The Codex That Never Existed

n The Silence of the White Shadow, a medieval codex is discovered at Dolwyddelan Castle in North Wales in 1896. Its contents raise questions about the relationship between the Welsh princes and the English Crown, and about how confidently the past can ever be reconstructed from the documents that survive it.

The Dolwyddelan Codex is entirely fictional, but the medieval politics and Victorian uncertainties that surround it are not.

Within the novel, the document is imagined to have originated during the principality of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, Llywelyn the Great, who died in 1240. His authority rested not only upon military power but upon diplomacy, law and the careful negotiation of his relationship with the English Crown. Medieval sovereignty was rarely as simple as the boundaries on a modern map might suggest. Authority could be layered, obligations contested and agreements capable of supporting different interpretations.

That ambiguity became important when I began thinking about the document at the centre of the novel. What if an agreement had survived whose wording allowed a later reader to interpret the relationship between Welsh and English rulers rather differently?

The history that followed gave the idea its significance. In 1267, Henry III recognised Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as Prince of Wales under the Treaty of Montgomery. Relations deteriorated after Edward I came to the throne, and following Edward’s campaign of 1277 the Treaty of Aberconwy sharply reduced Llywelyn’s territories. The uprising of 1282 brought a more decisive conflict. Llywelyn was killed that December, his brother Dafydd was captured and executed the following year, and Edward’s conquest brought independent princely rule in Gwynedd to an end. The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 established a new framework of English royal government in the conquered territories.

That transition from negotiation to conquest interested me more than the military history itself. An agreement that had once helped define a political relationship could acquire a very different significance after that relationship had disappeared. Words written in one political world might survive into another, where they could be read quite differently.

The manuscript I invented grew from that possibility. It does not attempt to rewrite the known history of medieval Wales. Instead, it introduces uncertainty into the interpretation of it, which seemed appropriate for a novel concerned with evidence, belief and the difficulty of knowing exactly what the past can tell us.

The second part of the idea came from the nineteenth century.

By 1896, Welsh scholars and antiquarians were intensely interested in manuscripts, medieval literature and the recovery of the Welsh past. Yet scholarship also had to contend with material whose authenticity was uncertain. Iolo Morganwg, one of the most remarkable figures of the Welsh cultural revival, combined genuine antiquarian enthusiasm with extensive invention and forgery, some of which continued to influence ideas about Welsh history and bardic tradition long after his death. By the later nineteenth century, scholars were increasingly questioning claims that had previously been accepted.

That was precisely the intellectual environment I needed.

A newly discovered medieval manuscript in 1896 could not simply be read and accepted. Where had it come from? Who had written it? Was it contemporary with the events it described, a later copy, an altered version or a forgery? What did particular words mean when they were written, and how much of their apparent significance came from the assumptions of the person reading them?

Those questions allowed the codex to become more than an object around which a mystery could be constructed. It became a way of exploring something that interests me far more: the uncertain relationship between evidence and interpretation.

Historical evidence does not arrive accompanied by instructions explaining what it means. Documents survive imperfectly, language changes and interpretation is inevitably influenced by what the reader already believes. A manuscript can remain physically unchanged for centuries while the significance attached to it alters completely.

The Dolwyddelan Codex never existed.

The uncertainty surrounding it very easily could have.

And that is where the fiction begins.

University College Morlan

An extract from University College Morlan

Outwardly, Morlan resembles many institutions of its kind: a collection of buildings overlooking the Menai Straits, its courts and halls shaped by successive generations, its governance defined by charter, custom, and careful negotiation. Yet to understand it in these terms alone is to miss something essential. For Morlan is not merely a place of learning, but one in which habits of thought are formed, tested, and, in time, carried outward into the world. It is within this environment that Owain Morgan is best understood.

The purpose of this book is not to recount his life, nor to retell the cases with which his name has become associated. Those matters are treated elsewhere. What follows instead is an attempt to trace the conditions from which such a mind might emerge: the intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century, the structures that govern inquiry and authority, and the interplay between belief, habit, and experience that shapes both.

In this sense, Morlan is not a backdrop to Owain Morgan’s work, but part of its foundation.

To step inside this world is to encounter tensions already long established by the closing years of the nineteenth century. The relationship between faith and reason, between tradition and reform, between Wales and the institutions of England, had not been resolved. They had simply been given form within the life of the university. Its colleges, though bound together by charter, retained distinct identities and competing claims to authority. Its benefactors, increasingly drawn from industrial wealth, brought with them new expectations. Its scholars moved, often uneasily, between inherited moral philosophy and the emerging language of psychological science.

