Cylchgronau Cymru

LEWYS GLYN COTHI AND RADNORSHIRE MARGED HAYCOCK I am very pleased to have been invited to talk to the Radnorshire Society, and to be back in Llandrindod on my home patch and to see many familiar faces. It is a great sadness that Mr Reg Oliver, whom I remember with much affection from my days in the Grammar School, is no longer with us. He will be sadly missed by the Society, as, of course, is Mr Ffransis Payne, whose pioneering work on the medieval poets of Radnorshire has been such a source of inspiration to me and to others interested in the Welsh literary heritage of our area. Many years ago, the former National Librarian of Wales, E. D. Jones, addressed the Society on the subject of Lewys Glyn Cothi's Cefn- Ilys poems. Dr Jones was the acknowledged authority on this fifteenth- century poet, and he published two pioneering volumes of edited texts: Gwaith Lewis Glyn Cothi: Y Gyfrol Gyntaf, Cardiff and Aberystwyth, 1953, [GLGC], and Lewys Glyn Cothi (Detholiad), Cardiff, 1984, [LGCD]. He was working towards a full edition of the 250 or so surviving poems when he died. This task was taken over by one of my colleagues in the University of Wales, Dr Dafydd Johnston of Cardiff, and the complete annotated edition is due to be published in 1995; it is more than likely that a further volume of English translations will follow. This is good news: at the moment, many of the poems to patrons in Radnorshire are only available in the old and inadequate edition published by Walter Davies and John Jones, The Poetical Works of Lewis Glyn Cothi, Oxford, 1837-39, [PWLGC], and hardly any of these Radnorshire poems have been translated for the benefit of historians not able to read Welsh. So, in some ways, the talk today is a trailer for Dr Johnston's new edition. But there are other reasons for looking at Lewys Glyn Cothi too. The first is the sheer volume of his output. The surviving poems composed in the later medieval period to the Radnorshire nobility from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries add up to around 160, a figure which compares very favourably with other areas of Wales. To these 160, we can add a further 28 composed to members of the Vaughan family in Hergest and Bredwardine in Herefordshire. This makes a grand total of 188 poems. Lewys Glyn Cothi, amazingly prolific, composed 57 of these, almost a third of the surviving corpus 52 poems to Radnorians, and five to the Vaughans over the border. So we are dealing with a very substantial and varied body of material. And in terms of Lewys' career, it accounts for a fifth of his known output. The second reason for looking at Lewys Glyn Cothi has to do with the kind of poet he was. He was particularly good at describing the houses and possessions of his patrons. In this respect, he was partly following the general trend of his time: the fifteenth-century poets laid