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.

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…

Discover The Silence of the White Shadow →

When a Place Becomes a Story

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

For me, the difficulty has never been finding ideas. I have more than I can reasonably do anything with, and that creates its own problem of procrastination and inertia. It has always been recognising which of them contains a story I want to tell.

I keep a list of ideas, some of which may become an essay, short story or full-length novel. Some will never see the light of day. Or maybe they will, when I get around to them.

They rarely arrive fully formed as a plot or a character. More often they begin with something that catches my attention and makes me want to know more.

One of those moments occurred at Dolwyddelan Castle in late 2025. It was overcast and it had been raining. The castle was damp and dark, with that sense of foreboding North Wales can acquire when the weather closes in.

I had visited Dolwyddelan many times before. Like so many places in North Wales, it is woven into the landscape so naturally that it almost becomes part of the mountains themselves. Yet on that particular day I wasn’t looking for a story. I had gone with my camera, hoping simply to spend a few hours photographing a place that has fascinated me for years.

As I wandered through the ruins, I found myself wondering less about battles and princes than about quieter things such as who had walked these corridors, who had been in these rooms, and what conversations had taken place that history had never recorded.

Much of history is about great events and famous names, but I have always been more interested in the ordinary lives taking place beneath them, most of which disappeared without leaving any record at all.

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, or a gathering of scholars, or even Professor Owain Morgan. None of those things existed yet.

What I carried home was simply a question that refused to disappear. Worthwhile questions follow you home. They remain while I’m making tea, walking the dog or — as seems to happen surprisingly often — taking my morning shower.

Over the following weeks I found myself reading 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.

Looking back now, it seems obvious that the novel began there. At the time it felt nothing like the beginning of a book, just an enjoyable afternoon spent walking around an old castle with my camera.

Writers sometimes speak about finding stories. I am no longer sure that is the right phrase for me. More often, I think, I stumble across something that makes me curious and follow it to see where it leads. Sometimes it leads nowhere. Occasionally, as it did at Dolwyddelan, it becomes a novel.

I’m learning not to dismiss those moments when something catches my attention. I wasn’t searching for a novel that cold afternoon at Dolwyddelan Castle; I was simply curious, and The Silence of the White Shadow became the way of exploring it.