Tag Archives: Cymraeg

Got to laugh (no, not really)

A quick historical legal ‘joke’, or passage of what was seen as witty dialogue, anyway, from a 1915 edition of Y Dinesydd Cymraeg: my mental warm-up translation this morning …

 

A hard-headed judge

Judge: Was the stone you threw bigger than my head?

The prisoner: Yes, your honour, but not quite as hard!

 

How those Welsh citizens must have laughed! Possibly proving that humour does not really translate, across the language/time continuum. I do find myself fascinated, though, by the wise-cracking judicial persona that comes out in these things, and can’t help but see connections with some of the ‘humour’ I found some years ago, when researching an article on jokes and wordplay in medieval common law reports.

16/1/2024

 

Keeping them laughing … or possibly not

And here is another piece of proof that legal humour does not really travel, from an issue of Tarian y Gweithiwr from 1887.

The judge and the constable

Judge: What sort of man did you see committing the assault?

Constable: For certain, your lordship, he was some foolish little creature – about your size, your lordship’.

This time, I suppose that the humour is working on an assumption that lawyers are weedy and policemen burly and not very diplomatic …which makes more sense when we reflect that ‘Tarian y Gweithiwr’ was explicitly targeting ‘gweithwyr’, i.e. labourers.

 

You want more court-room humour from Welsh newspapers? Oh, very well.

Here we are, loosely translated from a Tarian y Gweithiwr from 1886: a side-splitting dialogue between a judge and a witness …

The judge asked the witness if he understood the meaning of the oath he had taken. “Yes, sir”, answered the witness, “I am sworn to tell the truth”. “What would happen”, asked the judge then, “if you did not tell the truth?”. “Well, I suppose”, said the witness, “our side would win the case”.

Ho ho!

 

And, since everybody loves an amusing, animal-related, incident in court, what about this, from an 1897 Gwalia?

In the quarter sessions in New Ross, presided over by Judge Kane, there was an exciting and very peculiar incident. A tom cat of dignified appearance made an appearance in the court, and, chased from one place to another by some people, he jumped onto the [witness box].[i] Whilst gliding lightly over the papers and black bags of the solicitors, one of the men of law threw a thick volume on the Land Acts at the animal, but the cat was too quick for the lawyer, and, like a flash, jumped onto the bench beside the judge.  With fire in his eyes, he jumped for the wig on the judge’s head. His Honour, somehow, managed to dodge him, and the cat fell down. The judge took the matter in the best possible humour, while the lawyers and the public laughed heartily.

[i] Or ‘table’.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Gwilym Carreg Ddu, or Blackstone in the Welsh press

 I enjoyed reading this little curiosity in an edition of the Welsh-language paper, Y Drych, from 1886. Here it is, in my best effort at a translation.

Blackstone and the Welsh

Sir William Blackstone was born in London on the 10th July, 1723. Although he lost his parents while he was a child, he received a good education and had every opportunity to develop his various talents. When he was young, he studied architecture and composed poetry. In 1741, he started to study law, and did so with moderate  success, until he was elected to the chair in law at Oxford University. It was the course of lectures which he gave there on the common law of Great Britain [sic] which immortalised his name. He died at the age of 57.

In his lectures on the sources of the laws of England, and influences on their formation. Although he did not devote much space to the British/Brythonic influence, what he said about the Cymry, their land and their laws, was entirely respectful.

Perhaps he was not inclined to think thoroughly about the likely effects of the unwritten laws of the druids on the large corpus of the common law, or unwritten law of the kingdom, after the Saxons and the Normans occupied the island.

When talking about the complete union of Wales and England, in the 27th year of the reign of Henry VIII, he said of our ancestors:

“Thus were this brave people gradually conquered into the enjoyment of true liberty.”

The learned lecturer admitted that the Welsh were the first of the peoples of Britain to share a deceased father’s land equally between all of his sons, as continues to be done in Kent.  The more recent and more unfair rule of the invaders made the eldest son heir to everything.  There was also the ‘Welsh mortgage’, a remarkably kind arrangement, and a just one. Its peculiarity was its ban on foreclosure, and the transfer of property to the creditor: any time he paid the money, the borrower could have his property back. In the meantime, the creditor could take all profits.

These examples of the old laws of our fathers are enough to make us regret greatly that we do not know more of them. They suggest that the Welsh had, from the time of the druids until Hywel Dda, strong ideas of fairness. It would have been a great blessing to the United Kingdom today if there had been fewer traces of the Normans, and more of the Celtic principles had remained in all of its institutions.

