3 - The Charters in the Book of Llandaf: Forgeries or Recensions?

Summary

It is not surprising that the Book of Llandaf has usually been approached with some scepticism. It is a twelfth-century record of a dubious twelfth-century claim to a diocese and bishopric of doubtful antiquity. Furthermore, its allegedly early charters are couched in much the same stereotyped formulae, year in, year out. The following charter (73b), one of those appended to the Life of St Dyfrig, is a fairly restrained example of their format, but even here comparison with a second copy of the same charter (163a) suggests that the italicised words – and perhaps others – are additions:

Sciant omnes quod duo filii Pepiav, Cinuin uidelicet & Guidci, dederunt tres uncias agri Cum Barruc sancto Dubricio & omnibus sibi succedentibus in æcclesia Landauiæ in perpetuo, cum omni libertate sine ullo censu homini terreno nisi sancto Dubricio & suæ familie & suis sequacibus & cum omni communione data circumcirca in campo & in aquis, in silua & in pascuis. Finis huius agri est a ualle usque ad lech longitudo, latitudo de lech usque ad petram Crita. Testes super hoc pactum de clericis: Arguistil, Iunabui, Cinguarui, Elheiarun, Cimmareia; de laicis testes: Guoidci & Cinuin, Collbiu & Arcon. Qui in sacrato isto peccauerint execrentur.

A further reason for scepticism is the compilers’ evident failure to arrange all the charters in a logical sequence of bishops of Llandaf from St Dyfrig to Herewald. Yet while this casts doubt on the assertion that all the recipients were bishops of Llandaf, it does suggest that the charters were not wholly invented by the compilers; they could surely have done a better job if they had relied on imagination alone.

The order of material copied by Hand A is shown in the following list. (Some parts of the material, in earlier drafts, are also preserved in Cotton Vespasian A.xiv.) Some bishops are named but are assigned no charters. The number of charters assigned to each is indicated by the suprascript figures. To clarify the ensuing discussion I have indicated the dates of the charters suggested by Wendy Davies and the ‘groups’ A to J into which she divides them. It should be noted that C to J are continuous in the manuscript, with no indication of breaks between them: