Manuscripts

London, British Library, MS Harley 4353 Cyfraith Hywel (Cyfnerth redaction)

  • Welsh
  • s. xiv1
  • Welsh manuscripts
  • vellum
Welsh lawbook, siglum V of the Cyfnerth redaction.
Identifiers
Location
Collection: Harley manuscripts
Shelfmark
Harley 4353
Type
medieval Welsh law
Provenance and related aspects
Language
Welsh
Date
s. xiv1
First half of the 14th century (Marged Haycock).(1)n. 1 Morfydd E. Owen, ‘The Laws of Court from Cyfnerth’ in The Welsh king and his court... (2000): 426, citing Marged Haycock, Llyfr Taliesin: astudiaethau ar rai agweddau (1983): 5–7.
Hands, scribes
Hands indexed:
Hand X86

Written in the hand of an anonymous scribe, designated ‘X86’ by Daniel Huws and sometimes known as the Book of Taliesin scribe, after one of the best known manuscripts in which the same hand is attested. See, for instance, Morfydd E. Owen, ‘The Laws of Court from Cyfnerth’ in The Welsh king and his court... (2000): 426.

Book of Taliesin scribeBook of Taliesin scribe
(fl. first half of the 14th century)
An anonymous scribe whose hand, designated ‘X86’ by Daniel Huws, has been identified in five Welsh manuscripts, of which the Book of Taliesin (Peniarth 2) may be the best known. Others are Peniarth 6 part 4 (Gereint), NLW MS 3036B (Brut y brenhinedd), and BL Cotton Cleopatra MS A xiv and Harley MS 4353 (both containing copies of the Cyfnerth recension of Cyfraith Hywel). It is not possible to pinpoint any particular monastic house with certainty, but he seems to have been active in the general area of southeast- or mid-Wales.
See more
Codicological information
Material
vellum
Table of contents
Legend
Texts

Links to texts use a standardised title for the catalogue and so may or may not reflect what is in the manuscript itself, hence the square brackets. Their appearance comes in three basic varieties, which are signalled through colour coding and the use of icons, , and :

  1. - If a catalogue entry is both available and accessible, a direct link will be made. Such links are blue-ish green and marked by a bookmark icon.
  2. - When a catalogue entry does not exist yet, a desert brown link with a different icon will take you to a page on which relevant information is aggregated, such as relevant publications and other manuscript witnesses if available.
  3. - When a text has been ‘captured’, that is, a catalogue entry exists but is still awaiting publication, the same behaviour applies and a crossed eye icon is added.

The above method of differentiating between links has not been applied yet to texts or citations from texts which are included in the context of other texts, commonly verses.

Locus

While it is not a reality yet, CODECS seeks consistency in formatting references to locations of texts and other items of interest in manuscripts. Our preferences may be best explained with some examples:

  • f. 23ra.34: meaning folio 23 recto, first column, line 34
  • f. 96vb.m: meaning folio 96, verso, second column, middle of the page (s = top, m = middle, i = bottom)
    • Note that marg. = marginalia, while m = middle.
  • p. 67b.23: meaning page 67, second column, line 23
The list below has been collated from the table of contents, if available on this page,Progress in this area is being made piecemeal. Full and partial tables of contents are available for a small number of manuscripts. and incoming annotations for individual texts (again, if available).Whenever catalogue entries about texts are annotated with information about particular manuscript witnesses, these manuscripts can be queried for the texts that are linked to them.

Sources

Notes

Morfydd E. Owen, ‘The Laws of Court from Cyfnerth’ in The Welsh king and his court... (2000): 426, citing Marged Haycock, Llyfr Taliesin: astudiaethau ar rai agweddau (1983): 5–7.

Secondary sources (select)

Catalogue of illuminated manuscripts [in the British Library], Online: British Library, ?–present. URL: <https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts>.
Owen, Morfydd E., “The Laws of Court from Cyfnerth”, in: T. M. Charles-Edwards, Paul Russell, and Morfydd E. Owen (eds), The Welsh king and his court, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. 425–477.
Contributors
Dennis Groenewegen
Page created
November 2010, last updated: August 2023