 

Thoughts

Well, it starts off with Blackstone, doesn’t it, but it ends up somewhere rather different and quite a lot more nationalistic. UK, be more Celtic! A fair number of druids floating around (though Blackstone does in fact get a bit druidy at times with some of his origin stories, e.g. in relation to burning women at the stake). Hywel Dda naturally present and correct. Perhaps more interesting is the enthusiasm for some more arcane aspects of Welsh property law. Very much of its time.

 

GS

15/1/2024

Photo by Catrin Ellis on Unsplash

 

Death and Doghethegy: homicide suits and dodgy spelling in medieval Herefordshire

Worth a brief note, I think, is a Herefordshire homicide case from the King’s Bench plea rolls of 1428 (KB 27/666 – the devil’s plea roll – mm. 81 and 81d). William ap Thomas ap Phelippe Vaghan of Talgarth in Wales, gentleman, and three other men, named in more-or-less Welsh fashion, John ap Jeuan ap Howell, Richard ap David Glyn and Jeuan ap Thomas ap Oweyn (all three of Talgarth, and each labelled ‘yeoman’), and a second list of one ‘gentleman’ and seven ‘yeomen’ of Talgarth (again, broadly Welsh-named) were attached to answer John ap Gwelym’s appeal concerning the death of Rhys [‘Resus’] ap Gwelym, his brother.

The allegation was (to summarise) that Rhys was attacked by the defendants, at Kivernoll, Herefordshire, on Wednesday 6th November, 1426, and killed (specifically, he was said to have been shot in the back and heart (x 2) with  arrows, bashed over the head with a pole-arm, and lanced in the chest and head). A bit ‘overkill’, it would seem, but this sort of account is common enough, perhaps reflecting a real series of events, perhaps semi-fictitious, as a way of tying various people into the killing.

William ap Thomas and most of the others said that they were not guilty, John ap Gwelym maintained his appeal, and everyone agreed to jury trial. So far so unexciting, from a legal historical point of view. One of the accused, however, tried a different strategy, and this is what interests me. Richard ap David objected that John ap Gwelym had no right to bring this appeal, because Rhys ap Gwelym had a wife, (and we are to understand that she ought to have brought the appeal).

I find this interesting, because the rules about appeal right are a little opaque. It is certainly clear that a wife could bring a prosecution against those she thought had killed her husband, but did that preclude others from doing so? This case seems to confirm that it did. So appeal-right by the blood, or through common law canons of inheritance,  did not trump, or sit on a par with, appeal-right by the former ‘joined flesh’ of matrimony. Interesting to ponder that. And yet, the other defendants did not go for the ‘he had a wife’ option – so was there some doubt as to the ‘trumping’ rule, or that the marriage would be found to have been valid, or did they have some other reason to prefer the straightforward ‘not guilty’ plea?

Making his argument that there was a wife, so the brother’s appeal was misconceived, Richard set things out very carefully. He noted promises to marry, from both sides, and banns, and a church-door wedding, and stated that the marriage had lasted for the rest of the life of Rhys (even if that was rather …. shortened), and that his wife was still alive, and in Kynardesley, Herefordshire. I have not seen this level of detail in such an allegation before, and it strikes me that it might have been a result of questioning, and suspicion with regard to the status of marriages amongst the Welsh, even those apparently resident in England. Could they be trusted to do the thing properly?

Anyway, whether because of this problem with his appeal or otherwise, John ap Gwelym did not see the appeal through, and it was left to the king to take up the matter. On it went, and after the usual delays, there was a jury trial. Richard and the others were acquitted. The switch to the king’s suit, rather than an appeal by a subject, would presumably put an end to investigation about the marriage of Rhys.

There is much here which is of interest beyond legal history, especially in relation to the Welsh in the very porous border area. Apart from their apparently fractious relationships amongst themselves, there is quite a lot which might be extracted, for those studying the cross-cultural aspects of border life. Possible issues about marriage I have mentioned. There is also some pretty glorious material on language. I am far from qualified to pontificate on this, but – hurrah – this is my blog, so I can do what I want, and I am going to give you a couple of quick thoughts:

