Cyfraith Hywel

Cyfraith Hywel, the laws of Hywel, was the legal system of medieval Wales before the English conquest, known in Latin as Leges Walliae and comparable to Irish Brehon law as a Celtic legal tradition. Tradition credits King Hywel Dda with codifying the laws in the mid-tenth century by convening men learned in law from every commote of his kingdom, though the earliest surviving manuscripts date only to the early thirteenth century, indicating the laws were revised and updated over time. The system featured collective kinship responsibility, gavelkind inheritance among male heirs, status-based compensation payments called galanas, and rights for women in marriage and divorce that struck outside observers as unusually progressive; its criminal provisions were displaced by the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 after Edward I's conquest, and its civil provisions were finally replaced by English law under Henry VIII's Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 to 1542.