From within this landscape, Owain’s method takes shape. His sensitivity to language and contradiction, his attention to conduct, and his insistence upon moral responsibility are not the product of a single influence, but of several, held in tension and worked through over time.

This book does not attempt to resolve those tensions. It seeks only to make them visible. In doing so, it offers a different approach to the cases.

The events themselves remain unchanged. But beneath them lies something less readily seen: the pattern of thought that allows one man to recognise what others overlook. It is this pattern, rather than any individual conclusion, that forms the true subject of what follows.

For the work with which Owain Morgan’s name has become associated does not begin with the crime, but with the mind that produced it. His role, in each instance, is not simply to determine what has occurred, but to understand how such an act could come to seem, to one individual, both possible and necessary.

The chapters that follow move between history and reflection. They trace the founding of University College Morlan, the development of its colleges, and the intellectual currents that shaped its teaching. They consider the balance of power within the institution, and the ways in which authority is exercised, challenged, and preserved. At intervals, they return to Owain Morgan himself, not as a figure to be explained, but as one through whom these forces may be observed.

For ideas do not exist in isolation. They are carried by individuals, shaped by experience, and expressed in ways that are often only partially understood, even by those who hold them. To understand the world of Owain Morgan, then, is not simply to understand a university, or a period, or a set of doctrines. It is to consider how a mind is formed within its surroundings, and how, in certain moments, it may come to see beyond them.

What follows is not a complete account. It is, rather, a series of observations drawn from a particular place and time, offered in the hope that they may illuminate something of the relation between ideas and lived experience, between the structures that shape us, and the ways in which we, in turn, attempt to make sense of them.

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An Eye for Detail

An extract from Unseen Souls

The first time Sian noticed Eliza’s fascination with shapes was when she caught her tracing crude, uneven circles in the soot on the windowsill.

At first, she dismissed it as idle child’s play. But as the months passed, the marks grew more deliberate and thoughtful.

For Eliza’s third birthday, Rhys made her a small blackboard from a slate tile, along with chalk he’d salvaged from the ironworks.

Eliza would sit cross-legged by the hearth, brow furrowed in earnest concentration, dragging the chalk across the slate.

Sian smiled softly the first time she saw a jagged circle, uneven lines sprouting from its centre like spokes on a wheel.

‘What’s that, then?’ Sian asked gently, kneeling beside her.

‘A flower,’ Eliza replied shyly, pressing harder as she made another mark. ‘Like the one in the jar.’

Sian glanced at the fading bluebell Rhys had picked the night before, and kissed her daughter’s hair.

‘It’s a good likeness, cariad.’

Soon, Eliza’s scribbles became more than play and she started to draw with slow, deliberate strokes.

Sian, sewing nearby, watched discreetly. Eliza’s tongue peeked out in concentration, and when she turned the slate towards her mother, it displayed sharp, angular lines.

‘It’s the mountain,’ Eliza said proudly pointing to the jagged peaks. ‘Like outside.’

Sian studied the slate carefully. The lines were rough, but unmistakably shaped like the hills surrounding Dowlais.

’That’s lovely, Eliza. You’ve got sharp eyes, haven’t you cariad?’

That evening, Sian showed Rhys the slate. He tilted it towards the firelight, looking closely at what his daughter had drawn.

‘That’s something,’ he murmured, glancing fondly at Eliza, who now sketched earnestly on a scrap of paper.

‘She’s got something, Sian. D’you think she was born with a gift?’

Sian hesitated.

She thought of the long hours spent sewing by dim lamplight, her fingers sore from stitching endless repairs into trousers and aprons, and Rhys’s calloused hands, forever blackened by coal dust and soot.

Eliza’s soft, tiny hands seemed almost miraculous in comparison.

‘Maybe,’ she whispered. ‘Or maybe she just sees what we miss.’

Rhys chuckled softly, pride warming his voice.

‘She’s got your eyes and my stubbornness. Poor girl doesn’t stand a chance.’

In the months that followed, Eliza’s drawings became a quiet comfort to them both, a reminder that life held more than daily struggle.

Her sketches, though unrefined, possessed a kind of vitality.

It wasn’t just what she drew, but how she captured them, as though her small world demanded to be seen.

‘She’ll go far, our Eliza,’ Rhys would often say, and Sian nodded, and she prayed he was right.

The cottage still hummed with its usual rhythm of mending, scrubbing and keeping the fire lit.

Eliza was quiet by nature, but her curiosity lit the house like sunlight through soot.

Despite her exhaustion, Sian nurtured that spark, smiling as Eliza handed her crooked fabric scraps stitched into misshapen quilts ’for the cat,’ she said proudly.