  1. The names, or their recorded versions, show a fair amount of mixing of languages. I realise that I have ‘Englished’ the Latin recording of some of the names above – those are ones which were recorded just as they would be for an Englishman – i.e. ‘Willelmus’ as opposed to ‘Gwilym/ Gwelym’, unless the latter is written down, and so on. I do quite like the Latin-English-Welsh mash-up recording of the name of one of them: Mauricius Thomasservant ap Phelippe Vaghan [of Talgarth in Wales, yeoman].There is also a bit of French accent to some of these – ‘Phelippe’ for example. Truly a fun puzzle for a linguist.
  2. And then there is somebody’s apparent bewilderment as to how to deal with the name of Rhys’s wife – who, I assume, was called Dyddgu. In the plea roll, she becomes ‘Doghethegy’. It might be that this was a spelling given by Richard ap David, but my little mental reconstruction of how this ended up being the version of record is that it was the result of somebody who could pronounce it saying ‘Dyddgu’ very, very slowly to a clerk with no Welsh, and him slightly throwing his hands up in despair and slapping down the start and finish of the name, padding it out with a few extra letters and leaving it at that.[i] I suspect that anyone with this name would still be looked at with uncertainty once over Offa’s Dyke, but at least she would probably not end up being recorded with a set of letters which left Google offering a few pictures of dogs and then giving up.

GS

22/6/2022

[i] If nothing else, it shows that the clerk responsible was not familiar with his Dafydd ap Gwilym.

Image – near the site of the alleged murder. With genuine medieval vehicle.

That which we call ‘rhosyn’ … names and language in medieval common law records

A question which has often occurred to me is how medieval criminal justice managed to confirm people’s identities, in a world without ‘identity documents’, and with a wide margin of error (or a lack of a definite concept of error) with regard to spellings. This is probably hugely anachronstic, and no doubt the answer has something to do with small communities and good memories, but I came across a case today (after a period of rather slim pickings in my searches) which suggested another angle to this question of identity.

In a King’s Bench roll of 1368, there is a short entry relating to a homicide case in Gloucestershire. It notes that the roll of one of the Gloucestershire coroners recorded that one John Penres had been indicted for the felonious homicide of Gerard Walyssh[i] at Ockington, arrested and sent to the gaol at Gloucester castle. John Tracy, sheriff of Gloucestershire, was now ordered to bring this man before the court, to answer the charge. No John Penres could be produced, however. The sheriff contended that somebody had been executed for this crime already – he was a Penres, but his first name was not the Anglo John but the Welsh Yeuan (Ieuan as it is in modern Welsh). There was an investigation, referring to a particular previous session, at which Ieuan was said to have been tried and executed, and it was confirmed that a Ieuan Penres had been executed for the homicide of Gerard Welssh [sic]. The sheriff was off the hook therefore.

This shows that the identity question was solved in part by documentary searches, and it is a little comfort to see that care was taken to check these things. It probably also has things to say about physical and linguistic borderlands. I have noted the fun and games clerks of the English bureaucracy had with some of the more ‘difficult’ Welsh names, especially Gwenllian, but did they really find Ieuan difficult? Or would somebody of Welsh background, living or working in Gloucester, have adopted an English name as a matter of routine, for his dealings with non-Welsh-speakers? There is definitely scope for further digging and thought on this issue. Nice little research project for somebody?

Update/addition

And this one jumped out at me just the other day – not a Welsh one, but another apparent ‘mistaken identity’ case, from a gaol delivery session at Newgate on Wednesday 17th March 1316, A certain Ralph le Leche was in jeopardy – he was said to have been appealed by an approver of involvement in a robbery and a homicide in Northamptonshire. His story, though, was that the original accused man was some other Ralph le Leche of London – let us call this alleged miscreant Ralph 1 – while he, Ralph 2, had been in London all the time, and at the relevant period, he had been ill. A jury of London citizens confirmed his story, so Ralph 2 was saved. Does make you wonder whether less ‘together’ defendants might have ended up being executed by mistake in this way, though.

GS

3/7/2021, updated 7/7/2021

[i] This sounds like a ‘Welsh-on-Welsh’ crime, from the names, doesn’t it? Or at least ‘Welsh-extraction on Welsh-extraction’.

Image – your actual Offa’s Dyke – symbolic border etc. etc.

Defamation with a Welsh accent?

‘Oh my country, my country! Her Majesty’s Commissioners say we are a drunken, lying and dishonest race – men without honour, women without chastity …’[i]

 

One of the projects I want to take off the back-burner in the next year deals with defamation in relation to Welsh, and the Welsh people. My initial interest was in the early period of common law actions on the case for defamation – which come to prominence, and show rapid development, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at a most interesting period for both Welsh governance and the Welsh language, and, as far as I am aware, there has not yet been a full consideration of the way in which actions on the case for defamation dealt with the bilingual reality of Wales. This is something of a stretch for me, in that this is not a period in which I would claim any great expertise, and there may be a need for a bit of hand-holding from those who know it better, but I am not sure that any individual has all of the various skills and knowledge relevant to this, so it does not seem totally out of order for me to have a go at it. At the moment, of course, it is difficult to make any progress, given the inaccessibility of archives. I decided to do a little exploration of such sources as are available to me, and am currently searching through the excellent Welsh Newspapers Online – Home (library.wales). This is proving interesting both in terms of what I have thought of as the ‘core’ of the project – the doctrinal development of defamation law in relation to Wales, Welsh and the Welsh – and also in terms of wider ways in which defamation might have had a distinct role, a distinct accent, for the Welsh, over a much longer period.

