REPORT ON MANUSCRIPTS IN THE WELSH LANGUAGE. VOL. II.-Part I. Jesus College, Oxford; Free Library, Cardiff; Havod; Wrexham; PRINTED FOR HIS MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE, PRINTERS TO THE KING'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY. And to be purchased, either directly or through any Bookseller, from E. PONSONBY, 116, GRAFTON STREET, DUBLIN. [Cd. 1100.] Price 1s. 9d. 1902. INTRODUCTION. THE present report deals with documents in the Welsh language in the libraries of Jesus College, Oxford, and of the town of Cardiff, as well as nearly the whole of the quondam Havod collection, and a few stray manuscripts at Llanwrin Rectory, Merthyr Tydvil, and Aberdâr. The collection at Jesus College is the result of gifts from some of its alumni, of whom the Rev. Thomas Wilkins, of Llanblethian, in the county of Glamorgan, is the worthiest in this respect. To him belongs the credit of having rescued from the vicissitudes of private libraries the Red Book of Hergest, the largest vellurn manuscript and one of the best known in the Welsh language. This Red Book, though incomplete, forms in itself a fairly good mediæval Welsh library. Theology and the laws excluded, it may be said to contain a representative collection of the best literature current in Wales at the close of the fourteenth, and the opening of the fifteenth centuries. And though work done for this Commission has made it clear that most of its prose contents are to be found in earlier documents, still, if we exclude the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Book of Aneirin, and the Book of Taliessin, it remains practically our oldest and most reliable source for a very large part of the works of the poets of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The purely historical value of these metrical productions is too readily overlooked. Indeed it seems necessary to reiterate again and again, with emphasis, the impossibility of writing the social history of the Welsh peoples without an attentive and exhaustive study of mead-song and elegy, the trumpet call to battle and the paean of victory and peace. When all that remains of the "poetry," produced in Wales between the rise and the fall of the monasteries, has been properly edited, the historian will find a wealth of unsuspected material often stamped with the hall-mark of the eye-witness and fresh as the morning dew. Jesus College, Oxford. The Welsh portion of the manuscripts brought together at Philipps MSS. Middle Hill, by the late Sir Thomas Philipps, Bart., was removed y 98560. Wt. 7509. a 2 |