Priuilegium Sancti Teliaui and Breint Teilo

Abstract

Library of Wales 17110E, fol. 63), copied by the main scribe of the manuscript, contains the earliest surviving copies of the Latin Priuilegium Sancti Teliaui (fol. 63ra1-b3) and the Old Welsh Breint Teilo (fol. 63va8-b26). 1 Between them in the manuscript is a papal privilege, Statutum est … pacis inueniant (fol. 63rb4-63va7) which seems to act as an appendix to the Priuilegium (see Plates 1 and 2); the gap left after Breint Teilo was subsequently filled in the fifteenth century by a bull of excommunication. What follows is the text of fol. 63 as printed in Evans and Rhŷs (my translation is in Appendix 1 (pp. **-*)): 2

‘Dark’ and ‘Clear’ Y in Medieval Welsh Orthography: Caligula versus Teilo

“…digauayl ‘exempt from hosting, exempt from taxation, exempt from distraint’ was at first misunderstood and treated as di/dy /ðɨ/ ‘to’. vi yncyfr y tin (= Mod.W. yn gyffr e din ‘generally’) looks like a mistaken ‘modernisation’ of e to y in an exemplar which often used <e> for /ǝ/ (Russell 2016: 56), although a genuine variant cannot be ruled out; compare MW cyfr y dec < cyfr e deg ‘running with’.…”

“…As a result the reader has a safe guide as to when to pronounce /i(:)/, /ɨ(:)/, and /ǝ/; nothing so systematic is found before Brut Dingestow a century and a half later (see Section 8 below). Is it significant that there is evidence that Braint Teilo was read out from the Book of Llandaf in the later Middle Ages and was marked up then in order to avoid mispronunciations (Russell 2016: 53)? (These changes are omitted in the text quoted above.)…”