I had imagined that my main questions for the doctrinal core would be:

  • in what ways might calling somebody Welsh (alone, or in combination with something else) be defamatory?
  • when might an insult in Welsh be actionable?
  • how would such an insult be evaluated?

I have found some good material on some of these points in the archive in the past, and today turned up a nice quote relevant to the last point, from a letter in a newspaper in 1821:

‘ In cases of libel or defamation, which originated in the Welsh, and are now brought into Court to be tried in the English language, the parties are frequently foiled, and the ends of justice defeated. No language will admit of a literal translation, or is always capable of giving every word its full force and meaning in another.  The Judges are totally ignorant of the Welsh, the Barristers equally so, and the Attornies, not uncommonly without any knowledge of it. The issue of the whole matter then rests on the fidelity of the Interpreter, who is not, at all times, the most competent for his office. And how, I would ask, can justice and equity be administered in such a case?’[ii]

After starting to look at the newspaper archive, however, I have an additional question: how would it be ascertained whether a person alleged to have uttered an insult in Welsh could in fact speak Welsh? This came up in a report of 1808 from North Wales.[iii] The case was Williams (an infant) v. Read and his wife. How much of an ‘infant’ Williams was is not clear – and nor, sadly, though unsurprisingly, are the words, the nature of the alleged insult is not set out. We are told that Mrs Read tried to plead justification, and failed, and that then there was the issue of whether she could have said the words in question (those pleas seem rather contradictory to me, but perhaps I am missing something!). The point was made that Mrs Read came from Cheshire, and that, despite living for 30 years in what was a seriously Welsh-speaking part of the country she had not learned any Welsh, or at least not enough to speak the words in question (were they particularly challenging to a non-native speaker? Lots of Ll and Ch? Had she allegedly described young Williams as the worst thief in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch?). The jury didn’t accept this anyway, and Mrs Read was found to have defamed the infant Williams. (I am definitely going to have a poke about to see if there are other, more informative, reports: nothing so far!)

There are a number of leads like this to follow up, but also some wider contexts and trends to consider. I do wonder whether there is a particular vehemence to the condemnation of defamation in a community condemned in the way suggested by the quote at the head of this post, but which emphasises, in one of its central cultural institutions, the Eisteddfod, its own heroically truthful tradition: Y Gwir yn Erbyn y Byd (‘[The duty to uphold] the truth against the world’). It is interesting to note how regularly the Welsh language papers seem to leave ‘defamation of character’ in English – a nasty Saxon practice? Also, my superficial perusing has me musing (going a little bardic there?) about the regular mentioning of slander and defamation in relation to the bitter fighting over the position of the Anglican church, and native dissent, in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century. From a modern, secular, viewpoint, this sometimes looks like a battle over trivial differences, but the feelings were very deep and real, and accusing the Tory/high church powers of defamation against the Welsh in general, and their dissenting churches and their ministers in particular, was a complaint which seems to have been something of a rallying cry.  One example gives a flavour – ‘The Church Times has out-Heroded HEROD in its superfluity of libellous traducement. We have occasinally noticed the sluice of persistent slander against the Welsh people which this High Church paper keeps continually open’.[iv]

Much to ponder, and to investigate further, when it becomes possible. I am encouraged, though, that there is something here. It just might be less the one painless article I had looked forward to, after more or less escaping the long pressure of the Women and the Medieval Common Law book, and more a set of linked pieces of a rather amorphous blobby nature. Ah well – Wales, Welsh and the Welsh never have been straightforward. Croeso i Gymru.

 

GS

7/2/2021

 

 

[i] North Wales Chronicle and Advertiser for the Principality, 22nd February, 1848, p.2. Letter from ‘A Loyal Welshman’.

[ii] D.W., The Cambrian, 16th June, 1821, Letter, ‘The Welsh Language’, p.3,

[iii] North Wales Gazette, 24th November, 1808, p. 3, dealing with proceedings in ‘Carnarvonshire’ County Court.

[iv] South Wales Daily News, 22nd December, 1896, p. 4.