When Thomas de Chobham, the sub-dean of Salisbury, wrote his manual for confessors in the year of Magna Carta, he emphasised that a careful psychological appraisal of the penitent was an essential part of the priest's function: the confessor should remember that a Welshman was as different from an Englishman as a minstrel or a harlot from a knight. No less a contrast exists between the Welsh reluctance to write general surveys of their history and of its sources and the zealousness of the English. If this book has any theme at all, it is the nature and cause of this contrast.

The central, superficial contrast is between the bulk of the sources for English medieval history, narrative, archival and material, and the small remains for medieval Wales. The difficulty of the Welsh sources, their physical dispersal and the lack of existing finding-aids create massive problems, and in the course of compiling this survey I have been acutely aware of my own ignorance in too many aspects of these sources. Like John Speed, I have been obliged to ‘put my sickle into other mens corne’. It is my hope, however, that this initial survey will prompt those qualified in the special fields on which I have trespassed to produce fuller and more authoritative introductions for students.