ABSTRACT
References to the staple instruments of cerdd dant, the harp and crwth, are found in a number of early Welsh sources pre-dating 1400. Some of these texts evidently incorporate layers of retrospective elaboration, although five of the sources discussed below were in existence in some form well before 1350, and Gerald of Wales, who made a number of important observations about music, probably wrote his Topographia Hibernica around 1185. Just one of the sources, David Powel's Historie of Cambria, derives from a later period, but it is included here since it evidently draws on much earlier material. The great feast allegedly held at Cardigan Castle in 1176 by the Lord Rhys, where musicians and poets are said to have competed to win a chair, is often cited as the earliest recorded eisteddfod, although there is no overt emphasis here on the rigorous graduation requirements that characterized its late medieval counterpart.
