Hywel Dda and the Laws

Hywel ap Cadell, called Hywel Dda — Hywel the Good — was king of Deheubarth from around 920 and, by 942, of most of Wales. He had travelled to Rome on pilgrimage, knew the Roman law and the Carolingian capitularies of Frankia, and held his court at Dinefwr Castle in Carmarthenshire — the political centre of the kingdom of the south.

The customary law of the Welsh — 'cyfraith Hywel', the Law of Hywel — already existed as oral tradition in every commote, varying place to place. Around 945 Hywel summoned six men from each commote in Wales — six lawful men of standing, each on oath — to a council at the white house in Whitland (Tŷ Gwyn ar Daf) in Carmarthenshire. They sat for forty days and forty nights. The result was a single redacted code — three regional versions in time, but one coherent body of law.

The Law of Hywel governed Wales for the next four centuries, until Edward I's Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 imposed English common law on the conquered principality of Gwynedd, and the Acts of Union of 1536–1543 finished the job in the Marches and the south. Provisions of the Welsh law — equal inheritance among sons, including the recognition of children born outside marriage; the relatively high status of women in property and divorce; the system of compensation rather than retributive punishment for many offences — were strikingly different from the Anglo-Saxon and Norman law that surrounded it.

The Powell name carries the mechanic of patronymic Welsh — and, in popular tradition, the descent from the king who first wrote Welsh law down. The genealogical tracing is tenuous; the cultural tracing is exact.