ABSTRACT
The most significant, distinctive, and yet most elusive, music of medieval and early modern Wales is 'the craft of the string' or cerdd dant, played on harp and crwth. Since the relationship of Welsh bardic poetry and music was so close, a proper understanding of cerdd dant inevitably demands some understanding of the poetry that partnered it. One of the most striking features of such poetry is its strongly aural quality, in part a natural outcome of its social function: as we have seen, this was poetry for public declamation before a noble audience, rather than for private reading. During the era of Dafydd ap Gwilym a particularly significant development was to occur in this respect: the flowering of a lively new poetic form known as the cywydd, which was to become the staple genre for poets of the Welsh nobility right up to the demise of the bardic order.
