- Language and Society among the Insular Celts AD 400-1000 -
the Irish which had occurred many centuries earlier. In this form, the legend of
Cunedda implied that British territory had been purged of Irish intruders. It thus
perceived relations between both the languages and the peoples of Britain and Ireland
as fundamentally hostile and as issuing in a British victory.
The earliest versions of the story, then, are those in the Historia Brittonum of
829/30. In chapter 14 of the Historia Brittonum it is said that 'the sons of Liethan
took land within the territory of Dyfed and also in other territories, namely GWyr
and Cedweli, until they were driven out by Cunedda and his sons from all British
lands'.22 In the Harleian Genealogies of the mid-tenth century there is a radically
different version: here there is no mention of the Irish but only of a migration of
Cunedda with eight sons and one grandson from Manaw Gododdin and of a
land-division between the sons and the grandson embracing territories from the Dee
to the Teifi.^23 The southern boundary of the activities of Cunedda and his family in
this account is the traditional northern boundary of Dyfed. Yet the latter was the
principal theatre of their activity in the version given in chapter 14 of the Historia
Brittonum.
Chapter 62 of the Historia Brittonum and the Vita Secunda of St Carannog
(probably of the twelfth century) offer different intermediate versions. The Historia
Brittonum says that Cunedda, the great-great-great-grandfather of Maelgwn king of
Gwynedd,
had earlier come with his sons, of whom there were eight, from the northern
part [of Britain], that is from the district which is called Manaw Gododdin, 146
years before the reign of Maelgwn, and they drove out the Irish with very great
slaughter from those districts, and they [the Irish] never returned to dwell there
agam.
Myrdin a Cwendyd y Chwaer (Myvyrian Archaiology, 110, Stanza 36 = The Poetry in the
Red Book of Hergest, ed. J. Gwenogvryn Evans (Llanbedrog, I9II), 578.40), which
provides a king-list of Gwynedd in verse, initially going up as far as the tenth century but
with a stanza which may refer to Gruffudd ap Cynan. Cf. Llawysgrif Hendregadredd,
transcribed by Rhiannon Morris-Jones, ed. J. Morris-Jones and T.H. Parry-Williams
(Cardiff, 1933), 65-15 (marwnad for Owain Goch ap Gruffudd ap Llywelyn), 'hil g6ra6
breinhya6l brenhin mana6', 'most courageous privileged lineage of the king of Manaw';
this is not a reference to the later. marriage connection between Rhodri ab Owain
Gwynedd and a daughter of the king of Man, for Rhodri was not Owain's ancestor. There
can be no question of linking Merfyn with Manaw Gododdin since that Manaw had been
lost by the Britons more than a century and a half before Merfyn's time. The Second
Dynasty of Gwynedd is regularly called by the poets Merfyniawn after Merfyn. See also
P.M.C. Kermode, 'A Welsh inscription in the Isle of Man', ZCP 1 (1897): 48-53, J. Rhys,
'Note on Guriat', ibid. 52-3; P.M.C. Kermode, Manx Crosses (London, 1901), no. 48 (pp.
121-3); R.A.s. Macalister, Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum (hereafter CIIC)
(Dublin, 1945-9), no. 1066. For the mixed character of the Isle of Man see J.M. Wallace-
Hadrill, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: a historical commentary
(Oxford, 1988),223.
22 Historia Brittonum, c. 14.
23 EWCT 13.