Hywel Dda(c. 880–950)

Hywel ap Cadell, known to Welsh tradition as Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good), was born around 880, second son of Cadell ap Rhodri, King of Seisyllwg in south-west Wales, and the grandson of the great Rhodri Mawr (Rhodri the Great, King of Gwynedd to 878) who had briefly united most of Wales under a single Welsh crown. He inherited the kingship of Seisyllwg on his father's death around 909, took by marriage to Elen ferch Llywarch the kingship of neighbouring Dyfed around 904, and from the union of the two kingships created the kingdom of Deheubarth that ran from the upper Towy to the south Welsh coast and from Pembrokeshire east to the Tywi. On the death of his cousin Idwal Foel of Gwynedd in 942 he took the kingship of Gwynedd, and from 942 to his death in 950 was the effective overlord of most of Wales.

He pursued through his reign an unusually accommodationist policy with the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex, attended the courts of Edward the Elder and of Æthelstan (the witness lists of Æthelstan's charters of 928 to 935 show Hywel attesting as a sub-king of Britain), and used the diplomatic protection of the strong Wessex relationship to consolidate his domestic position in Wales. He made the pilgrimage to Rome in 928, the first Welsh king to do so, was struck by the codified Lex Romana he saw in the Italian and Frankish administrative practice of the period, and on his return determined to set the native Welsh customary law on a written codified footing.

Around 945 he summoned the great synod of Whitland (Hendy-gwyn ar Daf) in his Carmarthenshire heartland, to which he called six representative men from each of the cantrefi (the territorial subdivisions) of his kingdoms, with the leading church dignitaries and the senior lawyers of the country. The synod sat through the long winter and produced the Cyfraith Hywel (the Laws of Hywel Dda), the codified statement of the native Welsh law in the three regional recensions (the Gwentian, the Dyfed and the Venedotian) that governed Wales for the next three hundred years. The laws are notable in European medieval legal history for the protection of women in marriage and divorce settlements (substantially more generous than the contemporary Anglo-Saxon and Continental practice), for the careful graduated compensation tariffs (galanas) in place of capital punishment, and for the constitutional separation of the king's household law from the public law of the kingdom.

The Cyfraith Hywel survived in continuous Welsh legal practice from 945 to 1284, when Edward I's Statute of Rhuddlan replaced the criminal jurisdiction of the laws with English common law (the civil and inheritance jurisdiction continued under Welsh law in some Welsh courts as late as the Acts of Union of 1536). Four medieval manuscript copies of the laws survive, the earliest dated to around 1200, the longest a hundred and seventy folios; they are held at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth and the British Library in London. Hywel died in 950, was buried at the cathedral of St Davids in Pembrokeshire, and is the only pre-Norman ruler in the British Isles known by the cognomen Dda (the Good). The Powell surname (from ap Hywel, son of Hywel) descends in part from his royal name. The Hywel Dda Health Board, the local-government NHS authority for Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, carries his name. The Welsh Government Hywel Dda Centre at Whitland stands at the traditional site of the 945 synod.