Walter Map and the Matter of Britain. Joshua Byron Smith

terms. Within this tale Walter Map brings two Welsh “customs” into blunt opposition—their taste for plunder and their respect for hospitality. Not only does rapacity overcome hospitality, perhaps hinting at what really drives the Welsh, but it does so in a way that emphasizes Cynan’s weakness. In short, Welsh raiders—a serious and constant threat to Marchers—are here reduced to somewhat comical characters, subject only to their greed, even to the point of ignoring one of their most cherished mores. Indeed, throughout distinctio 2 the defining characteristics of the Welsh are their reverence for hospitality and their inclination toward rash violence. The religious streak of this tale also has significance in this context. The Welsh were routinely said to have suffered at the hands of the Saxons because of their religious failings. For a Marcher audience, particularly those who had read their Geoffrey of Monmouth, this story would imaginatively defang the persistent threat of Welsh raids. It reduces the shortsighted nature of their raids into parody and elides the failure of Cynan to heed hospitality into the widely held belief that the Welsh people’s military and political stumblings are divine retribution for their sinful behavior.

      While the story of Cynan addresses the anxieties of the Marcher elite, those like the valiant knight Cynan attacks, other stories show that Walter was interested in “the problem of the Welsh” on a national level as well. The most detailed portrait of a Welshman in the De nugis curialium is that of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, king of Wales.⁸⁷ Walter never intends to be a careful writer of history, and it has long been suspected that he has switched the name of the son and father around.⁸⁸ (Those who have worked with Welsh dynastic names will forgive this mistake.) Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1063), who became king of Gwynedd and Powys in 1039 and gained all of Wales in 1055, is most probably the historical figure who lies behind Walter’s Welsh king.⁸⁹ In addition to being the leading political figure of his day, inspiring one Welsh chronicler to style him the “head and shield and defender of the Britons,” Gruffudd swore fealty to Edward the Confessor in 1056, an event that Walter records, with no small help from his own imagination.⁹⁰ The historical Gruffudd was a dynamic figure who allied himself with Earl Ælfgar of Mercia—an alliance that some English observers cast in a positive light.⁹¹ But Walter’s Llywelyn is much more one-dimensional, termed at the outset a “faithless man, just as almost all his predecessors and successors were.”⁹² This characterization is unsurprising, since Walter’s home country had been on the receiving end of Gruffudd’s success a few generations before. Of all Gruffudd’s campaigns into English territory, the most memorable was his harrying of Hereford in 1055, when he laid waste to the city and its cathedral; in the next year at Glasbury he even slew its bishop Leofgar, several of the cathedral’s canons, and the sheriff Ælfnoth, all of whom had attacked Gruffudd in retaliation.⁹³ The minster lost almost everything. Very few documents survive from before 1055, and the relics of St. Æthelbert were likewise destroyed, thus depriving the chapter of significant spiritual cachet. Moreover, Westbury-on-Severn, whose church Walter held, had also suffered at the hands of Gruffudd in 1053.⁹⁴ It is unsurprising that Walter, himself a canon of Hereford, describes a cruel, jealous, and untrustworthy Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. Even if he did not get the name quite right, he knew that the southern borders had been ravaged by a fearsome Welsh king a century before.

      Walter recounts four short anecdotes about Llywelyn; all but the last serve to defame him. Nonetheless, these Llywelyn passages are not merely personal invective—Walter has not bothered to get the name of this Welsh king exactly right, after all—but general illustrations of Welsh backwardness. For Walter’s English contemporaries, these stories would exemplify several distasteful aspects of Welsh culture: their odd legal system, cultivation of prophecy, and extreme political violence.

