Celtic Lore & Legend by Bob Curran Page A

excursions on the boundaries of it. For some time, he pursued and endeavoured to catch them, but always failed; for the enchanting nymphs, and, when they had reached the lake they tauntingly exclaimed:
    Cras dy fara,
Anhawdd ein dala
.
    which, with a little circumlocution, means “For thee, who eatest baked bread, it is difficult to catch us”.
    One day some moist bread from the lake came to shore. The farmer devoured it with great avidity, and on the following day he was successful in his pursuit and caught the fair damsels. After a little conversation with them, he commanded courage sufficient to make a proposal of marriage to one of them. They consented to accept him on the condition that he would distinguish her from her two sisters on the following day. This was a new and very great difficulty to the young farmer, for the fair nymphs were so similar in form and features, that he could scarcely perceive any difference between them. He observed, however, a trifling singularity in the strapping of her sandal by which he recognised her the following day. Some indeed who relate this legend, say that this Lady of the Lake hinted in a private conversation with her swain that upon the day of the trial, she would place herself between hertwo sisters and that she would turn her right foot a little to the right and by this means, he distinguished her from her sisters. Whatever were the means, the end was secured, he selected her and she immediately left the lake and accompanied him to his farm. Before she quitted, she summoned to attend her from the lake, seven cows, two oxen, and one bull.
    The lady engaged to live with him until such time as he would strike her three times without cause. For some years they lived together in comfort and she bore him three sons, who were the celebrated Meddygon Myddvai.
    One day when preparing for a fair in the neighbourhood, he desired her to go to the field for his horse. She said she would, but being rather dilatory, he said to her humorously, “dos, dos. Dos—i.e. go, go, go” and he slightly touched her on the arm, three times with his glove.
    As she now deemed the terms of her marriage broken, she immediately departed, and summoned with her her seven cows, her two oxen and the bull. The oxen were at that very time ploughing in the field but they immediately obeyed her call and took the plough with them. The furrow from the field in which they were ploughing, to the margin of the lake is to be seen in several parts of that country to the present day.
    After her departure, she once met her two sons in a Cwm, now called Cwm Meddygon (Physicians Combe) and delivered to each of them a bag containing some articles which are unknown but which are supposed to have been some discoveries in medicine.
    The Meddygon Myddvai were Rhiwallon and his sons, Cadwgan, Gruffydd, and Einion. They were the chief physicians of their age, and they wrote about A.D. 1230. A copy of their works is in the Welsh School Library, in Grey’s Inn Lane.
    Such are the Welsh Taboo tales. I will now make a few remarks upon them.
    The age of these legends is worthy of consideration. The legend of Meddygon Myddvai dates from about the thirteenth century. Rhiwallon and his sons, we are told by the writer of the Cambro-Briton wrote about 1230 A.D. but the editor of that publication speaks of a manuscript written by these physicians about the year 1300. Modern experts think that their treatise on medicine in the Red Book of Hengist belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, about 1380 or 1400.
    Dyfydd ab Gwilym , who is said to have flourished in the fourteenth century, says in one of his poems, as given in the Cambro-Briton , vol ii, p 313, alluding to these physicians:
    “ Meddyg nis gwnai modd y gwaeth
    Myddfai, o chai ddyn maddfaeth ”
    “A Physician he would not make,
    As Myddvai made, if he had a mead fostered man”
    It would appear, therefore, that these celebrated physicians lived somewhere about the thirteenth