Page:Welsh Medieval Law.djvu/444

 to the twenty-four officers there were twelve gwestais in the king's retinue. These thirty-six rode on horseback. The authors of The Welsh People (204) think it probable that the twelve gwestais were the persons who brought in the gwestva or entertainment dues.

gwestva, a king's entertainment dues from his free men, being analogous to the dawnbwyd or food-gifts due to him from his taeogs or villeins. The gwestva was paid twice yearly, once in winter and again in summer. From the present text one might suppose that the payment was the same on both occasions, save that in summer silver and horse provender were not provided. The money equivalent of the food supplied from every trev from which the king's gwestva was due was one pound, viz. 120 pence for the bread, 60 pence for its enllyn, and 60 pence for the liquor. If the food were not supplied at the proper time, this money equivalent was to be paid. As this proper time is definitely stated to be winter, it would appear as though it were not unusual to supply money instead of food in this season ; perhaps not so in summer. The 24 pence paid with the winter gwestva is the gwestva silver, aryant y givestttaeu in which sundry officers participated. Gwestva is represented in the Latin Peniarth MS. 28 by cena, from which comes the civynnossawc of our text through cvvyn + nos, evening meal, supper. See twnc.

gwlad, a patria. Gwlad might be translated ' country ' and even ' state ', but the former is too indefinite and the latter too modern for the purposes of our present text. Gwlad implies both the definite territory which is held by a ' people ' and also the ' people ' itself organized into a polity. Pre-Norman Wales (or Britannia as it was called) was not itself a gwlad, but a group of gwlads, somewhat like Germany before 1870. Dyved, Gwynedd, Powys, Morgannwg, &c. (which now make up the single gwlad or patria of Wales), would be as distinct from one another as Wessex, Kent, Mercia, and the rest of the gwlads or patrias which formerly made up what is now the single gwlad or patria of England. By the time that the earliest of the Welsh law books, now extant, were written, the Anglo-Normans had filched a number of these patrias, especially in South Wales. Morgannwg with Gwent, Brycheiniog, and Dyved were gone. Ceredigion was left, and also the interior of the old patria of Ystrad Tywi, that is, the land around Dinevwr. This probably is the reason why our texts adopt the vague term Deheubarth, dextralis pars (speaking of it as a gwlad), in lieu of the well-known and well-marked names of the South Welsh patrias. It may be that by the gwlad, Deheubarth, our text means no more than the remnant