The corpus contains two religious plays, ‘Y dioddefaint’ and ’Y tri brenin o Gwlen’, from British Museum Additional 14986. Although the oldest manuscript dates from 1552, little is known as to when the plays might have been composed and / or committed to writing. In her edition, Jones argues (44–8), on linguistic grounds, that the plays were composed towards the end of the fourteenth century. However, the evidence is scant, and further research is needed to corroborate this.
‘Y dioddefaint’ is found on folios 10v-33v of the manuscript, and is followed by ‘Y tri brenin o Gwlen’ on folios 33v-38v. The manuscript is by various sixteenth-century hands. The scribe of the two religious plays is identified as Llelo Gwta (Llywelyn ap Mredydd) (Plas y Lelo, Derwen, Denbs.) on folio 10v.
The text of ‘Y tri brenin o Gwlen’ is incomplete in British Museum Additional 14986. The last page has been torn off, leaving an irregular margin, and the text goes only as far as the end of line 222. The remainder of the text has been supplied here from British Museum Additional 15038, foios 60r-62v. This manuscript is slightly later, and was copied in 1575 by Morgan ap Henri of Llangyfelach, Glamorgan.
The earliest manuscript is from Denbighshire, and linguistic evidence is consistent with the north-east of Wales as the origin of the plays. Detailed evidence for dialect from the orthography and phonology of the texts according to the various manuscripts can be found in Jones's edition. Note especially that the plays have /e/ as the outcome of post-tonic Middle Welsh diphthongs /aɨ aʉ aɪ/ and /e/ (for example, Dioddefaint 791-4 rhymes drysse : vffernlle : mine), which is consistent with an early northern provenance, before lowering of this /e/ to /a/ in northern dialects.
The text has been marked up using the basic structural markup for drama. Note, however, that speeches, identified using sp-elements, have no who-attribute in ‘Y dioddefaint’. An editiorial castlist has been supplied for ‘Y tri brenin o Gwlen’ only. Speaker names in the manuscript are in boxes in the right margin throughout, with an empty box in the right margin where a speaker continues over more than one stanza. These have been placed in the usual position before the spoken text in the transcription.
At one point, two lines are absent in BM Add. 14986 where they are present in some of the other manuscripts of the text, although no gap is left for them. Two numbered blank lines have been added to the transcription at this point (lines 515–16), in order to ensure that the line numbers of this edition and Jones's edition are consistent with one another.
The text of ‘Y tri brenin o Gwlen’ has been taken from two mansucripts. For this reason, the text is treated as a grouped text, with each manuscript section being treated as a separate text-element with a group-element. The two texts are linked together using next- and prev-attributes of the text-element.
Editorial spaces are sometimes inserted to divide words. The isp-convention has been partially, but not consistently, used. Capitalisation has been left as in the manuscript, so that, with the exception of <R> for modern Welsh <rh>, the first letter of each stanza and the names of speakers are not capitalised.