SINCE J. E. LLOYD's seminal two-volume tome The History of Wales, published in 1912, the thematic concentration for medieval Welsh scholarship has been on conquest, coexistence, and Change. The interwoven strands of discussion largely centre on the concept of a native Wales and the idea of Welshness, beginning with the wake of the Norman settlements in the south from the twelfth century and stemming beyond the Edwardian Conquest of 1282. Over the course of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries power struggles— regionally, on the Welsh March, and the increased involvement of the English Crown in Welsh affairs— transformed Welsh socio-economic, political, and religious cultures. Certainly, ongoing dialogue about these core issues contributes to a better understanding of medieval Wales in the wider context of British political and social history. Yet, save for the very recent investigations undertaken by Susan Johns, Emma Cavell, and Gwyneth Richards, questions as to where exactly women fit within the master narrative and what their contributions were to the development of medieval Welsh society, across the spectrum, has not yet been explored.

As women's history overall has received little attention in Welsh scholarship, it is far from surprising that the important topic of queenship has also been left on the sidelines. Welsh queenship has primarily been considered only in the context of the male experience or codified native law, both approaches of which are problematical. The former explicitly denies the female experience. The latter poses more of a conceptual problem. The codified tenthcentury Laws of Hywel Dda were expanded on by lawyers during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and used, for the most part, as a means of teaching. Thus, varied source material was both added to and deliberately omitted from the Hywelian nucleus of the native legal codes. As such, the laws cannot be considered examples of “living law” or as accurate portrayals of the state of affairs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Welsh queenship involves an interplay of a number of thorny issues. For instance, concubinage was practised in Wales to the middle of the thirteenth century, and native laws themselves describe nine different types of marriage. Defining how women, including the queen, were ranked in a system of multiple wives is challenging.