chapters collected here comprise a fascinating and detailed study of the organization and working of the courts of native Welsh rulers before the Edwardian conquest.
The various essays discuss the composition and functioning of the itinerant royal household, and demonstrate the different ways in which government roles might emerge from the household duties which were the essential elements of dignified mobility, for example the officers in charge of food, alcoholic drink, horses, sleeping-quarters, and the priest. The Welsh Laws of Court shed light on medieval royal government and also exemplify ways in which such a household ordered the rituals of domestic life into a powerful cohesive force.
The Welsh King and His Court not only provides thematic discussions of the royal household, but also presents primary texts along with English translations and, for comparative purposes, an Irish text dealing with hereditary court offices is also included. The chapters collected here comprise a fascinating and detailed study of the organization and working of the courts of native Welsh rulers before the Edwardian conquest.
- GenresNonfiction
603 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2002
19 people want to read
About the author
T.M. Charles-Edwards
16 books4 followersThomas Mowbray Charles-Edwards FRHistS FLSW FBA is an emeritus academic at Oxford University. He formerly held the post of Jesus Professor of Celtic and is a Professorial Fellow at Jesus College.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 9, 2012
Basically essential reading on the laws of court, if not the rest of the welsh laws. This book has an edition and translation of the cyfnerth redaction, latin b redaction and the tangentially relevant ‘Customs of the Ui Mhaine’ and more interesting Canu i Swyddogion Llys y brenin. Don't think this is all about the texts however. There are a good 400 pages of essays, written and edited by the Oxford-Cambridge Celtic club. There is a wealth of scholarship here, although it was of course biased towards direct appreciation of the laws rather than the implications of the laws. Entertainment literature like the Mabinogi is only rarely referenced. Ultimately most of the essays are terribly boring unless you are intensely interested. Three quick quotes:
The tractate of the Laws of Court that opens the principle redactions of the Welsh lawbooks is a very strange animal indeed. Perhaps ‘mythical beast’ might be closer to the truth, for while it purports to be an account of the structure of rouyal government in medieval Wales, in fact it is one of the best arguments that exists against the notion that the boundary between history and literature is at all hard and fast. No purely literary source could possibly do a better job recreating the atmospherics of an early medieval court. Insolent falconers swagger off into the bushes to relieve themselves knowing the at the king must by custom hold their horse for them until they return; female bakers hurl kitchen tools in to the air to determine the extent of the sanctuary they are permitted to offer. Foodholders vigorously massage the royal toes, while huntsmen and stewards scrupulously parcel out animal body parts among the officers of the court. This text is stylized, outrageously artificial, and even funny. What it is not is reflective to any appreciable degree of the historical realities of medieval Welsh courts: to read it side by side with David Stephenson’s the Governence of Gwynedd is a highly disorienting experience.
The function of the teulu was to attend to the king’s needs or, as the Latin A Redaction puits it, que prompta debet esse ad opus regis. The teulu was a small force, usually up to 120 men, who accompanied their lorda t all times. Traditionally it was made up of young men aged between fourteen (the age of majority) and twenty-one, although this is nowhere stated in the Laws; all that is said there is that when a son reached the age of fourteen his father should take him too the lord and commend him to him.
The hebog had at its best the high value of £1, which confirms the view that it was a falcon; in the Latin Redactions this value is given to the accipiter, and we must take it that that word is not being used in a wide sense in these texts. Only the Cyfnerth Redaction gives values for the gwalch (at its best 120d,) and the Latin Redactions have no birds of corresponding values: we shall return to this point. From its name, based on hwyad, ‘duck’ it might be supposed that the hwyedig wasa duck-hawk, more or less synonymous with the English ‘goshawk’, but the Latin references to accipiter masculus ‘id est hwyedig’ makes it clear that the hwyedig is a male bird, called in English ‘tiercel’ because it was a bout one third smaller than the female. And since the Iorwerth Redaction rules that the hwyedig is worth 24d. If it is a hebog, we can surely say that only falcon tierccles interested the court: no-one would be interested in other male raptors except for breeding. Further, the absence from so man Redactions of the gwalch (to which the narrower meaning of ‘goshawk’ can be given) seems to imply that when the falcon had been generally adopted, the goshawk was of no interest to the court. The llamysten presents no problem: there is no doubt that it was a sparrowhawk; and it hada romantic significance in medieval Europe which secured continued importance for it: it was the lady’s hawk par excellence, and was often given as the prize in tournaments, and would be presented by the winner to his lady, as the hero did in the Welsh romance ‘Geraint son of Erbin’.
The tractate of the Laws of Court that opens the principle redactions of the Welsh lawbooks is a very strange animal indeed. Perhaps ‘mythical beast’ might be closer to the truth, for while it purports to be an account of the structure of rouyal government in medieval Wales, in fact it is one of the best arguments that exists against the notion that the boundary between history and literature is at all hard and fast. No purely literary source could possibly do a better job recreating the atmospherics of an early medieval court. Insolent falconers swagger off into the bushes to relieve themselves knowing the at the king must by custom hold their horse for them until they return; female bakers hurl kitchen tools in to the air to determine the extent of the sanctuary they are permitted to offer. Foodholders vigorously massage the royal toes, while huntsmen and stewards scrupulously parcel out animal body parts among the officers of the court. This text is stylized, outrageously artificial, and even funny. What it is not is reflective to any appreciable degree of the historical realities of medieval Welsh courts: to read it side by side with David Stephenson’s the Governence of Gwynedd is a highly disorienting experience.
The function of the teulu was to attend to the king’s needs or, as the Latin A Redaction puits it, que prompta debet esse ad opus regis. The teulu was a small force, usually up to 120 men, who accompanied their lorda t all times. Traditionally it was made up of young men aged between fourteen (the age of majority) and twenty-one, although this is nowhere stated in the Laws; all that is said there is that when a son reached the age of fourteen his father should take him too the lord and commend him to him.
The hebog had at its best the high value of £1, which confirms the view that it was a falcon; in the Latin Redactions this value is given to the accipiter, and we must take it that that word is not being used in a wide sense in these texts. Only the Cyfnerth Redaction gives values for the gwalch (at its best 120d,) and the Latin Redactions have no birds of corresponding values: we shall return to this point. From its name, based on hwyad, ‘duck’ it might be supposed that the hwyedig wasa duck-hawk, more or less synonymous with the English ‘goshawk’, but the Latin references to accipiter masculus ‘id est hwyedig’ makes it clear that the hwyedig is a male bird, called in English ‘tiercel’ because it was a bout one third smaller than the female. And since the Iorwerth Redaction rules that the hwyedig is worth 24d. If it is a hebog, we can surely say that only falcon tierccles interested the court: no-one would be interested in other male raptors except for breeding. Further, the absence from so man Redactions of the gwalch (to which the narrower meaning of ‘goshawk’ can be given) seems to imply that when the falcon had been generally adopted, the goshawk was of no interest to the court. The llamysten presents no problem: there is no doubt that it was a sparrowhawk; and it hada romantic significance in medieval Europe which secured continued importance for it: it was the lady’s hawk par excellence, and was often given as the prize in tournaments, and would be presented by the winner to his lady, as the hero did in the Welsh romance ‘Geraint son of Erbin’.
July 5, 2007
Read for HIST 498D: Law and Society in Medieval Europe
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews