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Saints, Kings, and Princes: Welsh Pasts in an Age of Conquest, c.1070–1282

In the period from the earliest Norman incursions of the late eleventh century to Edward I’s conquest of Wales in 1282, Welsh history writing expanded greatly in both quantity and scope. However, its assumptions and approach largely built on the legacy of the early Middle Ages. On the one hand, Geoffrey of Monmouth was the most conspicuous example of an enduring preoccupation with the distant Brittonic past; on the other, chronicles continued to narrate recent and contemporary events. In both cases, two broad phases may be distinguished, extending respectively from the late eleventh to the mid-twelfth century and from then down to the Edwardian conquest. In the first phase a burst of writing about the British and Welsh past coincided with, and to a considerable extent responded to, the conquest of substantial areas of Wales by the Normans and their allies. Unlike earlier conquests by the Irish in the post-Roman period and the English in north-east Wales in the ninth and tenth centuries,¹ the conquests from the late eleventh century onwards, though fluctuating in their extent, led to the enduring settlement of people from England, northern France, and Flanders which ensured that, henceforth, Wales would be a land of plural cultures. Conquest also stimulated changes in the Church, notably the definition of territorial dioceses and the introduction of Benedictine monasticism, including reformed religious orders of continental origin. These changes had a significant impact on history writing. Not only did narratives of contemporary events have to take account of a new intrusive presence on an already fragmented political scene, but ecclesiastical reorganization led both Welsh and Norman clergy to take an interest in the history of Welsh churches and their saints. More generally, conquest stimulated attempts—in England as well as Wales—to conserve and elaborate pre-Norman accounts of the Britons in the era down to their loss of most of the island to the Anglo-Saxons, a subject whose potential was seized upon with astounding success by Geoffrey of Monmouth. His work was a crucial influence on Welsh history writing in the second phase, from the mid-twelfth century to 1282. However, another stimulus was provided by the exploits of the most powerful Welsh rulers, patrons of a network of Cistercian monasteries which became the main centres of history writing from the late twelfth century onwards. The same period also saw the construction of historical narratives from the perspective of settlers of Anglo-French origin in the March of Wales.

In addition, the often turbulent relations between the Welsh, the marcher lords, and the English crown left their mark on the increasing number of historical works written in England from the Anglo-Norman period onwards, which take a greater interest in Wales than had their Anglo-Saxon predecessors. One aspect of this is the recording of miracles and wonders said to have occurred in Wales.² More typical was coverage of military and political affairs, such as royal campaigns in Wales and diplomatic relations with Welsh rulers, but extending, for example, to detailed accounts of the Welsh risings early in King Stephen’s reign and of political developments in mid-thirteenth-century Gwynedd, news of which was probably passed to Matthew Paris by the bishop of Bangor on visits to St Albans.³ Though Paris showed sympathy for the Welsh, even commending their exemplary readiness to fight ‘in the fashion of the Trojans from whom they were descended for their ancient laws and liberties’,⁴ many English historians were hostile. Indeed, one influential view, increasingly evident from the mid-twelfth century onwards, held that the Welsh were barbarians.⁵

The following discussion begins with works that focused on the distant past, namely saints’ Lives and related texts, followed by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudo-history of the kings of Britain and its reception in Wales. Attention then turns to accounts of recent and contemporary history in which Welsh rulers were central actors, namely the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan and Welsh chronicles, and also touches briefly on marcher chronicle writing.

British Pasts

The warm welcome extended to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Wales reflected a continuing sense of the Welsh as descendants of the Britons that is widely attested in this period. Gerald of Wales thought it remarkable that, during the late twelfth-century resurgence in Welsh princely power, ‘the whole people’ believed that the prophecies of Merlin would be fulfilled and ‘the Britons will exult in their old name and fortune in the island’.⁶ Court poetry in praise or memory of Welsh princes evoked both the struggles between the Britons and English in the post-Roman era and more recent events in Wales as well as elements of the historical mythology summarized in the index of bardic learning known as The Triads of the Island of Britain (W. Trioedd Ynys Prydain).⁷ This is consistent with the evidence of later medieval bardic grammars, which declare that poets were required to master not only early poetry (W. hengerdd), including works attributed to Aneirin and Taliesin that focused on sixth-century northern Britain, and poetic art (W. barddoniaeth), but also ‘stories’ (W. ystoryaeu; sing.: ystorya), a term which probably encompassed the Britain-centred Welsh historical mythology, and perhaps especially ‘the History of the notable Acts of the kings & princes of this land of Bruttaen and Cambria’, listed in early modern texts as one of the ‘three memories’ of poets.⁸ In addition, poets and reciters memorized genealogies which were not only transmitted orally but preserved in books in Welsh according to Gerald of Wales (he also noted that ‘even the lowliest of the people have regard for their genealogy’, being able to recite their pedigrees back for six or seven generations, or even further).⁹ On the other hand, there is no evidence for the production of verse histories in the vernacular comparable, for example, to the French-language works of Wace and Benoît de Sainte-Maure in the twelfth century.¹⁰

Welsh poets thus cultivated a broader historical culture and political mythology comprising a repertoire of people, places, and events that evoked the past of the Welsh and their Brittonic ancestors.¹¹ However, that culture and mythology could accommodate different emphases. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was deployed on the one hand by poets in courtly contexts, whether as a rhetorical tool for praising princes or through singing ‘The Sovereignty of Britain’ (W. Unbeiniaeth Prydain) before a princely war band; and on the other as a means of legitimizing the liberties (W. breintiau, sing. braint) which leading kin groups in the regions of Powys and Arfon, faced with intrusive princely power, claimed to have been bestowed on their ancestors as rewards for heroic military service during struggles between kingdoms in Britain over half a millennium earlier.¹² In addition, lawyers in thirteenth-century Gwynedd, some of whom were related to poets, sought to give added historical depth to Welsh law by including stories about the sixth-century king Maelgwn Gwynedd and by drawing on Geoffrey of Monmouth or his sources to assert that Welsh law, attributed to a royal reform by Hywel Dda, had in turn superseded the first laws established in Britain by its king Dyfnwal Moelmud (Geoffrey’s Dunuallo Moelmutius).¹³

Sacred Histories: Hagiography and Ecclesiastical Politics

The late eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed an efflorescence of writing about the early Church in Wales, focused above all on saints.¹⁴ This celebration of a sacred past reinforced a fundamental assumption, attested from Gildas onwards, that one defining characteristic of the Britons and their Welsh successors was their long-established adherence to Christianity, originating in the Roman period but consolidated, mainly in the sixth century, by the foundation of churches by holy men (and occasionally women) who came to be regarded as saints. Saints thus provided a powerful focus for the notion that Welsh history was Christian history, a notion that continued to be influential until the nineteenth century. Some saints may have been the subject of Latin Lives from at least the eighth century, and it has been argued that ‘hagiography was widespread in Wales by ca800’ on the grounds that the Historia Brittonum drew on Lives of St Patrick and St Germanus, and also recorded a miracle involving St Illtud.¹⁵ It may be, too, that some of the extant complete Lives drew on earlier texts that have since been lost. Nevertheless, the Lives composed in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries marked a new beginning that formed part of a revival of saints’ cults linked to ecclesiastical reorganization which resulted from Norman conquest and domination in Wales. In particular, through providing narratives of those regarded as the founders of churches the sacred biographies discussed here sought to endow the ecclesiastical communities for whom they were written with the prestige and authority of an ancient Christian past. It is likely, moreover, that the stories recorded in such Latin texts as well as in twelfth-century vernacular poems to saints had an impact beyond the ecclesiastical communities which promoted them.¹⁶

The most important collections of the extant Lives from this period occur in two manuscripts.¹⁷ One, the Book of Llandaf (Liber Landavensis), whose significance is assessed below, includes Lives of St Dyfrig (Dubricius), St Teilo, and St Euddogwy (Oudoceus), patron saints of the church of Llandaf, together with Lives of St Elgar, a hermit buried on Bardsey Island, and St Samson as well as hagiographical material relating to St Clydog.¹⁸ The other, BL Cotton Vespasian A.XIV, written probably in the last third of the twelfth century at Monmouth Priory, contains a calendar of mainly Welsh saints, a Latin–Old Cornish glossary, and a tract on the saintly progenitor Brychan, followed by fourteen Lives of Welsh and two of Irish saints.¹⁹ The collection provides valuable evidence of several stages of hagiographical activity which extended over a century and involved both the Welsh clergy of major pre-Norman foundations and monastic communities established by the Normans and their allies. First, the individual Lives were originally composed at different times from the late eleventh century onwards by the clergy of churches that sought to promote the cult of the saint commemorated. Second, it is likely that these were collected in the second quarter of the twelfth century, perhaps in the 1130s, either at Gloucester Abbey—which could have gained access to the texts through its acquisition of several of the Welsh churches, including Llanbadarn Fawr and Llancarfan, for whom Lives had originally been written—or by the professional hagiographer Caradog of Llancarfan.²⁰ Finally, the collection was copied in the Vespasian manuscript.

Although their subjects and contents differ, the Lives all follow the conventions of sacred biography developed since late antiquity; they thus seek to demonstrate, notably through accounts of miracles, that their subjects conformed with the norms of sanctity represented by Christ and other figures in the Bible as well as by earlier hagiographical works.²¹ On the whole, Lives concentrate on miracles achieved by the saint during his or her lifetime, but a few report miracles that occurred after the saint’s death. The largest collection, probably written for the Norman monks of Basingwerk Abbey and appended to a Life of St Winefride associated with her shrine at Holywell in modern Flintshire, demonstrated the saint’s posthumous power over Normans as well as Welsh.²² Many of the saints are situated in a Christian world that extended beyond Wales to Ireland, other parts of Britain, the Continent (especially Brittany and Italy), and Jerusalem. Yet if the Lives exemplify an immensely widespread literary phenomenon in Latin Christendom, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe they also exhibit distinctive characteristics deriving from a particular historical culture. The authors of most Lives reveal a familiarity with earlier accounts of the British and Welsh past and attempt to situate their subjects in plausible historical contexts in the post-Roman period, especially by connecting them with early Insular saints such as St Germanus, credited with the defeat of the Pelagian heresy in Britain, and St Patrick or by staging confrontations between the saint and King Arthur, Maelgwn Gwynedd, or other secular rulers.²³ Lives also often emphasize the royal ancestry of the saint, sometimes expressed in one or more genealogies, thereby adapting a genre already well established with respect to secular dynasties, and a practice greatly extended by the later twelfth or early thirteenth century through the composition of the vernacular genealogical collection Bonedd y Saint (‘The Genealogy of the Saints’).²⁴ In other words, hagiography was informed by a wider body of historical writing to which it in turn contributed.

These characteristics are revealed clearly in the two earliest surviving Lives with named authors, composed by members of hereditary clerical families associated with churches in south Wales and renowned for their learning.²⁵ Probably the earlier of these is the Life of St David (Vita Sancti David) by Rhygyfarch (1056–99), son of Sulien (d. 1091), whose family was based at the church of Llanbadarn Fawr in Ceredigion (west Wales).²⁶ However, the family was also closely connected with St Davids, as Sulien served two terms as its bishop (1073–8 and 1080–5).²⁷ This was probably much less secure than Llanbadarn Fawr: Sulien returned in 1080 after the intervening bishop had been killed in a Hiberno-Scandinavian raid, while a decade later the shrine of St David was stolen from the cathedral, being despoiled of its gold and silver, and the church was destroyed by another attack in 1091.²⁸ The Life of St David may well have been written in response to the disasters that befell the cathedral in the early 1090s.²⁹ Rhygyfarch certainly presented it as an act of recovery, asserting that he had accounts of the saint ‘scattered in the most ancient writings of our country, and especially of his own monastery’, and that

although the books were eaten away along the edges and the spines by the constant devouring of grubs and the ravages of the passing years, and written in the handwriting of our forefathers, they have survived until now. For fear that they should perish, I have collected and gathered them together…³⁰

On the other hand, the Life probably pre-dates the Norman invasion of Ceredigion and Dyfed in the early summer of 1093, as the work lacks any echo of the event’s calamitous significance voiced by Rhygyfarch in his verse ‘Lament’ (Planctus) on that event,³¹ portrayed in Gildasian terms as the destruction of an established order by foreign oppressors visited upon the Britons as divine punishment for their sins.³² The poem reflects the wider interest taken by Sulien’s family in history, both sacred and secular. Another poem was composed by Rhygyfarch’s brother Ieuan in honour of their father Sulien that set the latter’s biography against the backdrop of the ancient British past. This celebrated not only the author’s descent from ‘the famous race of the Britons (which) once withstood the Roman army energetically’ but also the ‘homeland’ (L. patria) of Ceredigion, location of the ‘city’ (L. metropolis) of Llanbadarn, where St Padarn had lived and Sulien was born.³³ In addition, as argued below, it is very likely that members of the family wrote the late eleventh- and early twelfth-century sections of the Latin chronicle underlying Brut y Tywysogyon.

