#6 - PEREDUR BEISWYN or BEISWYRDD
Bartrum offered two different pedigrees
under the above heading:
(1) "Peredur peisswyn arglwydd Kredigion
ap Ednyfed Meirionydd ap Einudd bach"
(2) "Predur peisswerdd arglwydd Keredigion
uchaf ap Einion ap Evydd ap Pill ap Sanddef ap Gwyddno garanhir arglwydd Keredigion"
In his notes to the pedigrees, he
states:
"Peredur Beiswyn and Peredur Beiswyrdd
were probably brothers, perhaps twins, but if so, they have been so thoroughly confused that it would be hard now to distinguish
them. Note that older texts generally treat pais as masculine. The dates of Gwaithfoed of Ceredigion,
Rhys Chwith and Cadwgan Fantach poinht to a date of about 970 for the birth of Peredur. In Lhuyd's Parochialia 1.
7 we find:
'Predyr Peiswyrdh, Ld of higher Cardigan,
had a place or Pallace called Kayro, viz: Lhys Predyr ynghayro'
"According to E, Phillimore in Owen's
Pembrokeshire ii, 603 this must have been at or near Aber Caero in Llanfihangel, Geneu'r Glyn.
"In [pedigree (2)] Evydd is probably
a corrupt form of Einudd"
In his later work Welsh Genealogies
AD 300-1400, Bartrum abandons his belief about two brothers named Peredur and attaches all the ensuing families to a
composite Peredur. We think there were two brothers which we separate by the lands held by the descendants of each.
Men said to descend from Peredur Beisgwyn were all found in Ceredigion, while the immediate descendants of Peredur Beiswrydd
remained in Meirionydd where his ancestors had lived for centuries.
We would reject pedigree (1) above
since Eunydd Bach (without the nickname) appears in the ancestry of the first Einion ap Seisyllt as "Seisyllt ap Ednowain
ap Eunydd ap Brochwel" etc.[1] This is another family of Meirionydd, but a cousin line of the Peredur brothers whose
closest common ancestor was Gwyddno ap Cadwaladr ap Cynan of c. 830
Pedigree (2) above agrees exactly
(if we delete "garanhir" after Gwyddno) with our charts; the brothers were sons of Einion ap Eunydd ap Pyll ap Sandde ap Gwyddno.
Their father, Einion ap Eunydd, had inherited lands in far north Ceredigion from his mother Morfydd ferch Odwin[2].
We believe Peredur Beiswrydd was the youngest sibling and inherited the paternal manor in Meirionydd, while Peredur Beisgwyn
received the Ceredigion lands. A third son of Einion ap Eunydd (and perhaps the eldest) was, we think, Cynddelw ap Einion
who is treated separately in this series of papers on "Patriarchs".
Bartrum dates the Peredur
brothers a generation too early. We assign them birthdates c. 995 and 1000 and suggest the older of the two was Peredur
Beisgwyn. He was the ancestor of Rhys Chwith and Cadwgan Fantach, while we think both Gwaithfoed of Merionydd and Gwaithfoed
of Ceredigion descended from Peredur Beiswrydd.
The nicknames born by
the Peredur brothers are probably misspelled, being neither "peis" nor "beis" but originally "pais" or "bais" meaning coat.
It may not have applied to clothing, but to a coat of arms...that is, to the principal color on the shields they carried into
battle: one white and one red.
We would assign Cadifor[3],
a Meirionydd man, as the only son of Peredur Beiswrydd while Edelfrych[4], Pyll[5] and Gwylfyw[6] were men of Ceredigion and
sons of Peredur Beisgwyn.
