The history of Pembrokeshire / by the Rev. James Phillips.

  • Phillips, James.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The history of Pembrokeshire / by the Rev. James Phillips. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/606 (page 71)
    so the commencement of its medieval history is associated with the first and, save one, the greatest of the Edwards, the son of Alfred and the father of Athelstan. The building of Gladmuth was a foreshadowing of the fall of old Demetia, but the immediate future was to be one of peace. Howel possessed the one quality in which the Princes of Wales were nearly always lacking—the good sense which sees clearly the limits of one’s possibilities, and averts disaster by accepting the inevitable. The liegeman and friend of Edward and of Athelstan, he ruled his own lands in peace, and when he succeeded Idwal on the northern throne, to which the priority of rank, and sometimes that of authority, was conceded, the tranquillity which he had secured for Deheubarth, but which had been imperilled in the north by the folly of Idwal, was restored to Gwynedd. His great achievement was the codification of the laws and customs of Wales. It was an imitation on a small scale of the legislative work of Charlemagne, whose reign was long the embodied ideal of the monarchs of Western Christendom. Much remains to be done in the editing of the manuscripts, all of later date, some almost modem, which contain the results of the labour of Howel and his council. For the historian of Wales these Codes are of great value ; for the historian of Pembrokeshire they have for the most part only an academic interest. There are three Codes—the Venedotian (or Code of Gwynedd), the Demetian, and the Gwentian. These documents in their twelfth-century and thirteenth-century editions afford only indirect evidence of the relative social and political progress which at the beginning of the tenth century had been made by the several tribes that were being slowly, very slowly, fused into a nation. Yet the differences are worth noting. On the whole the Demetian Code shows a higher, or at any rate a healthier, political development than the other