The Life of St David was shortly followed by—and probably also helped to inspire—the composition of the Life of St Cadog (Vita Sancti Cadoci) by Lifris, master (L. magister) of the powerful ecclesiastical community of Llancarfan and, like Rhygyfarch, the son of a bishop—in this case, Herewald of Glamorgan (1056–1104), whose see was located at Llandaf.³⁴ Like Rhygyfarch, Lifris was acquainted with other native Welsh literary and historical traditions, which continued to be cultivated at Llancarfan after he completed the Life to judge by later additions to his text. These include pedigrees which suggest that the community had probably acquired a version of the Harleian genealogies by the second quarter of the twelfth century, while Llancarfan’s continuing importance as a centre of ecclesiastical learning in that period is also attested by the work of the professional hagiographer Caradog of Llancarfan (who was possibly also the author of the Book of Llandaf).³⁵

In general terms, the Lives of St David and St Cadog share a common aim of promoting the cult of their respective saints by means of staple hagiographical conventions, especially through their emphasis on the saint’s miraculous powers. In addition, the Lives reflect the privileged social status of their authors by making both saints the sons of kings and depicting them as moving among the secular and ecclesiastical elite.³⁶ Yet in significant respects the authors adopted different approaches to their task. Although Lifris was an accomplished Latinist whose style bears some similarities to that of Rhygyfarch, the latter was distinctive in his use of a learned hermeneutic Latin, marked by the use of obscure words, whose high literary register was intended to elevate the saint and showcase the ecclesiastical learning of the author and his intended readership.³⁷ Likewise he was far less ready than Lifris to locate his saint in a secular milieu. True, St David is affiliated to the royal dynasty of Ceredigion that had lost its power by the end of the ninth century (thereby making him in turn a descendant of Cunedda, legendary founder of the kingdom of Gwynedd), and described as getting the better of an Irish tyrant who resented the new monastic community founded at St Davids.³⁸ Later, though, rulers are drawn to the exemplary religious life practised by the saint, ‘as kings and princes of the world would abandon their kingdoms and seek his monastery’, including ‘Constantine, king of Cornwall’, probably identifiable with one of the five ‘tyrants’ castigated by Gildas.³⁹ Moreover, the historical context ascribed to the saint is primarily ecclesiastical. St Patrick is sent to Ireland after being compelled to relinquish St Davids to make way for its future patron saint, whose greatness is prophesied by Gildas while still in his mother’s womb, and who in turn extends his influence to Ireland and is associated with Irish saints; St David accompanies St Padarn and St Teilo to receive episcopal consecration from the patriarch of Jerusalem; and on his return he defeats the Pelagian heresy, which had revived ‘even after St Germanus [of Auxerre] had come to help a second time’, thereby gaining recognition as the leading bishop among the Britons.⁴⁰ Although it is uncertain whether Rhygyfarch’s original text included the passages, found in all the surviving copies, explicitly stating that St David was made archbishop and that his monastery received metropolitan status, the Life clearly sought to proclaim the supremacy of the saint and thus of his cathedral church.⁴¹ But this claim rested on the saint’s exemplary religious life, demonstrated by asceticism, defence of Catholic orthodoxy, and decrees that set a pattern for all churches in Wales, including the saint’s numerous monastic foundations.⁴² Rhygyfarch’s depiction of St David may be seen, then, as part of an attempt to promote the cult of the saint and thus the prestige of his cathedral church which had recently been subjected to violence and destruction.

Lifris’s St Cadog is also associated with clergy and churches.⁴³ However, his sanctity is evidenced, not by outstanding piety, but by terrifying, and sometimes vengeful, acts of miraculous power that targeted disobedient clergy and servants as well as oppressive secular rulers such as King Arthur and Maelgwn Gwynedd.⁴⁴ Lifris thus showed himself ready to deploy legendary material concerning the post-Roman past that went well beyond the ecclesiastical, thereby pointing up the connections between churches and Welsh historical and literary culture transmitted in both Latin and the vernacular. Above all, the saint is depicted as a staunch upholder of his property and judicial rights, and the Life was clearly intended, not as an assertion of dominant episcopal status comparable to Rhygyfarch’s portrayal of St David, but rather as a vindication of the interests of Cadog’s community at Llancarfan against the threats posed by both the Welsh and Normans of Lifris’s day.⁴⁵ The continuing power of the saint was further emphasized in additions to Lifris’s original text reporting miracles after his death.⁴⁶

The most ambitious attempt in the early twelfth century to construct an ecclesiastical history that served contemporary purposes was Liber Landavensis (‘The Book of Llandaf’), a Gospel Book containing saints’ Lives, charters, papal bulls, and other documents.⁴⁷ This was commissioned by Urban, bishop of Llandaf (1107–34) in order to provide historical support for his campaign to gain recognition of his see’s extensive diocesan boundaries and episcopal estates in south Wales against the rival claims of the neighbouring bishops of St Davids and Hereford. In projecting a vision of the see’s history from its alleged foundation by Bishop Dyfrig (Dubricius) to the early twelfth century, the Book of Llandaf was thus the product of a wider movement to establish fixed territorial dioceses stimulated by Norman conquest and Canterbury’s assertion of authority over the Welsh dioceses. As well as the composition of Lives of the see’s three patron saints, Dyfrig, Teilo, and Euddogwy (Oudoceus), the compiler of the Book of Llandaf edited charters in order to claim that estates had been granted to the see’s bishops over half a millennium.⁴⁸ He also related a version of the legend, first attested in Britain in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, that King Lucius of Britain had sought missionaries from Pope Eleutherius in order to bring Christianity to the pagan Britons, descendants of Brutus, which asserted that Dubricius had been established as archbishop of all the Britons of south Wales by none other than St Germanus and St Lupus following their eradication of the Pelagian heresy.⁴⁹ Although the Book of Llandaf was not intended as a work of history, but sought rather to provide a documentary justification for Urban’s claims, its approach was deeply historical, as the work drew on hagiography, charters, and other sources in order to frame its case in historical terms. Its author is unknown, but may have been the professional hagiographer Caradog of Llancarfan, named as the author of revised versions of the Lives of St Cadog and St Gildas, and who may also have composed or revised Lives of St Cyngar, St Illtud, St Gwynllyw, and St Tatheus.⁵⁰ Such was his reputation that Geoffrey of Monmouth named him as the one to whom he would leave the history of the kings of Wales after the death of Cadwaladr in the late seventh century.⁵¹

Geoffrey of Monmouth and His Reception in Wales

Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1154/5) has been rightly described as ‘the most influential writer of Welsh history in the Middle Ages’.⁵² He not only played a fundamental role in shaping Welsh understandings of the past until the nineteenth century but was arguably the first to articulate the notion of a history of Wales, as distinct from a history of Britain or the Britons. However, his relationship with and contribution to the writing of Welsh history were complex. In order to assess his significance, it is important to distinguish between the context and purpose of the original Latin work—Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’) or De Gestis Britonum (‘On the Deeds of the Britons’), completed c.1138—and its subsequent reception in Wales.⁵³ The latter took two main forms: the Welsh translations known as Brut y Brenhinedd (‘The History of the Kings’), probably first made in the early thirteenth century, and the creation of chronicles—represented by Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’) and Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’)—which were explicitly designed as continuations of Geoffrey. In addition, Geoffrey influenced the interpretation of the Welsh past by Gerald of Wales.⁵⁴ The discussion in this section will begin, then, by focusing on the De Gestis Britonum before turning to consider, first, Gerald of Wales, and, second, the Welsh translations of Geoffrey’s History.

Geoffrey was a learned cleric, associated with Oxford from 1129, including its archdeacon Walter, and probably a canon of the collegiate church of St George in the town’s castle; referred to as a magister by 1139, he was elected bishop of St Asaph in 1151, although it is uncertain whether he was able to take up residence in his see before his death in 1154 or 1155.⁵⁵ However, his origins and ethnic identity are uncertain. According to some manuscripts of his History, Geoffrey once described himself as ‘an abashed Briton’ (L. pudibundus Brito), which, taken with the epithet ‘of Monmouth’ (L. Monemutensis) could suggest either Welsh or Breton ethnicity.⁵⁶ Proponents of the latter have cited the History’s marked sympathy for the Bretons, important allies of the Normans in the conquest of England and subsequently prominent among settlers in Monmouth; this would also be consistent with Geoffrey’s seeking patronage among the Anglo-Norman elite, including the powerful marcher lord, Robert (d. 1147), earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan. His association with Oxford likewise placed Geoffrey firmly in an Anglo-Norman milieu.⁵⁷ Yet, as has recently been argued, these considerations do not necessarily preclude Geoffrey from having been Welsh.⁵⁸ Irrespective of his ethnic identity, the crucial point in the context of the present discussion is that, while his hugely popular history of the British kings may have been aimed primarily at an Anglo-Norman audience, the work was heavily indebted to Welsh sources, reflects the author’s knowledge of the Welsh language, and proved highly popular in Wales, where it provided the first extended narrative of early British history since the Historia Brittonum, on which it drew in part, notably as the earliest source to endow the Britons with Trojan origins.⁵⁹

The content and character of the History may be briefly summarized as follows. Ostensibly translated into Latin from ‘a very old book in the British tongue’ given to Geoffrey by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford,⁶⁰ the work offers a detailed and dramatic account of the Britons from their origins after the fall of Troy to the death of King Cadwaladr in Rome in 689 and the ensuing ‘passage of dominion’ over the island of Britain to the Saxons.⁶¹ Its fast-moving narrative, focused on Britain but ranging across Europe, was filled with battles, conquests, slaughter, lust, civil discord, betrayal, prophecy, and magic. The Britons are cast as flawed heroes: a once great people who had not only populated Britain but successfully defied the Romans and indeed, under Brennius and Belinus, captured Rome, while their greatest leader, King Arthur, ‘decided to conquer all Europe’, taking Norway, Denmark, and Gaul before assembling a huge force which eventually defeated the Romans and killed their emperor.⁶² However, like many of his predecessors, Arthur was betrayed, being mortally wounded at the battle of Camlan in 542,⁶³ and his successors proved unable to stem the conquering Saxons who deprived the Britons of their lordship of the island and became kings of England (L. Loegria). By contrast, ‘[t]he Welsh, unworthy successors to the noble Britons, never again recovered mastery over the whole island, but, squabbling pettily amongst themselves and sometimes with the Saxons, kept constantly massacring the foreigners or each other’.⁶⁴

Two related issues merit attention in considering the relationship of Geoffrey’s History to historical writing in, and about, Wales. One is the nature of the sources at the author’s disposal. It is generally agreed that Geoffrey’s claim to have translated ‘a very ancient British book’, given him by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, was no more than a literary device designed to conceal a fiction.⁶⁵ That he drew on written sources about the Britons is, nevertheless, clear: in particular, the debt to Gildas, Bede, and the Historia Brittonum is unmistakable, and the overall interpretation of the history of Britain as a transfer of sovereignty from the Britons to the English was a fundamental tenet of historical writing in pre-Norman Wales.⁶⁶ Geoffrey also had access to a version of the Harleian genealogies, quite possibly at Llancarfan, which could explain some of the names used in the History, especially for those attending King Arthur’s court at Caerleon.⁶⁷ He was certainly aware of historical arguments that arose from early twelfth-century disputes between the sees of Llandaf and St Davids in south Wales, and his choice of Caerleon as the seat of Archbishop Dubricius and of King Arthur’s court may have been influenced by the local Welsh dynasty’s recovery in 1136 of the site of this former Roman legionary fortress, whose former glory was evoked by ruins which, then as now, were still visible.⁶⁸ In important respects, then, Geoffrey resembled the Welsh and Norman churchmen discussed above who responded to contemporary developments by composing Latin accounts of early Welsh saints, churches, and rulers that drew in varying degrees on earlier sources.

It does not follow, however, that Geoffrey aimed his History particularly at the Welsh or intended it to redound to their glory. This brings us to the second issue requiring consideration, namely the context in which Geoffrey wrote and his reasons for writing. The latter are difficult to pin down and have been the subject of differing interpretations.⁶⁹ Whatever his precise aims, though, it is clear that Geoffrey wanted his book to read like a work of history, and that he exploited fully the rhetorical conventions of plausibility and verisimilitude to depict events as they could have happened, including set-piece speeches advocating particular courses of action.⁷⁰ And, particularly relevant to the present discussion, he responded to an interest in the history of the Britons shared by writers in both Wales and England, including the Anglo-Norman historians of his own day, by seizing on the opportunities presented by the sparse coverage of the Britons in early medieval sources in order to place them centre stage and thereby challenge Anglocentric interpretations.⁷¹ That Geoffrey thought the history of the Britons could appeal to the powerful in the Anglo-Norman realm is suggested by the surviving prefaces to his History, which were dedicated to Robert, earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan and Waleran, count of Meulan, and by the presentation of its book of prophecies to Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, who had allegedly encouraged its composition.⁷² Conversely, at the end of the work Geoffrey was dismissive of the Welsh and undermined any notion that they had special ownership of the history of the Britons. Now called, for the first time in Geoffrey’s text, Gualenses rather than Britones, a ‘name which owes its origin to their leader Gualo, to queen Galaes or to their decline’, the Welsh were presented as a barbarous people, ‘unworthy successors to the noble Britons’ given over to constant civil and external wars, who never recovered their dominion over the island from the Saxons.⁷³ Thereafter, the Welsh survived under their own kings, whose history Geoffrey left to Caradog of Llancarfan. But they were clearly the losers by comparison to the Saxons, who, ‘acting more wisely’, lived together peacefully and established their rule over all England, and, in leaving the subsequent history of their kings to William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey made clear that the English—and thus by implication their Norman conquerors—were also the Britons’ successors.⁷⁴

The closing section of Geoffrey’s History provides the first known explicit acknowledgement that the Welsh had their own history from the late seventh century onwards. The context in which he does so, however, suggests that he saw this as a pitiful epilogue to the dramatic narrative he had previously related. Not only had the Britons of Wales lost their original name; so too had their country, which was now called Gualia (or its plural Gualiae), a variant of Wallia, sharing the pejorative connotations of Gualenses, rather than Kambria.⁷⁵ At the beginning of Book II, Geoffrey elaborated the origin legends reported in the Historia Brittonum that Britain had been named after Britto or Brutus by maintaining that his three sons—Locrinus, Albanactus, and Kamber—had divided the ‘kingdom of Britain’ (regnum Britanniae) after their father’s death, and given their names respectively to Loegria (England), Albania (Scotland), and Kambria (Wales).⁷⁶ Wales thus had a separate territorial identity going back almost to the beginning of the Trojan settlement of Britain. It is also described as an ecclesiastical province under a metropolitan at Caerleon.⁷⁷ However, though endowed with his own territory, Kamber shared rule with his brothers within a single kingdom of Britain, and a ‘king of Wales’ (rex Kambriae) appears only once in the text, and then only briefly, being defeated and killed by Dunuallo Moelmutius, who then establishes rule over the whole of Britain.⁷⁸ Thus, though presented as an ancient territorial entity, Wales is portrayed as an integral part of the kingdom of Britain until the late seventh century: it is only after the final fracturing of the kingdom following the English conquests that Wales is attributed with a history separate from that of Britain as a whole. Yet the negative view of the Welsh kings that followed cannot be understood simply as an attempt to denigrate the Welsh by an author anxious to please Anglo-Norman patrons, who, as a result of the conquest of England, could in turn be regarded as successors of the Britons. Rather, Geoffrey of Monmouth drew on, and made more explicit, long-established understandings of their past by writers in Wales whose gaze was fixed above all on the Britons’ struggles to maintain their power on a wider British stage. His work thus throws into sharp relief the difficulty of conceiving of a separate history of Wales—or, perhaps more accurately, the reasons why Welsh history writing was above all concerned with the Britons and the British past.

Gerald of Wales

One writer who accepted Geoffrey’s contention that Welsh history was a continuation of British history was Gerald of Wales (c.1146–c.1223), a cleric, royal servant, and prolific writer of mixed Norman and Welsh ancestry born at Manorbier in Pembrokeshire.⁷⁹ Several of his works contain substantial treatment of the Welsh past and became a staple source for later historians.⁸⁰ His earliest prose works reveal a strong interest in history, as the Topographia Hibernica (‘The Topography of Ireland’, 1188) drew on a version of the Irish Lebor Gabála (‘The Book of Settlement’) to provide an account of the settlement of Ireland by a succession of ancient peoples, as well as on Geoffrey of Monmouth to justify Henry II’s overlordship of the island, while the Expugnatio Hibernica (‘The Conquest of Ireland’, 1189) offers a lively history of the English invasion of Ireland which places Gerald’s marcher kinsmen centre stage and covers events in Wales that had a bearing on his narrative.⁸¹ However, the Welsh past—both ancient and recent—received much greater attention in Gerald’s extensive writings about Wales. This is especially true of two works: the Itinerarium Kambriae (‘Journey round Wales’, 1191) and the Descriptio Kambriae (‘Description of Wales’, 1194).⁸² These were the first books written specifically about Wales and offer valuable insights into their author’s view of the Welsh past. In addition, his family connections and ecclesiastical ambitions led Gerald to take a strong interest in the history and hagiography of St Davids. This is already evident in the Itinerarium but moves to the forefront in his autobiography and related books concerning his unsuccessful attempt from 1198 to 1203 to be elected bishop of St Davids and to achieve recognition of that see as a metropolitan see for Wales independent of Canterbury.⁸³

At one level, the Itinerarium was, like the Expugnatio Hibernica, a work of contemporary history, being structured as an account of the preaching tour led by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury to recruit Welsh troops for the Third Crusade in Lent 1188. However, it is also much more than that, since its account of places through or near which the party travelled is enlivened with flashbacks to episodes in Anglo-Welsh relations from the late eleventh century onwards as well as with stories about saints and churches—an instance of the wider engagement with Welsh ecclesiastical traditions in the twelfth century discussed above.⁸⁴ The Descriptio Kambriae also has a strong historical dimension; indeed, Gerald describes it as a work of history.⁸⁵ The work opens with an overview of the geography of Wales before distilling what Gerald regarded as the distinguishing characteristics of Welsh society, both praiseworthy and unpraiseworthy, the latter providing a cue for advice on how Wales might be conquered and the Welsh might resist.⁸⁶ Here, much of the historical focus is on the distant past, interpreted through the lens of both Gildas—with whom Gerald explicitly compares himself in the preface—and Geoffrey, though attention is also given to the subjection of Wales by Anglo-Saxon and Norman kings of England.⁸⁷

Gerald’s interpretation of the Welsh past owed much to Geoffrey. However, his relationship with the earlier writer was complex. To begin with, Gerald did his best to disguise his debt to the earlier writer, whom he explicitly named only as the target of derogatory comments while borrowing from the De Gestis Britonum either without any acknowledgement or with vague attributions to ‘British histories’.⁸⁸ In part this distancing may simply have been an exercise in one-upmanship by an author always determined to establish his literary credentials and reap the rewards of patronage he considered his due. But it also reflected a difference in purpose, as Gerald placed greater emphasis than Geoffrey on the consequences of their Trojan and British origins for the Welsh of the present day—for instance, by ascribing their dark complexion to the hot climate of their ancestors’ homeland in Troy.⁸⁹ Moreover, Gerald adapted Geoffrey to his own ends. This is shown by Gerald’s use of Kambria for Wales and Kambri or Kambrenses for the Welsh.⁹⁰ These terms were clearly indebted to Geoffrey, who invented the noun Kambria and explained that it derived from the eponymous Kamber son of Brutus, and also asserted that this was why the inhabitants of Wales ‘still call themselves Cymry (Kambro) in British’.⁹¹ However, by adopting ‘Cambrian’ terminology for Wales and its inhabitants in his own day, he implicitly challenged Geoffrey’s assertions that Kambria had been later superseded by Gualia (a variant of Wallia) as the name for Wales, and that its people had become known as ‘Welsh’ (Gualenses, a variant of Walenses) rather than ‘Britons’ (Britones) as a result of their decline after the late seventh century.⁹² Indeed, Gerald highlighted the pejorative connotations of the terms Wallia and Walenses by correctly observing that they were derived from the English word for foreigner.⁹³ By using Kambria and Kambri or Kambrenses, terms redolent of the Britons’ heyday as depicted by Geoffrey, Gerald was thus able to confer dignity on both Wales and the Welsh from whom he was partly descended. On the other hand, although Book I of the Descriptio describes a number of their praiseworthy qualities, the work as a whole offers a pessimistic view of the Welsh as Gerald explicitly identifies himself with Gildas and, like Rhygyfarch ap Sulien before him, extends the sixth-century author’s explanation of the Britons’ loss of Britain as the result of divine punishment for sin to the later Norman conquests in Wales.⁹⁴ Gerald also accepts Geoffrey’s view that the Britons would not recover their former glory until they had done penance for their sins, and turns this against the Welsh of his own day by arguing that their hopes of recovery are misplaced as they are still mired in similar sins to their ancestors and therefore their penance cannot have been completed.⁹⁵

Geoffrey in Welsh: Brut y Brenhinedd (‘The History of the Kings’)

While Geoffrey’s History was widely copied in medieval Europe and vernacular versions of it were also produced in Old French, Middle English, and Old Norse,⁹⁶ the work had a special significance for Welsh literati, who took its author’s claim to have translated it from ‘a very old book in the British tongue’ at face value and thus regarded it as belonging to a Welsh tradition of historical writing. That Geoffrey’s Latin text circulated in Wales is shown by the Welsh associations of several thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century manuscripts containing versions of it, most notably that produced by c.1250 by ‘the Welsh brother Madog of Edeirnion’ (Frater Walensis Madocus Edeirnianensis), thus named in a Latin poem prefacing the work that extolled the military deeds of the Britons related by Geoffrey, and a writer quite possibly identifiable with the Franciscan Madog ap Gwallter who composed religious poetry in Welsh.⁹⁷ Above all, though, the History’s appeal in Wales is shown by the Middle Welsh translations of the work known as Brut y Brenhinedd (‘The History of the Kings’), which became a cornerstone of Welsh literary culture, surviving in some twenty-five medieval copies (including one containing numerous illustrations), a number surpassed among Welsh texts only by compilations of native law.⁹⁸ The impact of Geoffrey’s work in Wales is further highlighted by the production of different versions of Brut y Brenhinedd, including possibly four early independent translations, of which two appear in manuscripts of the mid-thirteenth century. When the early versions were first translated is uncertain, as is their relationship to each other.⁹⁹ That they were related is suggested by their shared use of very similar Welsh name-forms for the Latin forms given by Geoffrey, which may indicate that those versions all ultimately derived from a common exemplar, perhaps a glossed copy of the Latin text.¹⁰⁰ Moreover, since one of the name-forms used in Brut y Brenhinedd occurs in Welsh poetry at the end of the twelfth century, it has been suggested that the work, ‘in some form or other’, was known by then in the courts of Gwynedd and Powys.¹⁰¹ In any case, it is likely that one or more of the early versions had been produced by the early thirteenth century.¹⁰² If so, Geoffrey’s work may well have been the first Latin historical text to be translated into Welsh, preceding the creation of Brut y Tywysogyon and the Welsh version of Dares the Phrygian, the translations with which it later came to be associated, by about a century.¹⁰³

On the whole, the early translations adhere closely to Geoffrey’s text. However, they also needed to ensure consistency with Welsh tradition and meet the expectations of Welsh readers.¹⁰⁴ In other words, translation involved a process of adaptation designed to assimilate the work into Welsh literary and historical culture. This was achieved in part by substituting Welsh forms of personal and place-names for the Latinate forms given by Geoffrey, as well as by linking some passages to Welsh tradition: for example, by placing Maelgwn Gwynedd’s death ‘in the church of Rhos near Degannwy’.¹⁰⁵ Most strikingly, one of the early versions (Llanstephan 1) inserted a tale, derived from native story-telling, narrating how Lludd (Geoffrey’s Lud) and his brother Llefelys (the latter inserted by the translator as a fourth son of Beli Mawr) rid the island of Britain of ‘three oppressions’ that afflicted it.¹⁰⁶ However, the process of adaptation was taken further in ‘an enhanced translation of the Historia’ first extant in a fourteenth-century manuscript, though arguably deriving from a text composed in the thirteenth century, which added material from a variety of Latin and Welsh sources.¹⁰⁷ For example, Geoffrey’s account of Cymbeline (W. Cynfelyn) is expanded by inserting a summary of the life of Christ together with events in Roman history, while Latin verses on the supposed tomb of Arthur are cited, despite the text having previously translated Geoffrey’s account of how after the battle of Camlan the king had been taken to the isle of Avalon to be healed of his wounds.¹⁰⁸

Narrating Welsh Rulers

One major development, then, in Welsh history writing from the late eleventh to late thirteenth centuries was an intensified preoccupation with the history of the Britons. Another was the expansion of narratives focused on recent and contemporary history, with a particular emphasis on Welsh rulers. These texts mainly comprise chronicles, but also include the only surviving medieval biography of a medieval Welsh ruler, the Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan (Vita Griffini filii Conani), king of Gwynedd. Though none is explicitly presented as such, these narratives may be considered histories of Wales inasmuch as they frame the events they relate predominantly in a Welsh context and also, from the mid-twelfth century, rarely refer to the Welsh as Britons.¹⁰⁹ True, these narratives were not immune to the allure of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose work came to provide a backstory for several chronicles. However, apart from furnishing some of the names in the genealogies that open the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, and possibly also influencing the use of ‘Cambrian’ terminology for Wales and the Welsh both in that text and in the Cottonian chronicle, his influence on the contents of the texts considered here was minimal.¹¹⁰

The following discussion proceeds in two stages. First, it identifies the relevant works, considers their dating and textual history, and outlines their coverage and main characteristics. This leads, second, to an assessment of what the texts’ methods and themes reveal about their authors’ approach to history writing.

Royal Biography: Vita Griffini filii Conani (‘The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan’)

The popularity of Geoffrey’s History, in its Welsh guise as Brut y Brenhinedd, reflects the continuing interest taken in the British ancestors of the Welsh under a sequence of kings from Brutus to Cadwaladr. By contrast, only one medieval Welsh king was the subject of a near-contemporary biography: Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), ruler of Gwynedd in north Wales.¹¹¹ Like Geoffrey’s work, this was originally written in Latin and later translated into Welsh. The Latin Life, Vita Griffini filii Conani, extant in a version recovered from a later sixteenth-century copy, was composed during the reign of his son and successor Owain Gwynedd (r. 1137–70).¹¹² A striking feature is its emphasis on the king’s ancestry, early life, and struggles to establish himself in Gwynedd between c.1075 and c.1100; by contrast, his uncontested rule of Gwynedd thereafter until his death, aged eighty-two, in 1137 occupies only about the final sixth of the text.¹¹³ This emphasis is at least partly explicable by the author’s desire to proclaim the legitimacy of Gruffudd’s rule, which was by no means self-evident, as his father Cynan had not been king of Gwynedd, and he himself was born and raised in Swords near Dublin and had to fight repeatedly against various Welsh and Norman rivals in order to establish authority over what he claimed to be his rightful patrimonial kingdom. Accordingly, the work opens with a series of detailed genealogies linking Gruffudd not only with his paternal ancestors in the dynasty of Gwynedd but, through his mother, with Irish and Scandinavian rulers, including Rollo and his descendants in Normandy.¹¹⁴ These are followed by prophecies of his future greatness.¹¹⁵ Then comes a narrative of his various attempts to wrest Gwynedd from Welsh and Norman rivals, punctuated by a series of setbacks attributed to acts of betrayal, one of which led to his lengthy imprisonment in Chester.¹¹⁶ After his escape Gruffudd resumes his attempts to secure his claim to Gwynedd, which is finally vindicated through the favour of God and an accommodation with King Henry I of England, and the work ends with his bequests, to both churches and members of his family, pious death, and burial in Bangor cathedral ‘with a gleaming monument erected to the left of the high altar’.¹¹⁷

Two considerations may allow us to narrow down the likely date-range for the work’s composition. First, the Life was probably written no earlier than the 1140s, as its paternal genealogy of Gruffudd borrows from Geoffrey’s History, completed c.1138.¹¹⁸ Second, the author’s deft sidestepping of the question of succession—Gruffudd’s (unnamed) sons are present at his deathbed, where the king ‘blessed them and predicted what would eventually happen to them, like the patriarch Jacob who blessed his sons in Egypt’—may reflect a reluctance to take sides in the succession dispute between Owain Gwynedd and his younger brother Cadwaladr, and thus indicate composition in the period before Cadwaladr’s expulsion from Gwynedd in 1152 (and certainly no later than the brothers’ reconciliation five years later).¹¹⁹ If his position was unchallenged at the time of writing, it might be expected that Owain would be named as the successor, given the Life’s emphasis on the legitimacy of his father Gruffudd’s rule. It is likely, then, that the work was written at some point between c.1140 and 1152 (or, perhaps, 1157).

These considerations bring us to the identity, location, and purpose of the Life’s anonymous author. It has been suggested that the work was composed outside Gwynedd, about which the author seems rather vague in places, and possibly by a cleric at St Davids, since the text acknowledges that church’s claim to metropolitan status and uses ‘Cambrian’ terminology for Wales and the Welsh comparable to that deployed, under Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influence, in texts from St Davids.¹²⁰ However, the contents of the Life strongly point to its author being a cleric in Gwynedd with access to those in Gruffudd’s circle familiar with accounts of the king’s life.¹²¹ The biblical, classical, and Welsh learning displayed may indicate that he belonged to a major ecclesiastical community in the kingdom, quite possibly Bangor or Clynnog Fawr.¹²² Whether he wrote of his own volition or at the behest of an ecclesiastical or secular patron can only be guessed, although he is unlikely to have been commissioned by Owain or Cadwaladr, since, as argued above, no attempt is made to vindicate the claims of either to the kingdom.¹²³ On the other hand, the author may have been commissioned by, or at least sympathetic to, Gruffudd’s widow Angharad, who outlived her husband until 1162.¹²⁴ She receives favourable treatment including a flattering description of her appearance and character, the naming of only her children with Gruffudd (followed by the terse statement that ‘he also had some children by concubines’), and her unusual designation as ‘queen’ in an account of the bequests she received.¹²⁵ A sensitivity to Angharad’s position may also explain why the Life says nothing about the killing in 1132 of her eldest son Cadwallon in a feud with her brothers and nephews as he sought to expand into their territory in north-east Wales.¹²⁶

As the Life was probably composed about seven decades after Gruffudd first left Ireland for Wales, its coverage of his struggles in the late eleventh century must rely on accounts transmitted over the subsequent decades, possibly as oral stories told in Gruffudd’s hall.¹²⁷ If so, Gruffudd had already become a legend in his own lifetime, and the Life offers a valuable glimpse of the adaptation by Latin history writing of oral, and presumably vernacular, historical culture fostered in a secular milieu. One purpose of the Life, then, was to ensure that the memory of his lengthy struggle to become king of Gwynedd, marked by his overcoming of numerous setbacks, was perpetuated after his death in the high literary register of Latin prose in a composition influenced by classical models, especially the divisiones of classical biography exemplified by Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars.¹²⁸ Accordingly, though it probably drew in part on earlier materials, the Life was the creation of a self-conscious author, ready to mark his presence in the text through occasional interjections in the first person and to impose his own interpretation on the events described.¹²⁹ In particular, he set Gruffudd’s achievements in a context of universal history that invested them with deeper significance. Thus the king is compared with classical and biblical figures, including Agamemnon, King David, and Judas Maccabeus; like the latter, he had liberated the people of Gwynedd from foreign rule—represented, for example, by Earl Hugh of Chester, aptly likened to Antiochus, king of Syria—but had also suffered betrayal, a fate shared also with Julius Caesar and ‘[e]ven Arthur, the outstandingly noble king of the kings of the whole of Britain’.¹³⁰ Above all, the author attributes his successes to divine providence and portrays the people of Gwynedd as if they were latter-day Israelites under the protection of God, and whose kingdom, under Gruffudd’s rule ‘with an iron rod’, enjoyed peace and plenty accompanied by extensive church building.¹³¹ Irrespective of whether Angharad was the patron, the concluding depiction of a golden age may have served as an implicit warning against allowing dynastic strife to jeopardize what Gruffudd had achieved with so much effort.

Chronicles

The number of surviving chronicles written in Wales increased significantly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹³² In large part this resulted from ecclesiastical changes precipitated by foreign conquest and domination from the late eleventh century onwards, namely the foundation of monastic houses by both Anglo-French settlers and Welsh rulers. This in turn meant that chronicle writing in Wales belonged to two overlapping contexts: on the one hand, the continuation of a pre-Norman Welsh tradition best represented by the Harleian chronicle; on the other, the expansion of monastic chronicling in Britain and Ireland, especially among the Cistercians.¹³³ In other words, while the chronicles under consideration here may be regarded as examples of Welsh history writing, they also exemplify—and, in some cases, were closely connected with—wider historiographical trends extending beyond Wales. Moreover, in contrast to the pre-Norman period, chronicles were composed in Wales by foreign settlers as well as by the Welsh. One aspect of this, as we shall see shortly, was the appropriation of chronicles that continued the annalistic tradition at St Davids. However, these continuations marked a significant change in interest and allegiance. Divergence from the native tradition was clearer still in new chronicles created in Glamorgan, which developed into a major marcher lordship after its conquest by the Normans in the late eleventh century, namely the annals down to 1235 written at Margam (a Cistercian abbey founded in 1147 whose library contained the histories of both William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth) as well as adaptations of the Tewkesbury annals at the Cistercian abbey of Neath and the Benedictine priory of Cardiff at the end of the thirteenth century, discussed in Chapter 4.¹³⁴ To a great extent, these adapted monastic chronicles in England and reflected the Anglocentric outlook of the communities where they were produced: thus their chronology is structured around the reigns of kings of England, and several begin with the death of Edward the Confessor and the Norman conquest of England in 1066.¹³⁵ By contrast, there is only limited evidence of cross-fertilization between these texts and native Welsh chronicle writing before the end of the thirteenth century.¹³⁶ However, like monastic chronicles elsewhere, those in Glamorgan also recorded events in their localities, including Welsh attacks on the possessions of Margam and Neath.¹³⁷ These events were in turn affected by developments originating farther afield in Wales, especially the dominance achieved by Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd, who receives considerable attention in the Margam Annals, most notably after he led forces into south Wales in the early 1230s.¹³⁸ They therefore contributed to historical writing not only in, but also about, Wales.

Nevertheless, the most substantial and geographically extensive body of chronicles written in Wales in this period were those which continued the St Davids tradition represented by the Harleian chronicle that ended in 954. These survive in both Latin and Welsh texts generally known respectively as members of two related families, Annales Cambriae and Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), although modern scholarship has increasingly treated these texts, especially the former, as individual compilations rather than as variants of a single work.¹³⁹ The two Latin texts are extant in manuscripts of the late thirteenth century: the Breviate chronicle (the B-text of the Annales Cambriae), copied at the Cistercian abbey of Neath, which contains annals down to 1286, and the Cottonian chronicle (the C-text of the Annales Cambriae), copied at St Davids, the provenance of the chronicle as a whole, which ends in 1288.¹⁴⁰ Both derive from a St Davids chronicle down to c.1202, but thereafter the Breviate chronicle drew its material from Welsh Cistercian houses, quite possibly Whitland (Dyfed) and (at least ultimately) Strata Florida (Ceredigion), and also almost certainly Cwm-hir (Maelienydd in mid-Wales) for the period 1257–63; the final section was composed c.1300 at Neath, when retrospective additions of English events recorded in annals from Waverley Abbey (Surrey) were also made.¹⁴¹ These differences are related to the changing political orientation of the churches at which the chronicles were written. From the 1160s the Cottonian chronicle offers an English perspective on events reflecting the marcher environment of St Davids and the integration of its bishops in the province of Canterbury, whereas the composite nature of the Breviate chronicle reveals shifting views: thus for the period 1189–1263, it ‘speaks with the voice of independent Wales’, as its narrative is largely derived from Welsh Cistercian houses, while its final part, written at Neath, an abbey patronized by the Briouze lords of Gower, supports Edward I.¹⁴²

In one respect, however, the ancestors of both chronicles shared a common historical perspective after they diverged c.1202, as they combined their annals with universal histories extending from the creation of the world to the reign of the Emperor Heraclius (610–42) derived principally from Isidore of Seville’s Chronicon Epitome, to which was added material on early British history from Geoffrey of Monmouth and also, in the Breviate chronicle, the De Temporibus of Bede.¹⁴³ In the case of the ancestor of the Cottonian chronicle, this involved extensive chronological restructuring of the text, probably in or shortly after 1216.¹⁴⁴ The retrospective expansion of the chronicles was designed to give them greater chronological depth and to integrate them with universal Christian history. It is also significant as marking the earliest attempt to connect Geoffrey’s account of the kings of Britain with a chronicle that continued beyond the late seventh century and focused predominantly on events in Wales, albeit less explicitly than in the case of Brut y Tywysogyon discussed in Chapter 4.

Two other texts provide further evidence of chronicle writing by Welsh Cistercians in the thirteenth century. The Latin Cronica de Wallia, extant in a late thirteenth-century manuscript, was probably written at Whitland Abbey (quite possibly in 1277) and covers the period 1190–1266, providing fairly full narratives of many years down to 1255.¹⁴⁵ It bears close resemblances to the Welsh-language Brut y Tywysogyon, discussed below, whose lost Latin sources were probably very similar, as well as to parts of the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles.¹⁴⁶ By contrast, the other work, O Oes Gwrtheyrn (‘From the Age of Vortigern’), a title derived from its opening words and whose earliest surviving copies were written c.1400, is unique among chronicles of this period. Rather than being a continuation of the St Davids tradition, it appears to be a new work, probably originally written in Welsh (rather than translated from Latin) at the Cistercian abbey of Aberconwy, patronized by the princes of Gwynedd, that originally ended in 1211/12 and was subsequently extended to c.1265.¹⁴⁷ As its title indicates, the work fixed its dating with reference to the time since the reign of Vortigern, named in the Historia Brittonum as the British tyrant who had invited the Saxons into Britain, and also included calculations of the years that had elapsed since the coming of various peoples to Britain.¹⁴⁸ This allowed the chronicler to set recent events, however disastrous, against the backdrop of an ancient history which played on the long-established notion that the Welsh, as successors of the Britons, were the rightful proprietors of Britain. One example is the description of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth’s surrender of his son Gruffudd as one of the terms of the prince’s surrender to King John in 1211: ‘From when the Welsh first came to the island of Britain until King John came to Aber and until Gruffudd ap Llywelyn was taken hostage, two thousand five hundred and sixteen years.’¹⁴⁹ Significantly, the chronicle shows a number of affinities with a substantial new genealogical compilation of similar date, datable to 1216 × c.1223, that reflected the hegemony of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and was quite possibly also composed at Aberconwy. These affinities also strengthen the case that the chronicle was originally composed in Welsh, marking an innovative attempt at Aberconwy to extend the scope of historical writing in the vernacular.¹⁵⁰ Just as the Harleian genealogies had been composed as a supplement to the Historia Brittonum in the ninth century (see Chapter 2), so the chronicle and the genealogies were linked enterprises that drew on long-established understandings of the Brittonic past to structure new historiographical writing in thirteenth-century Gwynedd.

The fullest evidence for chronicle writing in this period occurs in Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), the conventional title for chronicles extant in manuscripts from the mid-fourteenth century onwards which covered the years from 682 to early 1282 and were intended as a continuation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De Gestis Britonum.¹⁵¹ These were also the most influential of the medieval Welsh chronicles, since they formed the basis for the earliest histories of Wales written in the Elizabethan period which in turn retained their authority as authoritative accounts of the Welsh past into the nineteenth century. The chronicles survive in two main versions, Peniarth 20 and the Red Book of Hergest, named after manuscripts containing copies of them. These are datable respectively to 1286 × c.1330 and 1307 × 1350; another chronicle, Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’), probably datable to 1282 × c.1330, is closely related.¹⁵² The extant texts are thus important evidence for Welsh history writing in the period after the Edwardian conquest, and their significance in that context is assessed in Chapter 4. However, they are also highly relevant to the present discussion, as it is generally agreed that the Welsh texts are translations of one or more sources in Latin on account of their preservation of Latin declensional forms, errors explicable as resulting from a misconstruing of Latin, and the close similarities of some sections with surviving Cambro-Latin chronicles, especially the Cronica de Wallia.¹⁵³ In other words, the vernacular chronicles are a palimpsest beneath which earlier stages of Latin chronicle writing remain visible, and thus provide evidence for chronicle writing in the period before the Edwardian conquest.

Two issues need to be considered here: the composition after the Edwardian conquest of a chronicle in Latin, sometimes termed ‘the Latin Brut’,¹⁵⁴ which provided a common archetype, now lost, for the vernacular chronicles; and the extent to which that lost Latin chronicle preserved the wording of the earlier Latin chronicles it used. First, it is mostly, though not universally, accepted that a lost Latin chronicle was probably composed at Strata Florida around the end of the thirteenth century, quite possibly in response to the Edwardian conquest, in order to create a continuation of Geoffrey’s History.¹⁵⁵ Derivation from a common Latin source (‘the Latin Brut’) is indicated by the close substantive similarities between the Peniarth and Red Book versions of Brut y Tywysogyon, and relevant parts of Brenhinedd y Saesson. However, it has also been argued that variations in content and especially phrasing between the Welsh texts suggest that the latter represent independent translations of three different copies or versions of the common Latin source.¹⁵⁶ It is also widely agreed that, as J. E. Lloyd argued almost a century ago, this Latin source was based primarily on a sequence of annals written at St Davids, then at Llanbadarn Fawr (c.1100–c.1175), and finally at the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in Ceredigion (albeit drawing on material from other Welsh Cistercian houses).¹⁵⁷

Second, however, the extent to which the translations keep to the wording of their Latin sources has been a matter of debate. J. E. Lloyd implied that the compiler of the lost Latin archetype of the vernacular chronicles had largely preserved the wording of his sources, his only major intervention being to omit annals for the years before 682 and to interpolate the annal for that year by referring to the end of Geoffrey’s History.¹⁵⁸ On the other hand, Thomas Jones subsequently suggested that the late thirteenth-century author of the lost Latin chronicle or ‘Latin Brut’ was ‘a conscious literary artist’, who, in some parts, significantly embellished what had originally been fairly terse Latin annals, comparable to those of the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles.¹⁵⁹ According to this interpretation, therefore, the texts of Brut y Tywysogyon provide an unreliable guide to the precise wording of the earlier annals upon which it was ultimately based. However, recent textual studies have persuasively challenged this view, and have instead argued that Brut y Tywysogyon essentially reproduces, albeit in translation, the wording of Latin chronicles written at different stages from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.¹⁶⁰ (The extent to which events were recorded contemporaneously rather than retrospectively merits further investigation.)¹⁶¹ That the compiler of the underlying ‘Latin Brut’ limited his editorial intervention essentially to beginning the chronicle as a continuation of Geoffrey’s History is also suggested by its abrupt termination (indicated by both the Red Book version and, in its original form, the Peniarth version of Brut y Tywysogyon) in March 1282, and thus before the momentous events precipitated by the Welsh uprising on Palm Sunday of that year, namely the Edwardian conquest and the death of Llywelyn.¹⁶² An interventionist compiler of the ‘Latin Brut’, writing shortly after the conquest, might be expected to have extended the coverage at least to the end of 1282 in order to round off the narrative and provide a conclusion in keeping with the emphasis on loss in the opening section based on Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Those who argue that the vernacular chronicles consistently adhere closely to their underlying Latin sources thus allow for a more complex and sophisticated picture of Latin chronicle writing, especially in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, than the advocates of late thirteenth-century literary elaboration by the author of ‘the Latin Brut’.¹⁶³ To take a particularly significant example, it has been convincingly argued that the account of the years 1100–26, which occupies about a sixth of Brut y Tywysogyon and is notable for its lengthy rhetorical passages, essentially represents a Latin chronicle written in the early twelfth century by a cleric from Llanbadarn Fawr, quite possibly Daniel ap Sulien (d. 1127), a brother of Rhygyfarch ap Sulien (d. 1099) who wrote the Life of St David and may himself have contributed to chronicle writing in the late eleventh century.¹⁶⁴ The following discussion will proceed on the assumption, then, that Brut y Tywysogyon opens a window on Latin chronicle writing in Wales down to 1282.

Themes and Approaches

Viewed as an evolving text, Brut y Tywysogyon provides valuable evidence for the assumptions and approaches of Welsh chroniclers—that is, members of native ecclesiastical communities followed, from the late twelfth century, by Cistercian monks. The following discussion will focus primarily on the surviving versions of this source, but will also comment on aspects of the other chronicles considered above as well as the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan. In some respects little changed between the eleventh and late thirteenth centuries. Like the Harleian chronicle down to 954, the Latin sources of Brut y Tywysogyon recorded the deaths of members of the ecclesiastical and secular elite, raids and battles, and unusual natural phenomena such as earthquakes.¹⁶⁵ On the other hand, from the early eleventh century entries tend to be fuller than previously,¹⁶⁶ though the amount of coverage remains uneven down to 1282, probably reflecting differences in the amount of information available to, and in the approaches of, individual chroniclers.¹⁶⁷ For example, even the section for 1100–26 deriving from the Llanbadarn chronicle, notable for its many expansive and dramatic passages, includes a sizeable minority of entries consisting of only a few short, unembellished annals.¹⁶⁸ Annals for the years 1177–84 and 1224–6 are likewise brief, while for the four years 1133–6 ‘there was nothing that might be placed on record’ and in 1161 ‘naught happened’.¹⁶⁹ Nevertheless, the readiness of some chroniclers to go beyond brief notices and create detailed narratives is unmistakable. So too is an increased tendency to give precise dates for events, according to either the Roman or, more frequently, ecclesiastical calendar. Such dates are lacking in the Harleian chronicle and the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, as also in the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles until 1047 and 1093 respectively, and are very rare in Brut y Tywysogyon and Brenhinedd y Saesson until the 1090s.¹⁷⁰ Moreover, while dates are given thereafter, they remain infrequent until the precisely dated account of Henry II’s journey through south Wales to Ireland and back in 1171–2, and become common only from 1200, which implies that Cistercian chroniclers were especially keen to record dates as far as they were known.¹⁷¹ Unlike some other late twelfth- and thirteenth-century chronicles in Britain, however, those in Wales did not cite or draw on texts of documents issued by ecclesiastical or secular authorities.¹⁷²

A reluctance to give dates may in part have stemmed from a desire to avoid interrupting the flow of the narrative passages which become more common from the eleventh century onwards.¹⁷³ Some of these are conspicuous for their adoption of literary conventions indebted to classical rhetoric which were intended to add dramatic effect.¹⁷⁴ In part, this involved deploying techniques ultimately derived from oral forms of communication. One is the use of direct speech, which appears occasionally in the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan and more frequently in annals for the years 1109–21 in the section of Brut y Tywysogyon derived from the early twelfth-century Llanbadarn chronicler, beginning with the account of Owain ap Cadwgan’s rape and abduction of Nest, wife of Gerald of Windsor, and the ensuing repercussions.¹⁷⁵ Another is the prefacing of a sudden turn of events with the exclamation ‘behold’ (Lat. ecce; W. nachaf, nychaf), as in the detailed account of the ill-fated Welsh attack on the Normans holding Aberystwyth castle in 1116.¹⁷⁶

Rhetorical conventions are particularly apparent in encomiastic descriptions of secular rulers which emphasize their martial prowess and other laudable qualities.¹⁷⁷ Thus his biographer praised Gruffudd ap Cynan for his military feats, comparing him with Judas Machabaeus delivering his land from foreign domination as well as with Agamemnon and King David, and also gave a flattering description of his physical appearance, educational accomplishments (including a mastery of languages), generosity, and bravery.¹⁷⁸ Brut y Tywysogyon and other chronicles describe rulers in similar terms, though without reference to their physical appearance. For example, an assault by Gruffudd’s sons on the Normans in west Wales in 1136 prompted this exuberant outburst:

And thereupon Owain and Cadwaladr, sons of Gruffudd ap Cynan, the splendour of all Britain and her defence and her strength and her freedom, like two kings, like two generous ones, two fearless ones, two brave ones, two fortunate ones, two pleasant ones, defenders of the churches, guardians of the poor, slayers of their enemies and tamers of warriors, surest help for all those who fled to them, while they surpassed all in strength of body and soul, held supremacy over all Wales and moved a mighty, fierce host to Ceredigion…¹⁷⁹

Such praise occurs most frequently in obituary notices. An early example is the account of the killing in 1064 of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn

after innumerable victories and taking of spoils and treasures of gold and silver and precious purple raiment, through the treachery of his own men, after his fame and glory had increased and after he had aforetimes been unconquered, but was not left in the waste valleys, and after he had been head and shield and defender to the Britons.¹⁸⁰

However, the most fulsome commemoration of a Welsh ruler is that for Rhys ap Gruffudd (the Lord Rhys; d. 1197), described as ‘prince of Deheubarth [south-west Wales] and the unconquered head of all Wales’, whose qualities and achievements evoked those of classical heroes such as Hercules, Achilles, and Ulysses as well as the Old Testament figures Samson and Solomon.¹⁸¹ This is followed, moreover, in the Peniarth 20 version of the chronicle by the use of Latin verse for heightened rhetorical effect. These verses open by declaring that ‘[t]he noble crown of Welsh honour has fallen’ and proclaim Rhys to have been superior to the Galfridian kings Camber, Locrinus, and Albanactus, and equal to Caesar, Arthur, and Alexander the Great; Latin verses on his tomb are also quoted.¹⁸²

Other obituary notices emphasize the ruler’s pious end, including taking the monastic habit on his deathbed. The earliest example relates that

Gruffudd ap Cynan, prince of Gwynedd and head and king and defender and pacifier of all Wales, ended his temporal life in Christ…after building many churches and consecrating them to God and the saints—after receiving extreme unction and communion and confession and repentance for his sins, and becoming a monk and making a good end in his perfect old age.¹⁸³

The passage seems to be derived from Gruffudd’s Life, which ends with a detailed account of his death and bequests,¹⁸⁴ and similar obituaries are given for his son and successor Owain Gwynedd (d. 1170) as well as one of his grandsons, his namesake Gruffudd ap Cynan ab Owain (d. 1200).¹⁸⁵ Both the latter and his cousin Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (d. 1240) are said to have taken ‘the habit of the Order’ at Aberconwy.¹⁸⁶ Likewise, though the Lord Rhys was buried at St Davids, his elder brother Cadell had taken the habit at the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in Ceredigion before his death and burial there in 1175, and the same was true of several of Rhys’s descendants in the thirteenth century, when the abbey became the dynasty’s mausoleum, a connection that explains the emphasis on the dynasty in Brut y Tywysogyon.¹⁸⁷

Obituaries expressed the conventional expectations of the ecclesiastical authors who commemorated the rulers and, as elsewhere in Europe, reflected the values shared by churchmen with the upper echelons of lay society, above all the emphasis on martial qualities, occasionally refined by allusions to chivalry: Maelgwn ap Rhys (d. 1231) was ‘the best knight, a second Gawain’.¹⁸⁸ Close attention was also given to rulers’ marital and other genealogical connections, including relations with multiple partners.¹⁸⁹ However, while criticizing acts of sacrilege against churches, both chroniclers and the author of the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan refrained from moral condemnation of rulers, though this is implicit in a report of the Lord Rhys’s fathering a son with his niece.¹⁹⁰

As in the pre-Norman period, the clearest indication of the texts’ fundamentally Christian character is their conventional interpretation of events as the workings of divine providence. The author of the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan compared his subject’s repeated attempts to establish himself as ruler of Gwynedd with the struggles of Judas Maccabeus and other leaders on behalf of the people of Israel, and was clear that Gruffudd’s eventual success was divinely ordained.¹⁹¹ For chroniclers, too, God intervened on behalf of the Welsh and their rulers. After Owain Gwynedd was struck down by grief after the death of his son Rhun in 1146

God…in his accustomed goodness saw good to show mercy to the race of the Britons, so that it should not be wrecked completely like a ship when it has lost its steersman, and be despoiled of its chief, and He preserved Owain for them as leader.

Accordingly ‘divine providence’ delivered a military victory that brought about the prince’s recovery.¹⁹² A section of the Breviate chronicle that probably derives from Cwm-hir Abbey shows that Welsh Cistercian chroniclers took a similar line in the thirteenth century: thus the Welsh under Llywelyn ap Gruffudd won the battle of Cymerau in 1256 ‘with the help of God’.¹⁹³ Christian defeats of the Saracens in the Middle East were likewise divinely ordained.¹⁹⁴

Their treatment of rulers suggests that the authors of these historical narratives were ‘engaged insiders’ commenting on contemporary politics.¹⁹⁵ However, establishing their precise relationship to the individuals and events described is difficult, as we have seen with respect to the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan. From the late twelfth century it is likely that Brut y Tywysogyon reflects the perspectives of the Welsh Cistercian communities patronized by the native princes, perspectives influenced in part by their relationships with the latter: the sharp change in attitude towards the southern Welsh ruler Maelgwn ap Rhys after 1198 is a case in point.¹⁹⁶ Significantly this change occurred in the context of a struggle for dynastic succession, which was frequently contested in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Wales and may partly help to explain the failure of the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan and most chronicles to name the successors of the deceased rulers they commemorated.¹⁹⁷ By contrast, Brut y Tywysogyon consistently records royal succession in England from the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066 to the accession of Edward I in 1272, ignoring contested successions in 1087 and 1100–1, and acknowledging Stephen’s holding of the kingdom, albeit ‘by force’.¹⁹⁸ This in turn implies that those kings were regarded as having authority over the Welsh,¹⁹⁹ enjoying a status and power of a different order to that of even the most powerful rulers of a politically fragmented Wales.

The Llanbadarn chronicler went further, in a providential interpretation that emphasized divine support for King Henry I, ‘the man against whom no one could be of avail save God himself, who had bestowed that authority upon him’. This affirmation of Henry’s power follows the condemnation of those who joined Gruffudd ap Rhys (d. 1137) in attacks on the Normans in west Wales as ‘young hotheads’ who had no fear of the king.²⁰⁰ While it is unclear whether the writer, possibly the cleric Ieuan ap Sulien, was influenced by the verdict earlier in the chronicle that kingship had ended in Wales with the killing of Rhys ap Tewdwr in 1093 (discussed further below), his acceptance of Henry’s authority is consistent with a speech attributed to a leader from the Powys dynasty with which he sympathized: ‘ “God has placed us in the midst and in the hands of our enemies and has brought us so low that we cannot do aught according to our will.” ’²⁰¹ Although there is no explicit mention of the Britons’ sins, it is tempting to see the influence here of Gildas’s interpretation of British history as a story of territorial loss resulting from divine punishment for sin, especially as the chronicler reveals his familiarity with the De Excidio in a report of Magnus Barelegs’s attack on Ulster in 1103 that compares the ‘Scots’ he faced to ‘ants rising from their caves when there is a shower of warm rain’, a phrase indebted to Gildas’s description of the Scots and Picts who took over northern Britain after the departure of the Romans.²⁰² The idea of descent from Britons could inspire pride, even defiance; but, viewed from a providential perspective, magnified by the moralizing lens of Gildas, it could also encourage resignation in the face of conquest.²⁰³

Like the invocation of divine providence, the description of the Welsh as ‘Britons’ was part of the historiographical legacy of the early Middle Ages. However, this use of ‘British’ terminology was largely abandoned by historical (and other Cambro-Latin) texts in the mid-twelfth century in favour of one that described Wales as Wallia or Cambria and its native inhabitants as ‘Welsh’ (Walenses, Cambrenses).²⁰⁴ The change is readily detectable in the Latin Breviate and Cottonian chronicles, and may be inferred in Brut y Tywysogyon from the replacement of Brytanyeit by Kymry, Welsh terms presumably translating Latin Britones and Walenses (or perhaps in some cases Cambrenses) in the chronicle’s Latin sources. (That compilers of Brut y Tywysogyon did not try to impose a uniform ethnic terminology is an important argument in favour of the view that they largely adhered to the wording of the earlier chronicles incorporated in the text.)²⁰⁵ Likewise the probably mid-twelfth-century Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan only once calls the Welsh of Gruffudd’s day ‘Britons’,²⁰⁶ and mainly refers to Wales and the Welsh as Cambria and Cambri, terms derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth.²⁰⁷

In some cases the use of ‘British’ terminology amounted to more than merely ethnic nomenclature; it could also have political, even existential, implications. In the later eleventh century Welsh kingship is sometimes linked to authority over the Britons of Wales: thus Bleddyn ap Cynfyn (d. 1075) ‘eminently held the kingdom of all the Britons after Gruffudd, his brother’.²⁰⁸ However, this did not survive the death in 1093 of Rhys ap Tewdwr, ‘with whom fell the kingdom of the Britons’.²⁰⁹ It appears, then, that a chronicler at St Davids articulated the notion of a ‘kingdom of the Britons’ embracing the whole of Wales.²¹⁰ The Llanbadarn chronicle goes further and alludes to traditional learning about the island of Britain.²¹¹ Henry I’s first campaign against the northern Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys in 1114 is interpreted as nothing less than attempted genocide, and evokes geographical descriptors for the extremities of Britain found in Welsh literary sources.

And out of hate for them they [the Normans] set their minds upon exterminating all the Britons, so that the name of the Britons should never more be called to mind from that time forth. And king Henry gathered a host over all the island of Britain, from the promontory of Penwith in Cornwall to the promontory of Blathaon in Scotland, and all these combined together against the men of Gwynedd and Powys.²¹²

Two years later Henry is described as ‘the man who had subdued under his authority all the island of Britain and its mighty ones’, language that echoed references to Britain as ‘the island of the mighty’ in the prose tale Branwen, one of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, which are set in a pre-Roman Britain.²¹³

It is notable that none of the Welsh leaders named in Brut y Tywysogyon from Rhys ap Tewdwr’s death in 1093 to the death of Henry I in 1135 are called kings (or given other titles): the only king active in Wales is the king of England.²¹⁴ However, Welsh kingship reappears during the rising against Norman power in 1136–7, as the chronicler’s praise of Owain Gwynedd, his brother Cadwaladr, and their father Gruffudd ap Cynan quoted above makes clear. Moreover, in several cases these and later members of native dynasties are associated not only with individual Welsh territories but also with ‘Wales’. The emphasis on Gruffudd ap Cynan’s royal status and hereditary title to the kingdom of Gwynedd is a recurring theme in his Life.²¹⁵ However, its author also took pains to associate Gruffudd with the Welsh as a whole. Thus he addresses his audience as ‘Welshmen most dear to me, whom I embrace with fraternal affection’, and describes the submission of Rhys ap Tewdwr, ‘king of the southern Welsh’ to Gruffudd, ‘king of the kings of the Welsh’.²¹⁶ Likewise the obituary notice in Brut y Tywysogyon remembers him as ‘prince of Gwynedd and head and king and defender and pacifier of all Wales’.²¹⁷

From the twelfth century, then, the most powerful rulers are associated with ‘Wales’ and ‘the Welsh’ rather than ‘(the kingdom of) the Britons’.²¹⁸ True, this involved an adaptation rather than abandonment of previous thinking. Thus in 1198

Gwenwynwyn [ruler of southern Powys] gathered a mighty host to seek to win for the Welsh their original rights and to restore their bounds to their rightful owners, which they had lost through the multitude of their sins…with the help and support of all the princes of Wales.²¹⁹

Yet, while the passage echoes Gildasian notions of territorial loss resulting from sin, its focus remains firmly on Wales without implying any rights more widely in Britain. Likewise from the later twelfth century chronicles frequently emphasize the unity of Wales in phrases such as ‘(all) the princes of Wales’, while the Cronica de Wallia even refers to ‘the monarchy of Wales’.²²⁰ This greater emphasis on Wales as a political unit reflected wider changes, especially the ambitions of the expansionist thirteenth-century princes of Gwynedd.²²¹ It was also fostered by the network of Cistercian monasteries patronized by Welsh princes which were the main centres of chronicle writing.²²² As we shall see in Chapter 4, these houses remained crucial to the development of Welsh history writing in the very different political circumstances following the Edwardian conquest.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0004

¹ Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, 87–9; Wendy Davies, Patterns of Power, 69–73; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 174–81.

² For examples in Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum see Elizabeth Freeman, Narratives of a New Order, 191, 194.

³ A. D. Carr, ‘Anglo-Welsh Relations’; Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 83–4; Gesta Stephani, cc. 8–11, ed. and trans. Potter, revd. Davis, 14–23; Gwyn A. Williams, ‘The Succession to Gwynedd’, esp. 406.

⁴ Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery, 17–18 (quotation), 21.

⁵ Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 7–18, 26–9. For a different emphasis, focused on Anglo-Norman historians’ treatment of Roman and post-Roman Britain, see Winkler, ‘William of Malmesbury and the Britons’.

⁶ DK, II. 7.

⁷ Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. and trans. Bromwich. Examples in the poetry in Bromwich, ‘Cyfeiriadau Traddodiadol’; Andrews and Stephenson, ‘Draig Argoed: Iorwerth Goch ap Maredudd’, esp. 77–89; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Welsh Raiding’.

⁸ Gramadegau’r Penceirddiaid, ed. Williams and Jones, xlii, 37; G. J. Williams, ‘Tri Chof Ynys Brydain’, quotation at 235; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Ystoria’.

⁹ DK, I. 3, 17; Guy, ‘Gerald and Welsh Genealogical Learning’.

¹⁰ Cf. Ainsworth, ‘Legendary History’, esp. 403–12.

¹¹ For comparison of the court poetry and historical writing of this period see McKenna, ‘Court Poetry’.

¹² Dafydd Jenkins, ‘Bardd Teulu’, 149–50; Charles-Edwards and Jones, ‘Breintiau Gwŷr Powys’; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Gwlad ac Arglwydd’, 251–2; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Royal Propaganda’, 238–45.

¹³ Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Royal Propaganda’, 229–38.

¹⁴ Saints’ Lives are listed with references to manuscripts, editions, and studies in Lapidge and Sharpe, A Bibliography, 14–17, 33–8. See also John Reuben Davies, ‘The Saints of South Wales’, esp. 370–91; John Reuben Davies, ‘Cathedrals and the Cult of Saints’; John Reuben Davies, ‘The Cult of Saints in the Early Welsh March’, esp. 47–51.

¹⁵ Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’, 22 (quotation); Wendy Davies, ‘Property Rights’, 517–18; John Reuben Davies, ‘The Saints of South Wales’, 382–3; ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 117, n. 33; Guy, ‘The Life of St Dyfrig’, esp. 2–6, 14–17, 36–7. According to the Historia Brittonum, St Germanus, after coming from Gaul to preach in Britain, blessed Cadell and made him king of Powys, promising that he would be succeeded by his descendants; he also condemned the evil Vortigern, and subsequently urged the pope to send Patrick to convert the Irish: HB, cc. 32–5, 39, 47–9, 51; Charles-Edwards, Wales, 442–3 and n. 24.

¹⁶ Henken, The Welsh Saints, 1–15; Nerys Ann Jones and Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Twelfth-Century Welsh Hagiography’.

¹⁷ For two Lives, possibly of Norman authorship, which survive only in other manuscripts see Winward, ‘The Lives of St Wenefred’. These draw on a lost Cambro-Latin Life of St Beuno, also used by the Middle Welsh Life of that saint, whose principal cult site was the church of Clynnog Fawr in Gwynedd: Buchedd Beuno, ed. Sims-Williams, 17–32.

¹⁸ The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans and Rhys, 1–24, 78–86, 97–117, 130–9, 193–7; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 109–31; Guy, ‘The Life of St Dyfrig’.

¹⁹ Barry J. Lewis, ‘A Possible Provenance’, 3–7, following Harris, ‘The Kalendar’. Date of the manuscript: Guy, ‘The Life of St Dyfrig’, 6 and n. 17. See also Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 53–66. The Lives and associated texts occur in the first of the three separate manuscripts bound together in Cotton Vespasian A.XIV (fols. 1–105).

²⁰ Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 57–64 and n. 54; Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map, 107–17; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 81–5, 98–9.

²¹ For a survey of medieval writing about saints see Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, ch. 13.

²² ‘Vita Sancte Wenefrede’, cc. 21–48, VSB, 294–309; Julia M. H. Smith, ‘Oral and Written’, 341; Winward, ‘The Lives of St Wenefred’, 115–18.

²³ ‘Vita Prima Sancti Carantoci’, cc. 1, 4, in VSB, 142–7; ‘Vita Sancti Iltuti’, c. 2, in VSB, 196–7; and discussion of the Lives of St David and St Cadog below. For St Germanus, see n. 15 above and n. 49 below.

²⁴ ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, c. 68, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 152–5; ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 45–7, in VSB, 116–19; ‘Vita Secundi Sancti Carantoci’, c. 1, in VSB, 148–9; ‘Vita Sancti Kebii’, c. 1, in VSB, 234–5. Bonedd y Saint: Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, ed. P. C. Bartrum (Cardiff, 1966), 51–67; date discussed in Barry J. Lewis, ‘Bonedd y Saint’, 139–40, n. 2.

²⁵ The late eleventh-century Life of St Padarn—whose author is not identified in the text—extant in Vespasian A.XIV may be the hystoria of St Padarn referred to in the Life of St David and thus pre-date the latter; indeed, its most recent editors have argued that it was written by Ieuan ap Sulien at the same time and in the same place as his brother Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David, though the identification with Ieuan specifically has been questioned: ‘ “Vita Sancti Paterni” ’, ed. and trans. Thomas and Howlett, 67–8, 75–7; Guy, ‘Rheinwg’, 101 and n. 18. See also ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, c. 44, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 138–9 and n. 85; Russell, ‘The Englyn to St Padarn Revisited’, 12–14; Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest’, 237–50.

²⁶ ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 107–55. For the family of Sulien and their writings and manuscripts see Nora K. Chadwick, ‘Intellectual Life in West Wales’, esp. 162–73; Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest’, esp. chs. 1, 3, and 4.

²⁷ BT, Pen20Tr, 16, 17 (1073, 1078, 1080, 1085).

²⁸ BT, Pen20Tr, 16–18 (1073, 1078, 1080, 1085, 1091); AC, 26–9 (1071 = 1073, 1076 = 1078, 1078 = 1080, 1083 = 1085, 1089 = 1091); J. Wyn Evans, ‘Bishops of St Davids’, 271.

²⁹ Cf. John Reuben Davies, ‘Cathedrals and the Cult of Saints’, 102.

³⁰ ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, c. 66, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 152–3.

³¹ John Reuben Davies, ‘Some Observations’, 159–60; John Reuben Davies, ‘Cathedrals and the Cult of Saints’, 102.

³² ‘Planctus Ricemarch’, ed. and trans. Lapidge, ‘The Welsh-Latin Poetry’, 88–93; also ed. and trans. Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest’, 334–6, with discussion at 209–20, 304–6.

³³ ‘Carmen Iohannis de uita et familia Sulgeni’, ed. and trans. Lapidge, ‘The Welsh-Latin Poetry’, 80–9 (quotations from lines 55, 57, 69); also ed. and trans. Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest’, 326–31, with discussion at 34–49, 262–3.

³⁴ The text extant in Vespasian A.XIV (‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, in VSB, 24–141) is a composite work embodying substantial additions to Lifris’s original text, which was probably completed c.1091 × c.1104: Emanuel, ‘An Analysis’. See also Brooke, The Church and the Welsh Border, 70–89; Wendy Davies, ‘Property Rights’, 518–23, 526–7, 528–9; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 15–16.

³⁵ Emanuel, ‘An Analysis’, 220; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 132–42; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 84–5, 98–9.

³⁶ Note also the contemptuous references to peasants in ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 7, 36, in VSB, 36–9, 100–1.

³⁷ Emanuel, ‘The Latin Life of St. Cadoc’, lxiii, 152–9; John Reuben Davies, ‘Some Observations’, 156–9; Zeiser, ‘Bragmaticus omnibus brittonibus’, 309–14.

³⁸ ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, cc. 2, 4, 16–19, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 108–9, 112–13, 120–5.

³⁹ ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, c. 27, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 128–9 and n. 66.

⁴⁰ ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, cc. 3, 5, 36–54, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 110–15, 132–47, quotation at 143.

⁴¹ The Vespasian Life, the version convincingly argued to come closest to preserving Rhygyfarch’s work, states that David was first made archbishop by the patriarch of Jerusalem, but then continues to call him bishop until he is again made archbishop at the Synod of Brefi; the first passage, at least, may therefore be a later interpolation influenced by the campaigns to secure metropolitan status for St Davids independent of Canterbury: ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, cc. 46, 53, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 140–1, 146–7; Nora K. Chadwick, ‘Intellectual Life’, 143–4; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Welsh Past’, 24 (but cf. Sharpe, ‘Which Text is Rhygyfarch’s “Life” of St David?’, 100–1). See also Richter, ‘Canterbury’s Primacy’. Although Rhygyfarch could have known that the title of archbishop was used in ninth-century Wales, including at St Davids (cf. Charles-Edwards, Wales, 593–4), the Life’s inconsistent application of the term to St David is nevertheless striking.

⁴² ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, cc. 21–31, 49–56, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 124–9, 142–7.

⁴³ ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 9–11, 22, 26, 34–6, in VSB, 44–9, 68–73, 80–3, 96–101.

⁴⁴ ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 7, 12, 15–16, 19, 22–5, 29, in VSB, 36–41, 52–3, 56–65, 68–81, 90–3.

⁴⁵ Wendy Davies, ‘Property Rights’, 520–2, 526–7.

⁴⁶ ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 40–4, in VSB, 110–17; Emanuel, ‘An Analysis’, 219–20.

⁴⁷ The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans and Rhys; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf.

⁴⁸ The derivation of most of the charters from authentic pre-Norman records was established by Wendy Davies, The Llandaff Charters. Her case is confirmed, with some important modifications, by Sims-Williams, The Book of Llandaf. See also Charles-Edwards, Wales, 245–67.

⁴⁹ The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans and Rhys, 68–9; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 110–11.

⁵⁰ John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 105, 132–42.

⁵¹ DGB, 281 (XI.208).

⁵² Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 220.

⁵³ For the date see The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I, ed. Wright, xii–xvi.

⁵⁴ For recent discussions of Geoffrey’s relationship to, and place in, medieval Welsh historical writing see Guy, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’, and Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’.

⁵⁵ Crick, ‘Monmouth, Geoffrey of (d. 1154/5)’; Joshua Byron Smith, ‘Introduction and Biography’.

⁵⁶ The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I, ed. Wright, ix–x; DGB, ix, 4–5, 143, 248–9 (I.3, VII.110 n., XI.277).

⁵⁷ See e.g. Tatlock, The Legendary History, 396–402, 438–46; Farrell, ‘History, Prophecy and the Arthur of the Normans’.

⁵⁸ Joshua Byron Smith, ‘Introduction and Biography’, 11–21, which reviews the scholarship on Geoffrey’s ethnicity and argues he was Welsh, a view advanced previously by Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 19–39. See also Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’, 258–9, 268–70.

⁵⁹ Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 39–40; Guy, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’, 39–42.

⁶⁰ DGB, 4 (Prologue, 2).

⁶¹ Leckie, Jr., The Passage of Dominion, esp. 57–71. Geoffrey arrived at the date by merging two seventh-century kings, Cadwaladr, king of Gwynedd and Cædwalla, king of the West Saxons: Guy, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’, 52.

⁶² DGB, 56–8, 204–8, 246 (III.42–3; IX.154–5; X.175).

⁶³ DGB, 248–52 (X.176, XI.177–8).

⁶⁴ DGB, 280 (XI. 207).

⁶⁵ The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I, ed. Wright, xvii–xviii; Brooke, The Church and the Welsh Border, 97, 100; Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 13–14; Joshua Byron Smith, ‘Introduction and Biography’, 21–4.

⁶⁶ Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 14–17. See further Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’; Wright, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas’; Wright, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas Revisited’; Wright, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede’; Guy, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’.

⁶⁷ Faral, La légende Arthurienne, 2: 137–9; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 90–2.

⁶⁸ Brooke, The Church and the Welsh Border, 16–24, 97–9; Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 32–7.

⁶⁹ See e.g. Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain, 5–8; Farrell, ‘History, Prophecy and the Arthur of the Normans’.

⁷⁰ Cf. Kempshall, Rhetoric, 319–21, 325–41, 348–9. William of Newburgh famously declared that Geoffrey had overstepped the mark here and produced lies: Kempshall, Rhetoric, 365–6. See also Henley, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’.

⁷¹ Leckie, Jr., The Passage of Dominion, 38–42; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’, 260–1, 268–9; cf. Wright, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede’, 30–1; Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 26–31.

⁷² DGB, 4–5, 142–3 (Prologue; Preface to Prophecies of Merlin).

⁷³ DGB, 280–1 (XI.207–8).

⁷⁴ DGB, 280–1 (XI.207–8), with translation slightly adapted.

⁷⁵ DGB, 281 (XI.208); also e.g. 31, 89, 259, 279 (II.23, IV.72, XI.186, 204).

⁷⁶ DGB, 30–1 (II.23).

⁷⁷ DGB, 88–9 (IV.72).

⁷⁸ DGB, 30–1, 46–7 (II.23, 34); Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’, 37.

⁷⁹ Bartlett, Gerald of Wales.

⁸⁰ Assessments of Gerald as a historian include F. X. Martin, ‘Giraldus as Historian’; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Gerald of Wales’, 134–8.

⁸¹ Boivin, L’Irlande au moyen âge, 91–100; Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 20–5.

⁸² Thomas Jones, ‘Gerald the Welshman’s “Itinerary through Wales” and “Description of Wales” ’.

⁸³ Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 46–57; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Welsh Past’.

⁸⁴ IK; Pryce, ‘Gerald’s Journey’; Pryce, ‘Giraldus and the Geraldines’, 63–6. The distinction Gerald drew between recent and distant events, and his reliance on orally transmitted information for the former and written sources for the latter, is paralleled in other twelfth-century writers of history: Guenée, ‘Temps de l’histoire’, 29–32.

⁸⁵ DK, ‘Praefatio Prima’; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’.

⁸⁶ DK; Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 181–210.

⁸⁷ DK, ‘Praefatio Prima’, II. 7; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’.

⁸⁸ IK, I. 5, II. 1; DK, I. 7, II. 7; Crick, ‘The British Past’, 60–75.

⁸⁹ DK, I. 15.

⁹⁰ E.g., IK, II. 11; DK, I. 3, 7, 12. See also Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 797–8. Gerald even seems to have adopted the name Giraldus Cambrensis at one stage in his career: Wada, ‘Gerald on Gerald’, 242.

⁹¹ DGB, 30–1 (II. 23). The History does not apply ‘Cambrian’ terminology to the Welsh, but they are referred to as Cambri in Geoffrey’s much less circulated verse Vita Merlini of 1148 × 1155: Life of Merlin, ed. and trans. Clarke, 104, 134 (lines 968–9, 1507), with discussion of the work’s authorship and date at 36–42.

⁹² DGB, 280–1 (XI. 207).

⁹³ DK, I. 7.

⁹⁴ DK, ‘Praefatio Prima’; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’; cf. Rhygyfarch ap Sulien, ‘Planctus’, lines 45–50, 68, 80–3, ed. and trans. Lapidge, 90–3.

⁹⁵ DK, II. 7; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’, 121–3.

⁹⁶ Jones, HWMW, ch. 3; A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Henley and Smith, Part 4 (‘Reception’).

⁹⁷ Hammer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 18–19; Dumville, ‘The Origin of the C-Text’; The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, II, ed. Wright, lxxvi, lxxix–lxxx, lxxxii–lxxxiii; Crick, The Historia Regum Britanniae, 197, 205, 214; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘The Literary Tradition’, 532–6. For a suggestion that Madog may have been a Cistercian monk at Valle Crucis see Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’, 278–9.

⁹⁸ Listed in Jones, HWMW, 431; for over 40 further copies of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries see Jones, HWMW, 432–3. Illustrations in NLW, Peniarth MS 23 (c.1500): Liber Coronacionis Britanorum, ed. Sims-Williams. Cf. Charles-Edwards, The Welsh Laws, 100–2.

⁹⁹ Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Roberts, xxiv–xxxvi; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘The Red Book of Hergest Version’. Sims-Williams, Rhai Addasiadau, suggests (at 48–55) that the version in NLW Peniarth 24 (copied in 1477) may be a fourth early independent translation, in addition to those in NLW 5266 (Dingestow MS), Llanstephan 1, and Peniarth 44. (Shorter version of this study in Sims-Williams, ‘The Welsh Versions’.)

¹⁰⁰ Brynley F. Roberts, ‘The Treatment of Personal Names’, esp. 289; Sims-Williams, Rhai Addasiadau, 6–8.

¹⁰¹ Sims-Williams, Rhai Addasiadau, 6 (emphasis in original).

¹⁰² Brynley R. Roberts, ‘The Red Book of Hergest Version’, 147.

¹⁰³ As noted below, however, the Welsh version of the Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan may also have been produced in the early thirteenth century.

¹⁰⁴ Brynley R. Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 220–1.

¹⁰⁵ Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Roberts, xxxiii; cf. Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 187.

¹⁰⁶ Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Roberts, xxix, xxxii–xxxiv; Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys, ed. Roberts; Brynley R. Roberts, ‘The Treatment of Personal Names’.

¹⁰⁷ Brynley R. Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 221–7, quotation at 227; Sims-Williams, Rhai Addasiadau, 15–54.

¹⁰⁸ Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. and trans. Parry, 79–82, 193. See also Brynley R. Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 224–5.

¹⁰⁹ Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 782–3.

¹¹⁰ Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 797–8; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’, 283–6.

¹¹¹ For Lives of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and his son Dafydd noted by the antiquary Robert Vaughan (1592?–1667) as being at Benet’s (i.e. Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, see Edward Lhuyd to Thomas Tanner, 20 May 1698, in Lhwyd, ‘The Correspondence’, http://tinyurl.com/y7wzd99r (last accessed 13 September 2021).

¹¹² Historia Gruffud, ed. Evans, ccxliii–ccxlix; VGC, 1–49. Assessment of the work’s structure and significance in J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Biography’.

¹¹³ VGC, 85–91 (cc. 30–5).

¹¹⁴ VGC, 52–9 (cc. 2–7). For the significance of the Irish and Scandinavian elements in the Life see Duffy, ‘Ostmen, Irish and Welsh’, 381–2, 388–96; Jesch, ‘Norse Historical Traditions’; Winkler, ‘The Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan’. See also Goetz, ‘Von der res gesta zur narratio rerum gestarum’, 706–7, for the close association of genealogies and medieval historical writing.

¹¹⁵ VGC, 58–61 (cc. 8, 11).

¹¹⁶ VGC, 60–73 (cc. 10–19).

¹¹⁷ VGC, 72–91 (cc. 22–35).

¹¹⁸ VGC, 52–5, c. 3; David E. Thornton, ‘The Genealogy of Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 86–7.

¹¹⁹ VGC, 88–9, c. 35; cf. Pryce, ‘Owain Gwynedd’. J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Biography’, 368, suggests that the Life was composed in response to ‘prolonged tension in the royal kindred of Gwynedd extending from 1143 to 1157’.

¹²⁰ VGC, 43–7 (which suggests the death in 1148 of Bishop Bernard of St Davids, a vigorous champion of his see’s metropolitan claim, as a possible terminus ad quem).

¹²¹ Historia Gruffud, ed. Evans, ccxxx; C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 48–50; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Biography’, 366–7. The use of ‘Cambrian’ terminology could have been adapted directly from Geoffrey, whose work was known to the Life’s author, rather than via usage in south-west Wales attested from the late twelfth century: cf. Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 797–8. The demeaning portrayal of the southern king Rhys ap Tewdwr (d. 1093) in the context of the battle of Mynydd Carn (1081) also argues against composition at St Davids, as Rhys is given precedence over Gruffudd at the battle in chronicles deriving from the church and also apparently endowed St Davids with substantial lands: VGC, 68–71 (cc. 17–18); BT, RBH, 16–17 (1081); Pryce, ‘The Dynasty of Deheubarth’, 305.

¹²² Historia Gruffud, ed. Evans, ccxlviii–ccxlix; C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 48.

¹²³ See also C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 50.

¹²⁴ BT, Pen20Tr, 62 (1162).

¹²⁵ VGC, 76–9, 88–9 (cc. 24, 35).

¹²⁶ Cf. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Three Columns of Law’, 36–7.

¹²⁷ C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 43, 48–50. The holding by members of the Gwynedd dynasty of lands north of Dublin, near Swords, probably in the twelfth, and certainly by the early thirteenth, century, may have been a further reason why Gruffudd’s origins and early life were remembered: cf. Flanagan, ‘Historia Gruffud vab Kenan’.

¹²⁸ Malone, ‘ “There Has Been Treachery” ’; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Biography’, esp. 341–7.

¹²⁹ VGC, 58–9, 76–7 (cc. 7–8, 23).

¹³⁰ VGC, 62–3, 64–5, 74–5, 78–9, 84–5 (cc. 12, 14, 22–5, 31); see also VGC, 58–9 (c. 6). The source of the reference to Arthur’s betrayal is uncertain. It is lacking in the Historia Brittonum, but was possibly influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth: Historia Gruffud, ed. Evans, 70, referring to DGB, 196–201 (IX. 145–7). See also Malone ‘ “There Has Been Treachery” ’, 70–2.

¹³¹ See esp. VGC, 84–5, 86–7 (cc. 31, 33 (quotation)).

¹³² Survey of modern scholarship in Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’.

¹³³ Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307, 143–8, 318–45, 395–438; Harrison, ‘Cistercian Chronicling’.

¹³⁴ Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 81–2; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 67–70; Cowley, The Monastic Order, 144; Patterson, ‘The Author of the “Margam Annals” ’; Colker, ‘The “Margam Chronicle” ’, 123–48.

¹³⁵ ‘Annales de Margan’, ed. Luard, 3; Henley, ‘The Cardiff Chronicle’, 253.

¹³⁶ J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 67–71.

¹³⁷ ‘Annales de Margan’, ed. Luard, 34–7 (s.aa. 1223–4, 1226–7, 1229).

¹³⁸ ‘Annales de Margan’, ed. Luard, 31–2, 38–9 (s.aa. 1211–12, 1230–2). See also Henley, ‘The Cardiff Chronicle’, 257–8, 260–2, 264–5 (s.aa. 1211, 1228, 1230, 1231, 1232, 1240); ‘Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century’ [ed. Jones], 278 (s.a. 1231); J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 69–70.

¹³⁹ For a similar approach to a much larger group of chronicles see Stafford, After Alfred, esp. comments at 33–7.

¹⁴⁰ Unsatisfactory editions in AC, which is cited for convenience. For full and accurate transcriptions, see ‘Annales Cambriae: The B Text’, ed. Gough-Cooper, and ‘Annales Cambriae: The C Text’, ed. Gough-Cooper.

¹⁴¹ Here I follow Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 73–6, 79–84, with the modifications proposed by Stephenson, ‘Gerald of Wales’; Stephenson, ‘The Chronicler at Cwm-hir Abbey’; and Stephenson, ‘In Search of a Welsh Chronicler’.

¹⁴² Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 76, 79 (quotation), 81–3.

¹⁴³ Brett, ‘The Prefaces’.

¹⁴⁴ Gough-Cooper, ‘Decennovenal Reason’.

¹⁴⁵ CW; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The “Cronica de Wallia” ’; Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 77–9; Crick, ‘The Power and the Glory’.

¹⁴⁶ BT, Pen20, xi–xiii; BT, Pen20Tr, xl; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The “Cronica de Wallia” ’, 274–6.

¹⁴⁷ Owain Wyn Jones, ‘O Oes Gwrtheyrn’.

¹⁴⁸ A precedent for, and thus possible influence on, this formulation is the Historia Brittonum’s statement that 428 years had passed ‘from the first year in which the English came to Britain until the fourth year of King Merfyn’: HB, c. 16. This in turn seems to have been modelled on the work’s summary of the Six Ages of the World (sex aetates mundi), an influential periodization devised in late antiquity: HB, cc. 1–4. For a similar scheme, see e.g. Bede, De Temporum Ratione, c. 66: 1–6, ed. Jones, 463–4, and discussion in Bassett, ‘The Use of History’, 281–7.

¹⁴⁹ Owain Wyn Jones, ‘O Oes Gwrtheyrn’, 222.

¹⁵⁰ Owain Wyn Jones, ‘O Oes Gwrtheyrn’, 191–5; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 200–23.

¹⁵¹ Historical Texts, ed. Williams, xxv–xxxii; Jones, HWMW, ch. 4.

¹⁵² Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ed. and trans. Dumville, v–x; Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’, 83–4 and n. 55.

¹⁵³ John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 378–9; BT, Pen20Tr, xxxvi, lvi; BT, RBH, li–lii; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 57–8.

¹⁵⁴ John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 384; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 56.

¹⁵⁵ John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 382, 386; BT, Pen20Tr, xxxv–xxxvi, xxxviii–xxxix and n. 3; J. Beverley Smith, The Sense of History, 7. Review of the arguments in Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’, 97–100. The existence of ‘the Latin Brut’ is questioned, though, in Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ed. and trans. Dumville, vi; Harrison, ‘Cistercian Chronicling’, 27, n. 66. See also Jones, HWMW, 232–41.

¹⁵⁶ BT, Pen20Tr, xxxvii.

¹⁵⁷ John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 382–6, followed, for example, by BT, Pen20Tr, xxxiv, xli. By contrast, Dumville, Review of Hughes, The Welsh Latin Chronicles, 465, argues that a version of the St Davids chronicle passed directly to Strata Florida, without an intervening period at Llanbadarn Fawr. However, the work cited in n. 160 has reinforced Lloyd’s case for the importance of the latter.

¹⁵⁸ John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 369–70, 382–6.

¹⁵⁹ Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing’, 25–7, quotation at 26. See also BT, Pen20Tr, xliii; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Castell Gwyddgrug’; J. Beverley Smith, The Sense of History, 8; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 56–7; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Princes, Lords and English Monarchy’, 250–1, 253–4, 257–8.

¹⁶⁰ Stephenson, Medieval Powys, 25–8; Stephenson, ‘The “Resurgence” of Powys’, 184–9; Stephenson, ‘Welsh Chronicles’ Accounts’, 51–7; Stephenson, ‘Entries Relating to Arwystli’, 47–9; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’. For possible earlier Latin chronicles incorporated in the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles see Gough-Cooper, ‘Meet the Ancestors?’.

¹⁶¹ The detailed account in BT, Pen20Tr, 12 (1022) may well have been composed in the late eleventh century: Stephenson, Medieval Powys, 27–8; also Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 13–14.

¹⁶² Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing in Medieval Welsh’, 23–4; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Testunau Hanes’, 296; Owain Wyn Jones and Huw Pryce, ‘Historical Writing’, 215–17. For the subsequent extension of the narrative to 1332 in an early fourteenth-century continuation of the Peniarth 20 version, in turn followed by Brenhinedd y Saesson, see Chapter 4.

¹⁶³ J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 57–8, argues that literary elaboration was restricted to the narrative from the early eleventh to late twelfth centuries.

¹⁶⁴ BT, Pen20Tr, 21–50; BT, RBH, 38–111; BS, 92–143. See Stephenson, ‘The “Resurgence” of Powys’, 184–9; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 215–27; Stephenson, Medieval Powys, 26–8. However, the author of the ‘Llanbadarn History’ may have relocated to the church of Meifod in Powys after monks from Gloucester Abbey occupied Llanbadarn Fawr c.1116 (and his successor was possibly based at Llandinam in Arwystli in 1128–32): Stephenson, ‘Entries Relating to Arwystli’, 47–9.

¹⁶⁵ Mortality: BT, Pen20Tr, 57, 97, 101 (1148, 1219, 1230). Earthquakes: BT, Pen20Tr, 81, 107, 117 (1201, 1247, 1275).

¹⁶⁶ A tendency already presaged in the slightly fuller annals for 987 and 992: BT, Pen20Tr, 9, 10.

¹⁶⁷ BT, Pen20Tr, xlii–xliii.

¹⁶⁸ BT, Pen20Tr, 22, 27, 36, 46, 47, 49 (1101, 1107, 1112, 1117, 1119, 1122–3, 1126).

¹⁶⁹ BT, Pen20Tr, 51, 62 (1133–6, 1161); also BT, Pen20Tr, 72 (1180).

¹⁷⁰ BT, Pen20Tr, 1, 3, 8, 10, 14, 18–19 (682, 810, 961, 993, 1047, 1091, 1093). BT, RBH, and BS are similar, apart from specifying the date of another lunar eclipse in 831.

¹⁷¹ Stephenson, ‘In Search of a Welsh Chronicler’, 80, suggests that ‘[m]aterials originating in Strata Florida seem frequently to give precise dates’. By contrast, the Annals of Margam give precise dates mainly for the deaths of ecclesiastics and kings of England and for natural phenomena, but usually assign events in Wales only to the year in which they occurred: ‘Annales de Margan’, ed. Luard, passim.

¹⁷² Cf. Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307, 325, 337, 342, 396; Julian Harrison, ‘Cistercian Chronicling’, 25–6.

¹⁷³ For early examples see BT, Pen20Tr, 12, 14, 15 (1022, 1056, 1063, 1066). Cf. Given-Wilson, Chronicles, 125–6.

¹⁷⁴ Historical Texts, ed. Williams, xxxi; Henley, ‘Rhetoric’.

¹⁷⁵ BT, Pen20Tr, 28–36, 38–46, 48 (1109–11, 1114–16, 1121). Cf. VGC, 68–73 (cc. 17–19). See also Kempshall, Rhetoric, 339–41; Johns, Gender, Nation and Conquest, 20–42.

¹⁷⁶ BT, Pen20Tr, 43 (1116). See also BT, Pen20Tr, 100 (1223); VGC, 80–1, 84–5 (cc. 27, 30); and, for the interjection of ‘alas!’ (L. heu) in reporting a ruler’s death, CW, 31 (1197); AC, 89 (1255).

¹⁷⁷ Historical Texts, ed. Williams, xxxi–xxxii; for parallels with rulers’ elegies in Welsh court poetry see Henley, ‘Rhetoric’, 95–6; McKenna, ‘Court Poetry’, 108.

¹⁷⁸ VGC, 62–3, 64–5, 72–3, 74–5, 84–5 (cc. 12, 14, 20, 23, 31).

¹⁷⁹ BT, Pen20Tr, 51 (1136). BT, RBH, 112–13 (1136), is similar, but the passage is highly compressed in BS, 144–5 (1136). Another example is the account of the defence of Llansteffan castle by Maredudd ap Rhys, praised as a boy who acted like a man: BT, Pen20Tr, 54 (1146); BT, RBH, 122–3 (1146); compressed in BS, 150–1 (1146).

¹⁸⁰ BT, Pen20Tr, 15 (1063). BT, RBH, 26–7, and BS, 72–3, are similar. Walter Map drew a far less flattering picture of Gruffudd with marked folkloric elements suggesting derivation from stories transmitted orally: Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and trans. James, revd. Brooke and Mynors, 186–97; Michael and Sean Davies, The Last King of Wales, 23–9, 84–6; Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map, 22–8.

¹⁸¹ BT, Pen20Tr, 76–7 (1197).

¹⁸² BT, Pen20Tr, 77–8 (1197); also edited and translated in Henley, ‘Rhetoric’, 100–3, quotation at 101. The closest parallel for the prose encomium appears in CW, 30–1 (1197). Only the first part occurs in BT, RBH, 178–9, and the encomium in BS, 192–3, is very brief. Discussion in Pryce, ‘Y Canu Lladin’, 212–15; Henley, ‘Rhetoric’, 79, 90–8; Russell, ‘ “Go and Look in the Latin Books” ’, 215–30.

¹⁸³ BT, Pen20Tr, 52 (1137).

¹⁸⁴ VGC, 88–91 (cc. 34–5).

¹⁸⁵ BT, Pen20Tr, 65, 80 (1170, 1200).

¹⁸⁶ BT, Pen20Tr, 105 (1240).

¹⁸⁷ BT, Pen20Tr, 71, 81, 82, 84, 99 (1175, 1201, 1204, 1210, 1222). Likewise Owain Cyfeiliog of southern Powys took the habit at Strata Marcella: BT, Pen20Tr, 79 (1197).

¹⁸⁸ BT, Pen20Tr, 74 (1189). The comparison is lacking in BT, RBH, 172–3 (1189), but BS, 186–7 (1189) calls Maelgwn ‘the flower of knights’, a description applied in the Breviate chronicle to his nephew Rhys Ieuanc ap Gruffudd: AC, 75 (1220 = 1222). The latter is called ‘the…unconquered bulwark of knights’ in BT, Pen20Tr, 99 (1222).

¹⁸⁹ Pen 20Tr, 45–6, 70–1, 83 (1116, 1175, 1205); VGC, 52–9, 76–9 (cc. 2–7, 24).

¹⁹⁰ BT, Pen20Tr, 30, 42, 69 (1109, 1116, 1173). The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan mentions the king’s ‘concubines’ and their children only in a brief aside, without naming them: VGC, 78–9 (c. 24). If, as is likely, members of the family of Sulien at Llanbadarn composed the chronicle underlying Brut y Tywysogyon in the early to mid-twelfth century, such condemnation may have been deemed imprudent, given the family’s role as mediators between kingdoms: cf. BT, Pen20Tr, 50, 54 (1124 = 1127, 1145 = 1146).

¹⁹¹ VGC, 62–5, 74–5, 80–5, 90–1 (cc. 12, 14, 22, 27–8, 31, 35).

¹⁹² Pen 20Tr, 55 (1146); similar passage, 62 (1162). See also J. Beverley Smith, ‘Castell Gwyddgrug’; Stephenson, ‘Welsh Chronicles’ Accounts’, 45–51.

¹⁹³ AC, 94 (1257 = 1256). See also AC, 95 (1257 = 1256, 1258), and Stephenson, ‘The Chronicler at Cwm-hir Abbey’.

¹⁹⁴ Pen 20Tr, 97, 108 (1219, 1249); AC, 74, 88, n. 2 (1219, 1249). For an exception see Pen 20Tr, 98–9 (1221). Cf. Hurlock, Wales and the Crusades, 24–6, 28–9.

¹⁹⁵ Cf. Stafford, After Alfred, 2.

¹⁹⁶ Owain Wyn Jones and Huw Pryce, ‘Historical Writing’, 215–16.

¹⁹⁷ Rare exception in BT, Pen20Tr, 105 (1240).

¹⁹⁸ BT, Pen20Tr, 18, 21–2, 51, 58 (1087, 1100, 1135, 1153, 1154).

¹⁹⁹ As stated explicitly in obituary notices of William I and Henry I: BT, Pen20Tr, 18 (1087), 51 (1135).

²⁰⁰ BT, Pen20Tr, 41–2 (1116).

²⁰¹ BT, Pen20Tr, 32 (1110).

²⁰² BT, Pen20Tr, 25 (1103), and notes at 161–2. Cf. DEB, 19, 1. The Latin chronicler who wrote the text underlying the Welsh chronicle must have been aware that ‘Scots’ were Irishmen both in Gildas and in 1103.

²⁰³ Later reference to divine support for the English against the Welsh: BT, Pen20Tr, 80 (1198); CW, 31 (1198).

²⁰⁴ Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’. A late exception is the description of Gruffudd Maelor of northern Powys as ‘the most generous of all the princes of the Britons’: Pen20Tr, 74 (1191). Cf. BS, 188–9 (1191): ‘the most generous of the Welsh’. The description is lacking in BT, RBH and CW.

²⁰⁵ Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 782–3; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 212–14.

²⁰⁶ VGC, 68–9 (c. 17). See also the description of Merlin: VGC, 58–9 (c. 8).

²⁰⁷ Cf. VGC, 45.

²⁰⁸ BT, Pen20Tr, 16 (1075). Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1064), earlier described as ‘king of the Britons’, was Bleddyn’s half-brother: BT, Pen20Tr, 14, 40–1 (1058, 1116).

²⁰⁹ BT, Pen20Tr, 19 (1093). Cf. BT, RBH, 32–3: ‘And then fell the kingdom of the Britons.’ Similar comment, quite possibly derived from a St Davids source, in The Chronicle of John of Worcester, Vol. III, ed. and trans. McGurk, xxxii, 64–5.

²¹⁰ The notion may also be attested by a reference to Gruffudd ap Cynan and Cadwgan ap Bleddyn receiving ‘a portion of the land and the kingdom’, i.e. Anglesey, and a portion of Powys and Ceredigion, a statement echoed by the annal for that year in the Cottonian chronicle: BT, Pen20Tr, 21 (1099); ‘Annales Cambriae: The C Text’, ed. Gough-Cooper, 31 [c420.1] (inaccurately rendered in AC, 32, n. 3). See also Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Welsh Past’, 21. But note BT, Pen20Tr, 17 (1081), which refers to William the Conqueror as ‘king of England and Wales’.

²¹¹ Cf. Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 218–27.

²¹² BT, Pen20Tr, 36–7; cf. Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. and trans. Bromwich, 234; Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. Wiliam, 121 (§90); Dafydd Jenkins, The Law of Hywel Dda, 120.

²¹³ BT, Pen20Tr, 42 (1116); Branwen uerch Lyr, ed. Thomson, 2; The Mabinogion, trans. Davies, 23. For a late association of a Welsh ruler with the island of Britain see BT, Pen20Tr, 80 (1200).

²¹⁴ However, the dominance of Owain ab Edwin and Iorwerth ap Bleddyn is acknowledged in general terms: BT, Pen20Tr, 21, 24 (1098, 1102); also Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 219.

²¹⁵ VGC, 58–63, 70–1, 74–7, 86–9 (cc. 9–12, 14, 18–19, 23, 33, 35).

²¹⁶ VGC, 58–9, 68–9 (cc. 8, 17).

²¹⁷ BT, Pen20Tr, 52 (1137). BT, RBH, 116–17 (1137) is similar. For the connotations of princeps, presumably the term translated as ‘tywyssawc’ in Brut y Tywysogyon, and its relationship to rex (‘king’), see Pryce, ‘Owain Gwynedd and Louis VII’, 20–4.

²¹⁸ One later reference in BT, RBH, 114–15 (1136), describes Owain and Cadwaladr as ‘jointly upholding together the whole kingdom of the Britons’. The corresponding passages in the Peniarth 20 version and Brenhinedd y Saesson are less specific, respectively stating that the brothers ‘held supremacy over all Wales’ and were ‘leaders of Wales’: BT, Pen20Tr, 51 (1136); BS, 144–5 (1136).

²¹⁹ BT, Pen20Tr, 79 (1198). CW, 31 (1198) is very similar.

²²⁰ E.g. AC, 50 (1165); BT, Pen20Tr, 70, 79, 85, 89, 91, 104, 105, 114, 117 (1175, 1198, 1211, 1215, 1238, 1240, 1264, 1275). ‘Monarchy of Wales’: CW, 32, 36 (1201, 1215 = 1216). Cf. BT, Pen20Tr, 81 (1201).

²²¹ R. R. Davies, ‘The Identity of “Wales” ’.

²²² Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 67–85; Stephenson, ‘The Chronicler at Cwm-hir Abbey’; Jones, HWMW, 317–31.