The Meddygon Myddvai were Rhiwallon and his sons, Cadwgan, Gruffydd, and Einion. They were the chief physicians of their age, and they wrote about A.D. 1230. A copy of their works is in the Welsh School Library, in Gray’s Inn Lane.”
Such are the Welsh Taboo tales. I will now make a few remarks upon them.
The age of these legends is worthy of consideration. The legend of Meddygon Myddvai dates from about the thirteenth century. Rhiwallon and his sons, we are told by the writer in the Cambro-Briton, wrote about 1230 A.D., but the editor of that publication speaks of a manuscript written by these physicians about the year 1300. Modern experts think that their treatise on medicine in the Red Book of Hergest belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, about 1380 to 1400.
Dafydd ab Gwilym, who is said to have flourished in the fourteenth century, says, in one of his poems, as given in the Cambro-Briton, vol. ii., p. 313, alluding to these physicians:—
“Meddyg, nis gwnai modd y gwnaeth
Myddfai, o chai ddyn meddfaeth.”“A Physician he would not make
As Myddvai made, if he had a mead fostered man.”
It would appear, therefore, that these celebrated physicians lived somewhere about the thirteenth century. They are described as Physicians of Rhys Gryg, a prince of South Wales, who lived in the early part of the thirteenth century. Their supposed supernatural origin dates therefore from the thirteenth, or at the latest, the fourteenth century.
I have mentioned Y Gwylliaid Cochion, or, as they are generally styled, Gwylliaid Cochion Mawddwy, the Red Fairies of Mawddwy, as being of Fairy origin. The Llanfrothen Legend seems to account for a race of men in Wales differing from their neighbours in certain features. The offspring of the Fairy union were, according to the Fairy mother’s prediction in that legend, to have red hair and prominent noses. That a race of men having these characteristics did exist in Wales is undoubted. They were a strong tribe, the men were tall and athletic, and lived by plunder. They had their head quarters at Dinas Mawddwy, Merionethshire, and taxed their neighbours in open day, driving away sheep and cattle to their dens. So unbearable did their depredations become that John Wynn ap Meredydd of Gwydir and Lewis Owen, or as he is called Baron Owen, raised a body of stout men to overcome them, and on Christmas Eve, 1554, succeeded in capturing a large number of the offenders, and, there and then, some hundred or so of the robbers were hung. Tradition says that a mother begged hard for the life of a young son, who was to be destroyed, but Baron Owen would not relent. On perceiving that her request was unheeded, baring her breast she said:—
Y bronau melynion hyn a fagasant y rhai a ddialant waed fy mab, ac a olchant eu dwylaw yn ngwaed calon llofrudd eu brawd.
These yellow breasts have nursed those who will revenge my son’s blood, and will wash their hands in the heart’s blood of the murderer of their brother.
According to Pennant this threat was carried out by the murder of Baron Owen in 1555, when he was passing through the thick woods of Mawddwy on his way to Montgomeryshire Assizes, at a place called to this day Llidiart y Barwn, the Baron’s Gate, from the deed. Tradition further tells us that the murderers had gone a distance off before they
remembered their mother’s threat, and returning thrust their swords into the Baron’s breast, and washed their hands in his heart’s blood. This act was followed by vigorous action, and the banditti were extirpated, the females only remaining, and the descendants of these women are occasionally still to be met with in Montgomeryshire and Merionethshire.