William the Silent; Pliny the Elder; Augustus the Strong; Aethelred the Unready; Frederick the Great; Edward the Confessor; Richard the Lion-Hearted; William the Conqueror. History is replete with figures who came to be known by a trait or characteristic.
We don’t know why Hywel ap Cadell ap Rhodri came to be known by later generations as Hywel the Good, but we’re skeptical that goodness had anything to do with it; Hywel was as ruthless as he needed to be in the 10th century (he ordered the murder of his brother-in-law). Still, he did something significant that was born of his being the first Welsh prince to go on a pilgrimage to Rome coupled with his study of legal systems. They helped him formulate advanced ideas about law.
When Hywel became king over nearly all of Wales in 942, he brought all the different systems known throughout Wales into a single body of law of which there were three different versions: The Venedotia Code for north Wales, the Dimetian Code for south Wales, and the Gwentian Code for the south-east. Together, they were Wales’ first formal legal system. It’s important to note that the laws weren’t Hywel’s invention, but traditional rights and duties of the land, some of which dated back hundreds of years. What Hywel did was to have them written down or “codified” for the first time. Even more impressive is that these laws remained in active use throughout Wales for hundreds of years until the union with England in 1536 under Henry VIII.
The codes covered everything from defining various units of measure and systems of inheritance, to processes of reconciliation. It offers fascinating insights into society of the time (for instance, the Law recognized fully nine different forms of legal union between a man and woman, and only one of these was a church sanctioned marriage) and even dealt with the theft or killing of a cat. To wit: If someone killed or stole a cat, the cat was to be suspended by its tail with its head on the floor. wheat was poured over the cat until the tip of its tail was covered, and the cat was worth that amount of wheat. Happily for the cat, there was another way to determine its worth, and according to the code, a cat from the king’s barn was worth a milch sheep with her lamb, and a common cat was worth 4 legal pence.
Got that?
It also dealt with dogs: If a guard dog was killed more than nine paces from the door, it was not paid for. If it was killed within the nine paces, it was worth twenty-four pence. As we are a purebred dog-centric site, we segue to the Harrier. The breed has long history in England and while there are detailed records of individual packs existing from 1260, Bryan Cummings writes in The Terriers of England and Wales that it was in the Dimetian Code, updated in 1180, that the Harrier was mentioned for the first time.
This makes the breed at least a hundred years older than some suspect.
Anyone wanting to do a deep dive into this will want to read, The Welsh King and His Court by T. M. Charles-Edwards, Morfydd E. Owen, and Paul Russell.
Image: This original painting of a Harrier by Joan Glinert may be purchased by contacting the artist here