Gwladys Ddu verch Llewelyn - Her mother

The book that you link to is inaccessible for any real reading, so I can’t find the passage where Mortimer discusses Gwladys’s lineage. The wikipedia article says that “sources differ” as to whether she is Joan’s daughter, without saying what the sources are, but that it is “widely accepted” that she is Joan’s daughter. But the article gives no citations for any of this, though it lists Mortimer’s work on Mortimer genealogy as a source. However, if you go there, you discover 5hat Gwladys’s mother is not mentioned.

There is no way yet of checking the evidence and argumentation for the assertion that Joan is her mother, but perhaps it will appear.

The Welsh manuscripts do not say that Joan was her mother, however. In general our custom here has been to use, when they differ, the Welsh sources for the a welsh and the Anglo-Norman sources for the Anglo-Normans.

Thanks! But there are no citations. Are you able to find the footnote that gives the manuscript evidence he’s using for the connection?

Bartrum originally ascribed Tangwystl as Gwladys’s mother, but then took that connection out, which is why we connect her to “unknown mistress,” of whom Llewelyn had several. On the page of his charts we have here — https://www.geni.com/documents/view?doc_id=6000000173392980834 — he gives five manuscript citations, mostly from the Peniarth collection at the National Library of Wales. That’s what I’m asking about — what manuscripts are Mortimer using? The information should be somewhere, but I don’t have access to the book.

My guess here is that the Anglo-Norman concern with legitimacy — which the Welsh did not share — caused them to assume, since Gwladys was so well placed, that she was Joan’s daughter. But if that information is not showing up in the Welsh manuscripts, it’s not as strong as what Bartrum is seeing — which is that her mother isn’t listed.

There is definitive proof either way, as far as I have been able to find, though certainly if there is we will be glad to shift Gwladys on over!

I note your argument that Joan would not have left a any of her lands to Gwladys unless she were her biological daughter, but Joan, who had come from a French background into her father’s Anglo-Norman court, embraced her role as a Welsh wife — she was called Siwan there, and she was living in a place where her illegitimacy under Church law was irrelevant, and a place where women’s lives differed from what she had known. i would love to know all of her bequests; several of Lewelyn’s children by other women were around, with varying roles in the country.

Private User I don't think Bartrum is disconnecting Gwladus from Tangwystl. He did not cross out the "(a)" above her name, he only changed the straight line, indicating legitimacy, to a crooked line, for illegitimacy.

Steven Mitchell Ferry -- true, that's the better interpretation.

So what we have is that Medlands gives Gwladys an unidentified mother, based on her mother not being in the MSS that Medlands deals with, Bartrum gives Tangwystl as her mother, based on the Welsh manuscripts, and she is also given Joan as a mother, based on no evidence that's been coughed up so far; many of the people I'm reading say "nobody knows."

Private User is the curator of this profile -- Janet, the Welsh say that Tangwystl is her mother, though there is otherwise disagreement (seldom actual argumentation, just a bunch of disagreement). What say you?

Dmitry Azikov -- Bartrum cites one MS that gives Tangwystl as Gwladys's mother, but others that give Joan as her mother. So it's a matter, I gather, of the preponderance of the evidence being for Joan.

The people who say "nobody knows" are discounting the evidence given by the actual Welsh people, who are writing about actual Welsh people.

This happens a lot.

But on Geni we have the custom of considering the Welsh MSS as evidence when examining the Welsh tree; and Bartrum did the main work in collating the Welsh MS.

Dmitry Azikov -- Thanks! I will wrassle the Mortimers and iron them out.