"Medieval Wales had a separate system of law to that found in England, and the law has been preserved in several medieval manuscripts. Whilst the purpose of the law manuscripts was to lay down the legal complexities of the era, what has been preserved can also be read as fascinating literature in medieval Welsh. An important element to the law manuscripts is the large collections of legal triads (lists of threes), probably composed for educational, mnemonic purposes, which offer a real insight into the workings of medieval Welsh law." "The Legal Triads of Medieval Wales is an new study and the first full exploration into the legal triads - among the largest collections of triads found in Welsh - covering almost every aspect of medieval Welsh law. Each triad is set in its literary and legal context, with a full edited text, translation and notes for each triad found in the law manuscripts." --Book Jacket.

In Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres. She argues that for jurists of thirteenth-century Wales, legal writing was an intensely imaginative genre, one acutely responsive to nationalist concerns and capable of reproducing them in sophisticated symbolic form. She identifies narrative devices and tropes running throughout successive revisions of legal texts that frame the body as an analogy for unity and for the court, that equate maleness with authority and just rule and femaleness with its opposite, and that employ descriptions of internal and external landscapes as metaphors for safety and peril, respectively. Historians disagree about the context in which the lawbooks of medieval Wales should be read and interpreted. Some accept the claim that they originated in a council called by the tenth-century king Hywel Dda, while others see them less as a repository of ancient custom than as the Welsh response to the general resurgence in law taking place in western Europe. Stacey builds on the latter approach to argue that whatever their origins, the lawbooks functioned in the thirteenth century as a critical venue for political commentary and debate on a wide range of subjects, including the threat posed to native independence and identity by the encroaching English; concerns about violence and disunity among the native Welsh; abusive behavior on the part of native officials; unwelcome changes in native practice concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and fears about the increasing political and economic role of women.

A ground-breaking study of the lawbooks which were created in the changing social and political climate of post-conquest Wales.

"Medieval Wales had a separate system of law to that found in England, and the law has been preserved in several medieval manuscripts. Whilst the purpose of the law manuscripts was to lay down the legal complexities of the era, what has been preserved can also be read as fascinating literature in medieval Welsh. An important element to the law manuscripts is the large collections of legal triads (lists of threes), probably composed for educational, mnemonic purposes, which offer a real insight into the workings of medieval Welsh law." "The Legal Triads of Medieval Wales is an new study and the first full exploration into the legal triads - among the largest collections of triads found in Welsh - covering almost every aspect of medieval Welsh law. Each triad is set in its literary and legal context, with a full edited text, translation and notes for each triad found in the law manuscripts." --Book Jacket.

The inhabitants of early medieval Britain and Ireland shared the knowledge that the region held four peoples and the awareness that they must have originally come from 'elsewhere'. The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland studies these peoples' origin stories, an important genre that has shaped national identity and collective history from the early medieval period to the present day. These multilingual texts share many common features that repay their study as a genre, but have previously been isolated as four disparate traditions and used to argue for the long roots of current nationalisms. Yet they were not written or read in isolation during the medieval period. Individual narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other texts. This book argues that insular origin legends developed together to flesh out the history of the insular region as a whole.

Professor Daniel A. Binchy’s Corpus Iuris Hibernici, published in 1979, set the seal on a lifetime’s work which had made him the acknowledged leader in Celtic law studies. At an earlier stage in his career, he had edited (in Studies in Early Irish Law, published by the Royal Irish Academy in 1936) the proceedings of a seminar on the Irish law of women; this volume was the spur to the seminar which began to work under the aegis of the Board of Celtic Studies in 1970, and took as its first field of study the Welsh law of women. The present collection of papers, based on the work of the seminar, differs in scope from the Irish volume but like it provides a detailed and documented account of one of the most illuminating tractates in the Welsh lawbooks; the volume was originally presented to Professor Binchy in grateful recognition of the inspiration given to all students of Celtic law by his devoted work. This volume comprises six studies dealing with various aspects of the Welsh material, texts of three versions of the tractate (one in Latin and two, both based on manuscripts not previously printed, in Welsh) with English translations, a Glossary, and Indexes. This new edition includes a preface by Morfydd E. Owen, who edited the original volume with Dafydd Jenkins, surveying work in the field since the first edition in 1980.