Welsh poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries features extensive praise for patrons’ exploits in battles abroad and, in particular, for their efforts in France. At the same time, terms, places, images and figures associated with France are often evoked as markers of excellence or refinement, deployed as items of praise for the very patrons lauded elsewhere (or even in the same poem) for their slaughter of the French. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which such violent anti-French rhetoric intersects and competes with these alternative discourses. Specifically, the essay proceeds by analysing moments where Welsh representations of France are enfolded within wider English imperial frameworks; it then considers examples that articulate desires for the cultural prestige, commercial exchange and genealogical distinction that are also associated with France and Frenchness. My argument throughout is that these apparent contradictions speak to the wider political positions of the Welsh gentry in overlapping domestic and international contexts, notably the aftermath of the Edwardian conquest of Wales in 1282‐3 and the series of conflicts now known as the Hundred Years War. The approaches articulated in the poetry relate, I suggest, to the Welsh gentry’s attempts to navigate their relationships with ruling insular elites at a time when both the Welsh and English were engaged in conflicting processes of entanglement with, and disentanglement from, France and Frenchness.
This paper sets out three sound changes that occurred in the prehistory of Lepontic and argues for them to have taken place in a specific relative chronology. These sound changes are not straightforwardly reflected orthographically in forms that have been borrowed into the Latin epigraphic tradition. It is demonstrated that two of these instances may be accounted for typologically and via Latin orthographic practice, respectively, while the third demands that the Celtic forms were borrowed into Latin prior to the Lepontic sound changes having diffused into Cisalpine Gaulish via a process of dialect levelling.
In his Owen Glendower (1931) Sir J. E. Lloyd published a short chronicle from the National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 135 which he entitled 'Annals of Owen Glyn Dŵr', judging it to be an important source as it was 'sufficiently near the time of Owen to be fairly free from legendary accretion'. This article examines this text in context, showing it to be, in fact, part of a much more extensive chronicle, an expanded version of the fourteenth-century chronicle known as Blwydyn Eiseu, ranging from 5199 BC to 1321, with a continuation from 1322 to 1422 which includes the 'Annals of Owen Glyn Dŵr'. The manuscript sources of the text are examined (including the National Library of Wales MS Cwrtmawr 453 written by Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, whose text is closely related to that of Peniarth 135 but not derived from it). The article attempts to establish the provenance and date of the text on the basis of linguistic evidence, judging it to be of likely Glamorgan origin and fifteenthcentury date, and it discusses its portrayal of the Glyndŵr revolt. The whole of the Peniarth 135 text is edited (with variants from Cwrtmawr 453), with an English translation and full textual notes.
Ferdinand de Saussure recognized that in Latin (and Greek) adjectives containing tautosyllabic a-diphthongs that have meanings associated with deviations from a norm are over-represented. 2 He called these deviations infirmités, 3 and said that in general, they represented crooked versus straight ('ópθóς ouδεξιóς', Rec. 595). I should make it clear from the outset that Saussure's approach was purely synchronic (to use his own term): he inspected the Latin and Greek lexica and identified those words that fit his categories. He did not perform even a rudimentary statistical analysis, so 'overrepresented' was his subjective impression. Saussure made the bold suggestion that the marginal status of a-diphthongs was iconic to the marginalized status of infirmités : his leading example was L. caecus 'blind'. In the current study, I will offer evidence from Celtic that supports Saussure's hypothesis, and finally, I will identify six inherited words that probably constitute the nucleus around which Saussure's infirmités were formed. Saussure's 'first principle' was that the linguistic sign is arbitrary. However, in the last article that Saussure himself (rather than his students) published, 'Indo-European Adjectives of the Type caecus "blind" ' in 1912, the year before his death, 4 he claimed that the comparative rarity of a-diphthongs gave words like caecus an iconic value. In such words son and sens did come together. Caecus finds exact formal cognates in OIr. cáech, W. coegddall, OCorn. cuic gl. luscus vel monop[h]t[h]almus 'with one eye closed or one-eyed'; 5 Goth. haihs (GOI 43): all mean specifically 'blind in one eye'. The remarkable consistency of meaning shared by these words led Watkins to project *kaikos 'blind in one eye' back to Common Insular Celtic (and one could go beyond that given the Gothic). 6 Saussure started from the fact that there is a group of Latin words referring to physical or behavioural differences (Saussure used the term infirmités because he saw in these words 'une nuance "pathologique" ' (Rec. 598)) 7 which share the structure #(C)C1 -aU/aR-C2 - (in modern terms, #H- can be #C1 -). Saussure (Rec. 595) was generous in his inclusion criteria: 'gauche, courbe, contrefait, rabougri, placé de travers, etc.' ('left-handed, bent, feigned/ deformed, stunted, put the wrong way, etc.').
The English loan-words bwrch 'perimeter wall or rampart' and ffoxas 'foxes' are remarkable, i. for occurring in a single line in Armes Prydein while being recorded nowhere else in Middle Welsh; ii. for representing entities for which there were already sufficient words in the language; and iii. in the case of ffoxas, appearing with its Old English plural termination rather than any Welsh equivalent. It is argued that each was borrowed with a specialized sense: that bwrch represents a metonymic development from Old English burh as applied to an Alfredian fortified town, and that ffoxas as a term of abuse was not invented by the Welsh but reproduces a nickname adopted for themselves by the English officials against whose extortions the poem is a protest. The possibility that an image in La3amon's Brut (an early Middle English verse chronicle) is connected with the passage is reviewed with some scepticism.
This article traces the later history of NLW Peniarth MS 1 (Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, 'The Black Book of Carmarthen') through its owners, borrowers and readers. The primary body of evidence consists of marginalia left by these individuals in the manuscript's pages, including sixteenth-century verses and a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ownership notes. Much of this marginalia was erased, possibly in stages beginning around the sixteenth century, and has been recently recovered through multispectral imaging. External evidence, such as a lost memorandum by Sir John Prise, early modern copies of the Black Book, and catalogues are also discussed. The picture that emerges from this evidence suggests that the Black Book was in south Wales, probably around Carmarthen, in the first part of the sixteenth century. There, it passed between the hands of poets perhaps associated with the circles of Lewys Glyn Cothi and Gruffydd Dwnn. By the latter half of the same century the book was owned by William Salesbury, and it had made its way to north Wales sometime before 1587. In the 1580s the Black Book appears to have spent time in Llanfair Dyffryn Clwyd, circulating among poets and scholars including Siôn Tudur, Simwnt Fychan and David Johns; sometime during this period a quire that had been displaced in the manuscript was put back in order. Jaspar Gryffyth had acquired the Black Book by 1604, after which it made its way ultimately to Robert Vaughan's library at Hengwrt.
