24/10/2026
Not eisteddfod related. Just some random yet interesting Welsh history. Enjoy ☕️
While England was busy burning heretics and hanging thieves, Wales had a legal code that protected women, children, and even the queen's cat. It was written in the 10th century and it was startlingly humane.
The laws of Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good) were compiled around 940 AD and stayed in use for centuries. They covered everything from divorce settlements to livestock disputes, and they treated people with a fairness that would shock anyone who thinks the medieval world was uniformly brutal. Here are 8 of the strangest and most forward-thinking rules on the books.
1. A woman could divorce her husband and keep half of everything
If a marriage lasted 7 years or more, the wife walked away with half the property, including livestock, bedding, and household goods. English women wouldn't get anything close to this until the Married Women's Property Act of 1870. That's nearly a thousand years later.
2. Illegitimate children could inherit
Under Welsh law, a child acknowledged by the father had the same inheritance rights as any child born in wedlock. The Church hated this and pushed hard against it for centuries. In England, illegitimate children were legally invisible.
3. The queen's cat had a fixed legal value
Kill or steal the royal cat, and you owed a fine equal to enough wheat to bury the cat when held up by the tail, with its nose touching the floor. It sounds absurd, but it reflects a legal system obsessed with precise, measurable compensation instead of arbitrary punishment.
4. A wife got three free hits before it counted as a beating
This one sounds grim by modern standards, but in context, it was progressive. A husband could be fined for striking his wife, and repeated abuse gave her grounds for divorce with full compensation. English common law let husbands beat their wives with impunity well into the 1800s.
5. Theft to survive wasn't punishable
If you stole food because you were starving and had first begged at 3 houses without success, you weren't guilty of theft. Compare that to England, where a child could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. Hywel's law recognized desperation as a legal defense.
6. Compensation, not ex*****on, for most crimes
Welsh law leaned heavily on galanas, a payment made to the victim's family for injury or death. Even murder could be settled with a fine rather than a hanging. The idea was to restore balance between families, not fuel more bloodshed through state killings.
7. Insulting the queen carried a very specific fine
Speak badly of the queen, and you owed her a rod of silver as thick as her middle finger and as tall as she was, from ground to mouth. Everything in Hywel's laws was measured against the body of the person wronged. Precision mattered.
8. Women who were widowed kept full control of their property
A widow in Wales inherited her husband's land outright and could remarry or refuse to remarry as she chose. In England, widows were routinely pressured into remarriage by lords who wanted the land back under a man's name. Welsh law treated the widow as a full legal person.
