The earliest Welsh prose of which the authenticity is unquestioned, is the collection of the laws of King Hywe] Dda, or Howel the Good, who died in 743, after a reign of forty years, during the last seven of which he was monarch of all Wales. This code is divided into the lawn of the court and the laws of the country, and under both heads it comprises a quantity of matter curiously illustrative of the manners of the times; it is assumed, for instance, that there is one cat in each village, and it is estimated as of precisely the same value as a sheep. The Lards are endowed with many privileges, extending to receiving dues on marriages, to exemption from bearing arms, and to various other sources of emolument and honour. The leading feature of the legislation is that every crime is punishable by a fine, even that of the murder of the king himself, which is to be atoned for, among other things, by "three golden cups, with covers each as broad as the offender's face," and as "thick as the thumb of a ploughman who has been nine years in that employment, three silver rods of the same height as the king, and as thick as his thumb," &c. &c. These laws were first published in a somewhat uncritical fashion in 1730, in Wotton's`Leger Wallicre ; ' the last edition, in Welsh and English, is comprised in the Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales,' issued in 1841 by the Record Commission, and edited by Aneurin Owen, the son of Owen Pughe, a much severer and more acute critic than his father. The earliest manuscript is of the 12th century ; and Owen cautiously describes his text as the " Laws, supposed to be enacted by Howel the Good, modified by subsequent regulations under the native princes prior to the con quest by Edward I." "References are made," he adds, "to laws ordained by Dyvnwal Moelmud, an ancient Regulus in the west, and some triads are ascribed to him ; but these, although they contain ordi nances likely to obtain in a primitive state of society, have no warrant of authenticity. We find mention of laws by Mania, of an equally apocryphal origin." The laws of Dyvnwal are supposed by some Welsh writers to have been prevalent in Britain 400 years before Christ. The triads here mentioned belong to the historical triads, of which a portion is admitted on all hands to be of at least as late a date as the reign of King Edward I., and they will therefore be treated of in our notice of the second era of Welsh literature, commencing from the date of the Norman Conquest.
Second Period-1066-1536. The epoch of the Norman Conquest of England is one strongly marked in the literature as well as the history of Wales. Harold, the last of the Saxons, had overrun the country, and reduced it under princes' subordinate to himself, in 1063, only three years prior to his own overthrow at Hastings. Two of the native princes, who were re-established on their thrones before the close of the 11th cciitury, Gruffydd ab Cynan, prince of North Wales, and Rhys ab Tewdwr, prince of South Wales, came from abroad, the one from Ireland, and the other from Brittany, where two kindred Celtic nations were at that time in close intercourse with the Danes and the Normans. Gruffydd ab Cynan gave birth to a new era in Welsh poetry, and Rhya ab Tewdwr may have had some influence in the production of the most interesting monument of Welsh prose—the stories of King Arthur, whose name was fur so many centuries a household word on the lips of the English as well as the Welsh.
The name of Arthur is tirst mentioned in the Latin chronicle of Nenolue, who also mentions the name of the earliest bards, Taliesin, Talhaiarn, and others. The oldest manuscript of Nennius, which is in the Vatican, is assigned Ly its editor and translator, the Rev. William Gunn, to the 10th century. But the Arthur of Nannies is very different from the Arthur of romance, who first appears in the pages of Goeffrey of Monmouth. Before proceeding, however, to Geoffrey, who wrote in Latin, some mention should be made of the earliest of Welsh chroniclers, Caradoo of Llauesnan.
The history pf the monk of Llancarran contains the annals of Wales from the death of CalderaBader, A. n. GU or Gal), to the times of Carachso himself, about the middle of the 12th century. It was eons tinned, as was the custom with monkish chronicles, by other hands, and a good deal more was added in the English translation made about 1557 by the Welsh antiquary, Humphrey Liwyd, and published by Dr.
Powell in 1584. The original Welsh remained in manuscript till included in the second volume of the Myvyrian Arehatology. A different " recension " of it is known under the name of Brut y Tywysogion' or ' Chronicle of the Princes,' and was printed in Welsh and English in 1860 in the collection issued under the authority of the Master of the Bolls. The chronicle of Caradoe is one of the less attractive kind of monkish histories, dry and jejune like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,' which goes over much of the same period, but affording a useful skeleton and ground-work for less succinct historians. It has never emerged into much notice.
Far different was the character and the fate of tho History of the Britons,' by Geoffrey of Monmouth, archdeacon of Monmouth, and bishop of St. As,aph, who was consecrated to his bishopric in 1152, and died in 1154. Geoffrey closes his narrative by the death of Cadwal lader, at which Caradoc begins, and tells us that he left the story, there on purpose for his friend Caradoe to continue. Ilia ` History of the Britons' opens with the destruction of Ttoy, and the coming of Brutus, the coloniser of England, from Troy to Britain ; and goes on, through the stork, of Locrine and Lear, and Cyrnbeline and Gorboduc, to the legends of King Arthur and his conquests, and the prophecies of the enchanter Merlin. The work had a wonderful and a sudden success. As it is dedicated to Robert of Gloucester, the illegitimate son of Henry I., it must have been issued before 1147, the date of his death; and Manus de Insulis, a Breton writer, who died in 1187, speaks of Arthur as then universally known, " Whither," he exclaims, "has not the name of Arthur the Briton been carried by Fame I What region of Christendom has it not reached ? Arthur is almost better known to the Oriental nations than to the Britons themselves, as ow pilgrims returning from the East declare." There was, doubtless, exaggeration in this, but there was doubtless also some foundation iu truth; and the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth is the main source of the fame of Arthur. Translated and versified by Wace and Layamon, it became popular in French and English. For many centuries tho story of Brutus, when name is first mentioned by Nennius, pleased for authentic, history : in the pedigree of Henry VII., drawn up for him by Welsh heralds, the line of the Tudors is traced to Brutes as its founder ; and oven eo far onward as in the time of Milton, the great poet gave way to his inclination to insert, though with en apology, these poetic stories in his history of England. With the poets, indeed, the success of the story of Geoffrey of Monmouth is still prolonged, and has buret out into fresh brilliancy in our own generation. The greatest work of Shakspere is founded on the legend of King Lear. Both Milton and Dryden projected an epic on the story of King Arthur, and Popo an epic on the story of Brutus. Walter Scott, who lamented that the court of Charles had "The world defrauded of the high design " of Dryden, himself paid tribute to Arthurian fiction in his Bridal of Trim-main.' In our own days Bulwer Lytton has given us his finest poetry in his epic of 4 King Arthur,' and Alfred Tennyson has achieved one of his brightest triumphs in hie' Idylls of the King,' Geoffrey of Monmouth was attacked with singular vigour by a contemporary antagonist—the chronicler, William of Newburgh. " In our days," says the eritio, "a writer has emerged, who strings together the most ridiculous figmenta about the Britons, raising them, with impudent vanity, above the Macedonians and Romans. Geoffrey is the name of this man, who is now called 'Arthur's Geoffrey' tGalfridus hic dittos eat, agnomen habene Arthurl), because taking some fables of Arthur from tho original figments of the Britons, and adding others of his own, he has coloured them up in the Latin language, and decked them with the name of a genuine history." It will be noticed that the worthy chronialer, who adds more to the same purpose, admits in this passage that the object of his indignation did not entirely invent his narrative, substance, details, and all, but that some "ridiculous figments" about King Arthur were current before he took i,en in hand. There must therefore have been Welsh traditions on the subject.