- Chapter Thirty-Six -
territory, as the Pillar of Eliseg proudly claims for Powys in the eighth century.164
Within Wales, however, the status of Welsh was transformed. Gildas rebukes
Maelgwn, the pupil of 'the magister elegans of almost all Britain',165 for abandoning
the religious life, murdering his way back to the throne, and then allowing himself
to be praised, in spite of his flagrant sins, by a yelling mob of encomiasts.^166 These
have generally, and I believe rightly, been taken to be poets praising Maelgwn in
British. It is not clear, however, that they were repellent in Gildas's eyes because they
sang Maelgwn's praises in British; the crucial point was rather that they poured glory
on such a notorious sinner. Nevertheless the contrast which Gildas allows to be
drawn but does not emphasize is between a magister whose refined learning was
indubitably in Latin and a crowd of sycophants whose praises of Maelgwn were as
physically repulsive in delivery as they were unmerited by their subject. Gildas's
words suggest that even if British, unlike Latin and Irish, was not admitted to the
distinction of being carved in stone, it was admitted to court. While Voteporix was
probably praised in Irish and was certainly commemorated in both Latin and Irish,
Maelgwn was probably praised in Welsh.
One of the most obscure questions about the Britons in the post-Roman period
is how far there was a reaction against the cultural depreciation of the British
language, a depreciation which had been a central aspect of romanization and was
inherited both by the English and by the Irish settlers in Britain. It cannot have been
a far-reaching reaction since Gildas and Maelgwn's magister elegans, as well as the
Latin inscriptions of the period, demonstrate the survival of a high Latin culture
alongside a spoken form of the language. The claim that Cadfan, king of Gwynedd
in the early seventh century, was sapientissimus suggests that the cultural values of
late Roman Christianity had not been abandoned.^167 Similarly, the few surviving
Welsh manuscripts of the pre-Norman period admit Welsh, as we have seen, only to
the margins or the interlinear spaces of the parchment page. It looks as though the
continued prestige of Latin caused the rise in the status of Welsh to be confined
largely to poetry. The rise was therefore in a primarily oral form. Poetry was some-
times written down, as the Juvencus englynion and, probably, the textual history of
the Gododdin show.^168 If there had been a less miserable survival rate of early
medieval Welsh manuscripts, there might even have been more evidence for Welsh
prose. The marginalia in the Lichfield Gospels show that Welsh, interspersed with
Latin, could be used for weighty purposes such as the attestation of land-grants or
of manumissions.^169 Apart from such rare appearances of Welsh prose, the existence
164 EWGT 2.
165 Gildas, De Excidio, c. 36.
166 Ibid., c. 34. 6; on which see P. Sims-Williams, 'Gildas and vernacular poetry', in Gildas:
new approaches (Woodbridge, 1984), 169-92.
167 ECMW no. 13.- Williams, The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry, 89-121; D.N. Dumville, 'Early Welsh poetry:
problems of historicity', 4-7.
169 The Text of the Book of Llan Dfiv, ed. J. Gwenogvryn Evans (Oxford, 1893; reprinted
Aberystwyth, 1979), xliii-xlvii; D. Jenkins and M.E. Owen, 'The Welsh marginalia in the
Lichfield Gospels', Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 5 (Summer 1983): 37-66; 7 (Summer,
1984): 91 - 120.