Hywel Dda and the Laws

A law is rarely founded by the conqueror who imposes it from outside. More often it is founded, quietly and on oath, by a ruler who has travelled enough to see other men's codes and come home convinced that his own country already knows its own custom, and needs only to be asked, in one room, for forty days, to say so aloud.

THE KING WHO HAD READ ROME

Hywel ap Cadell, called Hywel Dda, Hywel the Good, was the first man to hold most of Wales under one hand. Deheubarth came to him by inheritance and marriage; Powys and Gwynedd fell to him by the deaths of cousins and the slow patience of a ruler who outlived his rivals. He had been to Rome on pilgrimage. He had stood at Aachen and looked at the Carolingian court. He had read, or had read to him, the Latin of Justinian and the capitularies of Charles. He minted a silver penny with his name on it, the only Welsh king who did. The bards in his hall had begun, already, to call his Welsh regularised, which is what a court speech becomes when a court has time to listen to itself. He was in his late fifties, perhaps sixty. The country he ruled had a hundred customary laws and no single book.

THE WHITE HOUSE ON THE TAF

In the spring of the year, the king had a long timber hall on a meadow a quarter-mile from the river Taf whitewashed inside and out, and the place after that was called Ty Gwyn, the white house. Six lawful men were summoned from each commote of Wales, with their clerks and their grooms; three hundred and sixty men in all, by the count the chroniclers later gave. The bishop of St Davids came up. The bishop of Bangor came up. Tents stood in the meadow in rows. The river ran low and clear at that season. Inside the hall there was a stool for the king at the centre, the bishop's seat at one end, a long board down the middle for the clerks, and rush light against the smoke of the fire. The council sat on oath. It would sit, in the end, for forty days and forty nights. On the thirteenth day, an elder of the cantref of Penllyn in north Powys rose to his feet.

A SECOND ON THE THIRTEENTH DAY

The man was grey, in a coarse blue mantle, and he spoke the northern Welsh of the upper Dee. He said, plainly, that the custom of Penllyn was that the daughter of a man with no son inherited equally with her brother if she was acknowledged; that the custom of Ystrad Tywi in the south gave her half; and which was to be the law of the kingdom. The bishop of St Davids opened his mouth. Hywel did not nod for him. He sat on his stool and let the question stand in the air of the hall, and in the small interval before he answered he weighed three things at once, the way a man weighs grain in three hands. Penllyn, he knew, had the older custom; Ystrad Tywi had taken the half-share under Frankish missionaries in the eighth century, the same missionaries who had carried Roman ideas of the daughter's portion north out of Tours. The Roman law would side with the bishop. The Carolingian capitularies would side with the bishop. Both, in his reading, had been written by men who wanted the church to inherit where there was no son. He looked at the elder of Penllyn, and at the men of Ystrad Tywi sitting along the bench opposite, and at the young clerk from St Davids with the goose quill held above the parchment, and he understood, in that breath, that whichever way he turned now would set the grain of the whole code: a law for the country, or a law for the church that ruled the country. The law of this country, he said in Welsh, is to be the law of this country. He said then that the daughter of a man with no son inherited equally, that the Penllyn custom held, and that it was to be written so. The clerk wrote it. The bishop did not protest, because the bishop had sat at the council for thirteen days and had learned what kind of king he was sitting with. The men of Penllyn nodded. The men of Ystrad Tywi nodded. The hall, for a moment, was quiet, and the quiet was the sound of a country agreeing with itself.

WHAT WAS WRITTEN

After that the rest of the code came easily, because the rule of the council had been set. Day by day the elders rose and spoke their customs and the clerks wrote. A wife who left her husband after seven years took half the household with her, the pigs and the milk vessels counted out. A child born outside marriage, if the father acknowledged it, inherited equally with the children of the marriage bed. The killer of a cat that guarded the king's barn paid a fine equal to enough wheat to cover the cat when it was held up by the tail with its nose touching the ground. The physician's fees were set, the harpist's place at the king's table was set, the price of a hawk and the price of a queen's chamberlain and the compensation for a broken tooth. Forty days and forty nights, and at the end of it a single redacted body of law, cyfraith Hywel, the law of Hywel, in the Welsh the country spoke.

THE BISHOP AT THE END OF THE HALL

The bishop of St Davids rode south at the end of the council with his clerks behind him on the road to Carmarthen. He had wanted Rome's daughter, the half-share, the Latin order of inheritance that the church understood and could administer. He had not got it. He had got, instead, a code in Welsh, written by Welshmen, in which the church was named with respect and given its tithes and its sanctuary and no jurisdiction at all over the hearth. He understood, riding, that a country which writes down its own law in its own language has done a thing that cannot easily be undone afterwards by a foreign hand. He did not know the name Edward, which would not be a name in any royal house for three hundred years. He knew only that the king had been to Rome and had come back, and had written, on the Taf, a code that was not Rome's.

THE LONG INHERITANCE

The council sat in the year of our Lord nine hundred and forty-five, or near it; the surviving manuscripts are later copies in three regional recensions, the Venedotian, the Demetian, and the Gwentian, but the council itself is reported by contemporaries and the substance is one coherent code. It governed Wales for the next three centuries. In 1284, after the killing of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Edward I issued the Statute of Rhuddlan and laid English common law over the conquered principality of Gwynedd; the Acts of Union of 1536 to 1543, under Henry VIII, finished the work in the Marches and the south. By the seventeenth century cyfraith Hywel was a thing for antiquaries and Welsh-speaking lawyers in market towns to argue about over the price of a horse. The manuscripts went into libraries. The Welsh of the law went into the chapels and the kitchens.

THE STONES AT WHITLAND

At Whitland today there is a memorial garden on the ground where the white house is thought to have stood, a paved circle and a low wall, and the names of the laws cut into stones set around the circle: the law of women, the law of the court, the law of the country. Children from the village school come up in the summer term and trace the letters with their fingers. The thing a country founds in one room, on oath, in its own tongue, when it asks itself what it already knows, is harder to unmake than the men who unmake it ever quite believe. The Powells who carry the name today carry it from ap Hywel, son of Hywel, the patronymic worn smooth by English clerks into a single word. The stones at Whitland are cut in Welsh.