Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales by Robin Chapman Stacey (review)

Medieval Welsh law is a fascinating topic for study. The main body of extant legal material is connected with the tenth-century Welsh king Hywel Dda. The texts that we possess, however, were compiled centuries later in a number of main redactions. Of these, the Iorwerth redaction is associated with Gwynedd (northern Wales), while the others are connected with Deheubarth (southern Wales). Scholars generally agree that the various redactions are so closely related that there must have been a Model Lawbook on which they were ultimately based (p. 14). It is unclear what this looked like or when it was composed, but there are indications that at least certain elements in Welsh law pre-date the twelfth century, and that medieval Wales, like medieval Ireland, had legal experts earlier than elsewhere in Europe (p. 19).

The thirteenth century, the time when the extant legal redactions were first written down, was a time of political upheaval in Wales. Stability was threatened not just from within Wales itself but from the outside as well, something that was felt particularly keenly in the Welsh Marches and the borderlands. As a result, the Welsh began to take recourse to legal procedures from English Common Law rather than Welsh law (p. 9). This posed a threat to the Welsh legal system, and lawyers and judges charged with preserving and protecting native law were rightly worried, as both their authority and “the integrity of the tradition of which they were the primary custodians, seemed suddenly to be under fire” (p. 9). In this important and compelling book, Professor Stacey addresses the following main questions: to what extent was medieval Welsh law objective? And if it was not objective, but rather a carefully constructed literary narrative, what purpose did this serve?

Since modern legal tracts are considered to be objective pieces of writing, scholars tend to treat medieval legal texts with the same reverence, and law is often seen as separate from literature. Stacey demonstrates that this should not be the case and “hopes to demonstrate in this study . . . that, for at least some medieval jurists, legal writing was an intensely imaginative form of literature, one acutely responsive to practical concerns and capable of reproducing them in sophisticated symbolic form” (pp. 7–8). In fact, she argues (and it is difficult to overstate the importance of this point) that medieval Welsh law was fluid, and it could be (and was) manipulated by its redactors in a variety of ways to suit their own purposes. Their main purpose, as this book demonstrates, was to present a version of Wales that was fundamentally stable. This was achieved by attempting to protect native Welsh law from outside influence and threats on the one hand, and by criticizing those things that compromised the stability of Welsh society (and by extension Welsh native law) on the other.

Through careful analysis, Stacey builds the convincing case that to read Welsh legal texts just as legal text is to miss the point of some of these texts altogether. In three different sections (“Imagined Landscapes,” “Body and Bawdy,” and “Violence”), Stacey demonstrates how Welsh legal texts could and did function as political documents. In the first section, it becomes clear that the Welsh landscape presented in the legal tracts is not an accurate reflection of the Wales of that time, but rather a deliberately imaginary and mythical realm in which unity reigned, both unity within an individual court and within Wales against outside threats on a variety of levels (including law).

The manipulation of material also applies to the order in which some of these individual texts appear within the legal corpus, particularly in the Iorwerth redaction. In her discussion of the tract on the value of wild and tame (a listing of how much various animals were worth), for example, Stacey shows that the Iorwerth redaction has undergone a deliberate repositioning of the text, connecting wild animals with the concept...