      Welsh law differed considerably from English practice, a fact that contemporary observers were well aware of and that could present practical problems in places where English and Welsh law were both in use.⁹⁵ Walter, who had himself been an itinerant justice, was familiar with this cultural difference. His first anecdote relates the mechanics of one aspect of Welsh law with surprising accuracy. Llywelyn, overcome with jealously, desires vengeance from a handsome and well-born man who had merely dreamt of having an affair with Llywelyn’s wife the queen; the injured king “said that he had been duped and boiled with rage as if the deed had actually taken place.”⁹⁶ The dreamer is captured, and all his relatives offer themselves as surety so that he can be brought to trial. An insult to the king’s honor must be punished. Although Walter does not use the term, he understands one of the key elements of Welsh law: sarhad, or the compensation owed for harming someone’s honor. This strange case of sarhad vexes lawmen—how does one punish a thought crime? In the end, one exceedingly clever man solves the problem, and in doing so he gives an overview of the legal elements at play:

      We should follow the laws of our land, and we cannot, for any reason, do away with the laws that our fathers established as precepts and that have been confirmed by extensive use. Let us follow them and, until they reach any verdict in public at odds with custom, let us suggest nothing new. Our most ancient laws declare that anyone who dishonors the queen of the king of Wales through adultery will depart free and uninjured once he has paid a thousand cows to the king. In the same manner, the penalty was set at a certain amount for the wives of princes and other noblemen according to the honor of each. This man is accused of having sex with the queen in a dream, and he does not deny the charge. Given that he has confessed to the truth of his crime, it is settled that a thousand cows should be handed over.⁹⁷

      The ingenious solution is to line up one thousand cows along the shores of the lake of Brycheiniog, and to have Llywelyn gaze upon their reflection. He may then collect his payment in the form of the reflection of the cows, since dreams are merely a reflection of reality. Thus the punishment matches the crime, all while upholding Welsh legal tradition. This passage, in addition to succinctly explaining the basic concept of sarhad, closely echoes a passage in a southern recension of Welsh law.⁹⁸ In the Welsh lawbook known as the Llyfr Blegywryd, one of the three ways a king can be dishonored is by “violating his wife” (kamarueru o’e wreic), the fine for which is set at one hundred cows for every cantref a king controls.⁹⁹ Although stories of escaping legal quandaries while obeying the letter of the law are commonplace in folk literature, Walter’s story is grounded in actual Welsh legal theory. Importantly, Walter does not expect his audience to have a clear understanding of Welsh legal practice, and he therefore provides a brief explanation. The anecdote reads as both informative and entertaining and shows Walter at his best in crafting border tales from his knowledge of Welsh culture. The story also educates, even if derisively, its readers in Welsh legal difference—they do things differently over there.

      The next two episodes also discredit Llywelyn, though they do so not by explaining peculiar Welsh institutions but by relying on contemporary Welsh stereotypes. Llywelyn was, according to Walter, an underachieving child, one who “sat beside his father’s ashes.”¹⁰⁰ His sister scolds him, begging him to follow the “custom of the country” (mos huius terre) to venture out on New Year’s Eve to raid, steal, or even to eavesdrop.¹⁰¹ Those who choose to eavesdrop have the chance to hear a prophetic saying about their future. Inspired, Llywelyn creeps up to a house and listens to a cook inside contemplating the beef chunks in his stew: “Here I have found one remarkable piece among the others, since I always send it to the bottom and place it under the others, and right away it reappears above all the other pieces.”¹⁰² Llywelyn takes himself to be this unsinkable chunk of beef, and gladdened by such a “clear omen” (manifesto pronostico), he begins his rise to becoming “the most cunning thief and the most violent raider of the property of others.”¹⁰³ Political prophecy is certainly not unique to Wales, but Welsh political prophecy takes on particular significance when read in an English context.

      The Welsh nursed their loss of the island of Britain by cultivating a rich body of prophetic lore that told of a national savior who would come to destroy the English and restore the sovereignty of the island to its rightful holders. Gerald of Wales was not the only one to observe that the Welsh “foretell and boast with the utmost confidence—and their entire populace wondrously holds to this hope—that soon their countrymen will return to the island, and, in accordance to the prophecies of their own Merlin, both the foreign nation