Medieval Welsh law, like that of medieval Ireland, is characterized by a complex manuscript tradition. The written legal traditions of both countries include some interesting and unique features which offer the potential for interesting comparisons with the laws and societies of other medieval countries. However, much basic scholarly work still remains to be done on the legal manuscripts from both Wales and Ireland--and because so much scholarly work has been published in Welsh and Irish, the laws have been largely inaccessible to scholars who do not read those languages. Roberts' book is a significant contribution, both to advancing understanding of the complexities of medieval Welsh law for specialists and to explaining this subject to those who are not specialists.
Although the Welsh law tracts claim to have been created by a committee of legal scholars commissioned by the tenth-century ruler Hywel Dda, modern scholarship has revealed a much more complex and nuanced process of development, with legal changes influenced by English law and with significant differences in different regions of Wales. More than forty Welsh-language manuscripts of Welsh law currently exist, written between the late thirteenth and mid fifteenth centuries. These are conventionally grouped into three redactions or families, called Iorwerth, Blegywryd, and Cyfnerth after eponymous legal scholars named in these manuscript families. Seven manuscripts exist for the Cyfnerth redaction, and Roberts' book is an edition and English translation of the National Library of Wales manuscript called Peniarth 259B; scholars who study the relationships of the various manuscripts have also labeled this "manuscript Z." The first two words of Roberts' title are in Welsh and mean "Pontefract manuscript" because William Maurice, who owned it for a while, liked to give nicknames to his manuscripts and a note in this one states that it was once owned by the constable of Pontefract Castle.
Dafydd Jenkins, the doyen of scholarship about the Welsh laws, began work on this manuscript during the 1980s, hoping to disentangle the complex inter-relationships of the various manuscripts. With his permission Roberts has built upon his work to produce this book, which includes a forty-page introduction, a sixteen-page conspectus, 208 pages of edited Welsh text and facing pages of close English translation, 74 pages of notes, a general index, and a special index to the Welsh terms mentioned in the notes. The introduction succinctly describes the general nature of Welsh law, its manuscript patterns, and the place of this project within scholarship on this topic. The conspectus is a concordance which first analytically lists the contents of the "Z" manuscript by "tractate" or general topic, then by subsection, and then in additional columns gives references for the equivalent sections in seven other manuscripts that treat the same topics. Roberts has organized her text and translation so that each of the 2,292 sentences is labeled with a superscript number, allowing for very precise citation by sentence in her introduction, notes, and indices. The notes comment in very readable prose on various sections of the text and also provide clear definitions for many of the specialized Welsh-language legal terms, which are listed as headwords in bold type; thus a reader who is not familiar with medieval Wales, its legal traditions, or the Welsh language could use this book as an introduction to the basics on this topic.
Roberts comments that the "Z" manuscript is particularly interesting in its own right for several reasons. Apparently a late-sixteenth- century copy of an earlier manuscript, the "Z" text is the only one to have been copied on paper rather than parchment. Although this particular manuscript was produced fairly late, she argues that its contents reflect the evolution of Welsh legal material of the Cyfnerth redaction at an earlier stage of development. Many of the Welsh law manuscripts include "tails"--collections of additional material which were added by later scholars to the provisions in the standard tractates which they were copying. In Roberts' edition the tail of "Z" starts with sentence number 1256 and thus comprises a bit less than half of the total text. How this tail of material is organized in "Z", especially when compared with how similar material is presented in the tails of other Welsh legal manuscripts, reveals much about the working methods and mind-sets of the late medieval and early modern Welsh scholars who created and copied the manuscripts. A table in the introduction (25) conveniently lists the contents of this tail.
Roberts offers the hypothesis that features of "Z" suggest that this manuscript may have originated in the northeast region of Wales, or in the adjacent Welsh Marches, and that the author may have been a justice in the court of a Marcher lordship. She states that some provisions in "Z"--for example, castration as a punishment for rape-- suggest the influence of English common law. She also comments that the omission of most of the tractate on the "Law of Women" by this manuscript may indicate that provisions of this tractate had been superseded by canon law rules--at least in the Welsh Marches--after the English conquest of Wales late in the thirteenth century. Sentences 1422 to 1442 include detailed information about the value of different categories of horses and different body parts of those horses; this could possibly reflect the horse breeding tradition of the "Powys" breed, which originated in the Marcher lordship of Oswestry and the adjacent east central Welsh region of Powys.
Browsing through sections of the text reveals many stimulating tidbits for social and economic historians. Sentences 754 to 982 list financial values for a great variety of items, including types of trees, carpenter's tools, household implements, and clothing. One interesting item in the latter category is "every English-made garment" (pob tuddedyn Seisnic). Sentence 224 mentions a jester, while number 119 alludes to legal sanctuary in a churchyard, and number 1367 comments on treasure troves. Scholars interested in the legal treatment of the disabled may note provisions concerning persons who were blind, mute, or congenital stammerers. Sentence 1287 reveals that twins were treated as a single person for purposes of inheriting their patrimony.
There is perhaps room for more work to be done regarding "woman feud" (gwreicda) and "woman dispute" (gwreictra). The former was a legitimate reason to object to a witness. While an "innate nobleman" was defined as one with a Welsh mother and father and without alien or mixed lineage, provisions for the children of a woman given by her kindred to an alien and for the legal representation for a "foreign-tongued man" suggest the legal adjustments of a society experiencing significant numbers of Anglo-Welsh intermarriages and perhaps also English officials who spoke no Welsh.
Although this volume is generally well edited and clearly written, there are two significant editorial problems. Sentence number 1214 is omitted from the edited Welsh text, although an English translation of it is provided on the facing page. A serious error is that the bibliography does not list Dafydd Jenkins as the author of his various books and articles; a reader who is not very familiar with scholarship on medieval Welsh law would be misled into thinking that Christine James was the author of items actually by Jenkins. Anyone who buys this book, including libraries, would therefore be well advised to write in Dafydd Jenkins as the author of the Conspectus of the Manuscripts that appears at the bottom of page 355. The bibliography also lists a number of edited volumes which include separate article-length studies by various scholars. Many of these studies are cited by Roberts in footnotes, but the bibliography would be more user-friendly if it listed these studies as separate items according to their authors' names. Although they are not listed in the table of contents, the book includes four illustrations and several useful tables. The illustrations reproduce pages of the manuscript that are discussed in the introduction, and the visual quality of these is excellent. The last illustration shows a chart of the physical placement of law-court participants for pleadings about land law, and charts on pages 218-19 represent this in printed format.
Roberts is a fine young scholar, best known for her edition of medieval Welsh legal triads that appeared in 2007. Despite the two editorial slips described above, this is a well-written and thoughtful book which will be useful to scholars who do not know Welsh. In her introduction the author suggests that a bibliography of studies about medieval Welsh law would be a worthy project; an on-line format would perhaps be best for such a bibliography, which could thus be easily expanded.