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[11] A translation of this poem by John Mitchell Kemble was published in 1837; one by Thomas Arnold in 1876; another more recently by Colonel Lumsden; another by Rev. S. Fox, 1864.

[12] A chapter is devoted to the question of the genuineness and chronology of Nennius in Wright’s Biographia Britannica Literaria.

[13] Geoffrey of Monmouth: British History, chap. xii.

[14] For Robert de Brunne’s metrical version of this story, cf. Warton, Hist. Poet., i. 73. For Robert of Gloucester’s account, see Knight, Old Eng., p. 70.

[15] Golyddan: Arymes Prydein Vawr, 2 (as rendered by Turner).

[16] Professor Morley’s rendering is here adopted. Part of the Gododin was translated by Gray. A version of the whole is to be found in Davies’s Mythology of the Druids. It was translated by Probert in 1820, and by Rev. John Williams ap Ithel in 1858. It should be mentioned that Davies strangely maintains that the poem does not refer to the battle of Cattraeth, but to the massacre of the Welsh chieftains by Hengist’s command at a banquet at Stonehenge.

[17] Turner, Vindication of the Ancient British Poems.

[18] The poems of Taliesin are printed in the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, collected out of ancient MSS.

[19] An incident in his life also illustrates the intemperance of the time. Fishing at sea in a skin coracle, he was seized by Irish pirates, who carried him off towards Ireland. Escaping from them in his coracle while they were engaged in drunken revelry, he was tossed about at the mercy of the waves till the coracle stuck to the point of a pole in the weir of the Prince of Cardigan, at whose court he remained till the time of the great inundation which formed Cardigan Bay.

[20] MS. Cotton, Julius A. vi. inserted in Wright’s Homes of other Days.

[21] The original is given in Thorp’s Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, London, 1834.

[22] Exeter MS. fol. 107, vo.

[23] Prefixed to Collectanea, 1770, p. 75.

[24] See Christmas Festivities, by the present writer.

[25] Warner mentions this drink as in his days a speciality (1797). He says: ‘We now reached the Beaufort Arms (Crickhowel), where we refreshed ourselves with a bottle of cwrrw or Welsh ale.... I cannot say that it proved agreeable to our palates, though the Cambrians seek it with avidity, and quaff it with the most patient perseverance. Their ancestors, you know, displayed a similar propensity eighteen hundred years ago, and the old Celt frequently sunk under the powerful influence of the ancient cwrrw. It was then, as now, made from barley, but the grain was dried in a peculiar way which gives it a smoky taste, and renders it glutinous, heady, and soporiferous.’ Cf. Pliny, lib. xiv.: ‘Est et occidentis populis sua ebrietas, fruge madida’; and Strabo, lib. iv.: ‘Ligures utuntur potu hordeaceo.’