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.