Sometimes, when the day had been especially hard, Sian knelt beside Eliza, guiding her daughter’s tiny hand to form smoother lines, or helping her shape familiar faces.

These quiet moments were their refuge from the noise and grind outside.

As Eliza’s sixth birthday approached, Sian was pregnant again. And Eliza, ever forthright, had questions.

‘Why is your belly so big, Mam?’ she asked earnestly one day, eyes wide with wonder.

‘Because Bronwyn is certain you’re getting a sister,’ Sian explained gently, guiding Eliza’s hand to feel the baby’s movements.

‘She’ll need you as a big sister to teach her all the clever things you’ve learned. Like drawing your pretty pictures.’

Eliza lit up at that, even if she didn’t really understand what it meant.

She began making drawings ‘for the baby,’ filling her slate with flowers, radiant suns, and stick-figure families reaching lovingly for one another.

Even then, Eliza’s art was a mirror. The shadows and soot of the ironworks crept into the corners of her sketches, alongside the faces of her parents: her mother’s skilled fingers threading a needle, her father’s sturdy hands lifting her high above his head. They were small things, drawn from instinct. But they said more than most words could.

Her early pictures were clumsy, of course. But her eye was already different and her attention unnervingly precise.

Rhys would often shake his head, half in wonder.

‘She doesn’t just look, Sian, she sees. That’s rare, isn’t it?’

Sian would nod, pride tempered with worry because gifts like that didn’t always survive in places like Dowlais…

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Christmas 1896

An extract from The Silence of the White Shadow

Christmas 1896 was unlike any other. There was no joy in it, no warmth of recollection. A hard winter lay upon the valley, and the season brought only doubt and a quiet, persistent fear, for some at least, of a reckoning they would rather not meet.

A small and carefully chosen company had been invited to Dolwyddelan Castle in North Wales to examine what Lord Jeremiah de Haersbie called the Dolwyddelan Codex. This thirteenth-century manuscript appeared to challenge the accepted history of Wales’s long struggle with the English crown, suggesting that certain received accounts were comforting inventions rather than true. Even before its pages were fully considered, the codex unsettled the company. One regarded it with a reverence edged by apprehension; another with something nearing desperation. Others sought, in their different ways, to guard themselves against whatever truths it might disclose.

Their motives varied. Some arrived from curiosity, others from conviction, and a few with rather more to lose than they cared to acknowledge.

By Christmas Eve the snow lay so deep that the valley had become one vast white shadow, present yet scarcely defined. Within the castle the guests moved with subdued care, their conversations thinning as though each listened for news unspoken yet already understood. They had come in the hope of discovery, perhaps even illumination. Instead, they found themselves pressed by the unease of what such light might reveal.

Among them was Professor Owain Morgan — philosopher, academic, and patient reader of the human condition. His part in untangling what occurred in those days is the subject of this account, though he himself would later observe that the first signs were plain enough to those willing to see them.

Before we follow him into the white shadow that settled over Dolwyddelan, we must understand the man, his mind, and the methods that shaped all that followed, long before the snow at Dolwyddelan ever fell…

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How My Inquiry Began

An extract from The Morgan Papers

My interest in human conduct arose not in books, but from an event in the village of my childhood.

A boy of my own age was accused of taking money from the chapel collection. No proof was ever established, yet within a remarkably short time suspicion acquired the force of certainty. Each conversation appeared to strengthen the next until the question of whether the accusation was true simply ceased to be asked.

The adults involved were not cruel people. Most were decent by any ordinary measure. Yet decency alone proved insufficient protection against error.

The boy and his family left the village. Some months later I learned that he had been found drowned.

I was too young to understand what had happened, and I possess no greater certainty now concerning the circumstances of his death than I did then. What remained with me was a question I could not yet properly express: how does something merely believed acquire the authority of something known?

Years later, I came to recognise a process that had been invisible to me as a child. A possibility becomes a suspicion. Suspicion becomes belief. Belief, repeated and shared, gradually acquires the authority of fact.

Human beings are not persuaded by evidence alone. We are influenced by confidence, reputation, prejudice, repetition and, perhaps most powerfully, the reassurance of discovering that others believe as we do. Once sufficient agreement has been reached, the question of whether the belief itself is justified may cease to be asked.

That observation has remained with me ever since.

My education gave me the means to examine questions that had first arisen through experience. At Christ College, Brecon, I encountered the classical disciplines of language, logic and moral argument, and began to understand that apparently simple questions of conduct became considerably less simple when motive and intention were taken into account.

The study of languages taught me something else. Words that appear equivalent may carry different assumptions, and meaning rarely survives translation entirely unchanged. I came to suspect that the same was true of people. What a man says and what another understands him to have said are not necessarily the same thing.

Sport provided a rather different education. Competition has an unusual capacity to expose qualities that remain concealed under more comfortable circumstances. Patience, vanity, generosity, resentment, courage and fear may all become visible when something is at stake. I did not think of this as the study of conduct at the time, but I came gradually to appreciate that human beings reveal themselves as readily through action as through words.

* * *

At Oxford, the questions of childhood acquired philosophical form. I went up to read Literae Humaniores, and encountered thinkers who had approached questions of truth, justice, responsibility, virtue and character from very different directions. The more I read, however, the less persuaded I became that any single system could account for the variety of human behaviour. People appeared more complicated than the theories intended to explain them.

Henry Sidgwick particularly impressed me, not because he offered certainty, but because he demonstrated that intellectual honesty required difficult questions to be pursued wherever they might lead. Sincerity, I began to understand, could never by itself guarantee truth. A man might believe himself entirely sincere and nevertheless be mistaken, not only about the world, but about himself.

During those years I also came under the influence of Dr Elias Markham, a scholar of uncommon intellect and generosity. Markham seldom answered a question directly. Instead, he examined the assumptions concealed within it. From him I learned that the quality of an inquiry depends less upon the answers obtained than upon the questions one is prepared to ask.

It was through Markham that I encountered a number of writers whose influence extended well beyond my years at Oxford. William Blake proved particularly persistent. I found much of his work perplexing, yet returned to it repeatedly. What interested me was his refusal to divide human nature into simple categories. Opposing impulses might coexist within the same individual; contradiction was not necessarily evidence of confusion, but part of human nature itself.

This troubled the simpler moral assumptions of my childhood. Increasingly, I found myself wondering whether an action could ever be adequately explained by a single motive. Men might love and resent the same person, desire an outcome and fear its consequences, believe themselves honourable while acting from motives they would be reluctant to acknowledge.

Contradiction, rather than consistency, began to seem one of the more revealing characteristics of human nature.

After Oxford, I travelled north to Edinburgh to continue my studies…

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When a Place Becomes a Story

Ideas rarely arrive when I’m sitting at my desk. They appear when I’m walking in the mountains, following a forest track or wandering along the North Wales coast.

I’m never short of ideas. In fact, I probably have more than I can ever deal with. The challenge is recognising which of them is worth pursuing.

They seldom arrive fully formed, with a plot and cast of characters already waiting. Usually there is just a spark, something that catches my attention and arouses my natural curiosity.

One of those moments occurred at Dolwyddelan Castle in late 2025.

It was an overcast, damp day, and the place had that sense of enigmatic drama I have experienced many times in North Wales. From its vantage point high on a ridge of volcanic rock, the castle seems almost to be part of the natural landscape.

Built between 1210 and 1240 by Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, or Llywelyn the Great, it was intended to guard the mountain road between the Conwy valley and the uplands of Meirionnydd. In 1283, after months of siege, it fell to Edward I during his campaign to extinguish Welsh independence. For a time it held a garrison, but eventually the soldiers moved to the coast and the castle fell silent.

As I wandered through the ruins, taking photographs, I found myself wondering less about battles and princes than about quieter things.

Who had walked these corridors? Who had stood waiting in these rooms? What conversations had taken place here that history never recorded?

Much of history is about great events and famous names, but I have always been drawn instead to the countless ordinary lives that unfolded beneath them and disappeared almost as soon as they were lived.

It was somewhere during that walk that another thought appeared.

What if a discovery made within these walls challenged not only accepted history, but the people who found it?

I didn’t leave Dolwyddelan with an outline for a novel. I didn’t know there would be a medieval manuscript, a gathering of scholars or even Professor Owain Morgan. What I carried home was a question that refused to disappear.

Over the following weeks, I read about medieval Wales, Victorian scholarship, historical forgery, antiquarian societies and the growing fascination with archaeology during the nineteenth century. One question led naturally to another until, gradually, the world of The Silence of the White Shadow began to emerge.

The photographs I had taken that afternoon became part of the process. Looking at them took me back to the castle, to the landscape around it and to the questions that had occurred to me as I walked through the ruins. I realised that this is often how I imagine stories. I see the world first, and then begin to wonder who might inhabit it, what might have happened there and why.

The castle had provided the spark. Everything else grew from that.

I’ve learned not to dismiss those quiet moments of curiosity. I wasn’t searching for a novel that cold afternoon at Dolwyddelan Castle. I had simply gone there with my camera and started wondering about the people who had passed through those rooms before me.

The Silence of the White Shadow became my way of finding out where those questions might lead.