Red Book of Hergest

• 1. Introduction

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  Scholar Daniel Huws has described the Red Book of Hergest as by far the heaviest, the largest, and the thickest of all medieval Welsh manuscripts. Its red leather binding and its long residence at Hergest Court both contributed to the name it carries today. Written on vellum in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, it now sits on deposit at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is catalogued there as Jesus College MS 111.

  Six centuries and many different owners separate its making from that Oxford vault. Each transfer of the book was a chance for it to be lost, damaged, or kept by someone who would not return it. What the manuscript contains and how those texts came to be gathered there are questions that reach back to the fourteenth century and beyond.

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• 2. The Scribes and Hopcyn

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  Hywel Fychan fab Hywel Goch of Buellt is the only copyist whose name has been identified among those who made the Red Book. He worked for Hopcyn ap Tomas ab Einion of Ynysforgan, near Swansea. Hopcyn, who lived from around 1330 to 1403, may have been the patron for whom the manuscript was compiled. Several copyists worked on it together. The manuscript was begun shortly after 1382 and completed by about 1410. Hopcyn died before that work was finished, and for the rest of that century the book remained with his family.

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• 3. Six Centuries of Hands

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  Hopcyn's grandson, Hopcyn ap Rhys, was held complicit in a rebellion against King Edward IV. His property was forfeited, and the manuscript passed to a Breconshire family, the Vaughans of Tretower, probably in 1465. Ownership is confirmed by two odes written into the Red Book at Tretower. The Welsh poet Lewys Glyn Cothi composed them there, dedicating the verses to Sir Thomas Vaughan, who died in 1483, and to Vaughan's sons. The book then passed to the Vaughans of Hergest Court, near Kington in the Welsh Marches.

  By 1550, Sir John Price of Brecon had reportedly seen the manuscript, presumably at Hergest. In the late 1560s, William Salesbury found it at Ludlow, held by Sir Henry Sidney. A man from Llanidloes named Siancyn Gwyn held it on loan from Sidney at that time. By the early seventeenth century, the book had come to the Mansels of Margam in Glamorgan, possibly through the marriage of Henry's granddaughter Catherine Sidney to Sir Lewis Mansel. Mansel reportedly held the book in 1634.

  Thomas Wilkins, a Welsh clergyman and antiquarian who died in 1699, was the next known holder. He may have borrowed the manuscript from the Mansels and never returned it. In 1697, the scholar Edward Lhuyd visited Wilkins and spent time copying a manuscript that scholars believe was likely the Red Book. On the 17th of February 1701, Thomas Wilkins the Younger of Llanblethian donated the manuscript to Jesus College, Oxford. A note in the book suggests Lhuyd then held it on loan from the college, and the college did not recover it until 13 years later, following Lhuyd's death.

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• 4. The Texts Within

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  The Mabinogion, the cycle of Welsh mythological tales, survives in part through the Red Book, which is one of its key manuscript sources. The prose section also holds a Welsh translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, along with other historical texts and a series of Triads.

  Gogynfeirdd, also known as Beirdd y Tywysogion or Poets of the Princes, is the court poetry tradition that fills the second half of the manuscript. Three cycles from within that tradition appear in the Red Book: Canu Llywarch Hen, Canu Urien, and Canu Heledd. Poems attributed to Myrddin Wyllt are also among the manuscript's poetry.

  Rhiwallon Feddyg, the founder of a medical dynasty, is the figure behind a collection of herbal remedies also present in the manuscript. His descendants became known as the Physicians of Myddfai, from the village of Myddfai just outside Llandovery. That dynasty endured for more than five hundred years. The breadth of this material eventually prompted scholars to compare the Red Book with another great Welsh manuscript, and that comparison proved revealing.

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• 5. A Common Ancestor

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  The White Book of Rhydderch shares material with the Red Book so similar that scholars once assumed the Red Book was copied from it. That view has since been revised. Both manuscripts are now thought to have descended independently from a lost common ancestor, or a set of ancestors that no longer survives. Neither manuscript, in other words, is a copy of the other. What neither manuscript can fully explain is where the stories they share first came from.

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• 6. Tolkien's Borrowed Name

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  J. R. R. Tolkien is believed by some researchers to have borrowed a title from this manuscript's name. The title in question appears in Tolkien's mythology: the Red Book of Westmarch, presented there as the imagined legendary source of his tales. Whether the borrowing was conscious or coincidental is not something the historical record settles. The echo between the two names has been noted by more than one scholar of the medieval Welsh literary tradition.

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