13th September - Law News

Edition 5374: LawNewsIndex is a UK based daily legal news archive on Law, Lawyers, Law Firms, Jurisprudence, Legislation, Litigation, Legal Ethics, Human Rights and Social Justice related issues since 2011.

Today's Highlighted Video: X (Appellant) v The Lord Advocate (Respondent) - Case ID: UKSC/2024/0116

A selection of important developments in the world of law and justice (for a comprehensive look at the news and events, please visit @theLawMap Twitter/X feed):

Saturday Conversations on Law

• Growing apart: practice note on differences in English and Welsh law fills 38 pages | Law Gazette
• The Legal Services Board (LSB) is to take further enforcement action against the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), setting additional performance targets and ‘intensifying’ its oversight, it has said | New Law Journal
• ‘We’re hiring people that historically would only have been hired in the software space’ - The Global Legal Post
• Campaigners react as MPs say no to legalising assisted dying. Opponents say proposed law change for England and Wales was ‘unsafe and unworkable’ after bill is narrowly defeated
• Costs & Funding: Disclosure: a cure worse than the disease? | Law Gazette
• Digitalisation of the justice system took a step forward this week as the Online Procedure Rules (OPR) came into force | New Law Journal

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The Sunday Editorial: 

LawNewsIndex was founded as a way of cataloguing the ongoing changes in the UK justice system as well as documenting social justice related conversations as observed through the Twitter/X account @thelawmap. In the decade and half since 2011, LawNewsIndex has collated thousands of articles documenting how the justice system in Britain had responded to local and international events. The ongoing archive on justice, law and societal changes covers each day since December 2011. Since July 2026, a new weekend feature comprising essays, comments and original creative writing on an eclectic range of subjects is being published as The Sunday Editorial from a range of writers:  

In Defence of Iolo Morganwg, Forging Wales’ Past to Preserve Its Cultural Future: There are men whom history catches in the act. Iolo Morganwg is one of them. The hand is still visible on the page. Here, the manuscript has been altered; here, the genealogy extended; here, the ancient ceremony turns out to have been manufactured, not remembered. The forensic light of scholarship falls upon the evidence and the verdict seems almost embarrassingly clear. Iolo forged. Iolo invented. Iolo passed his own imaginings off as the inheritance of the dead.
And yet he remains. More than that: he has become impossible to dismiss.

Perhaps this is because we have learnt to be suspicious of the convenient border between truth and fiction. The twenty-first century knows that nations are stories as much as territories, that memory is less an archive than a composition, and what survives from the past is never quite the same as the past itself. We know that histories are written, and that the writing matters. 

Iolo knew something of this instinctively. He could not bear the blank spaces. Where the surviving record became indistinct, he drew a line. Where tradition seemed broken, he supplied a bridge. Where the fragments of medieval Wales lay scattered like stones after a ruin, he began, with astonishing confidence, he built.

The historian in us recoils. The literary imagination recognises the gesture. Iolo was not merely forging documents he was attempting to forge continuity. That distinction does not absolve him. It explains him.

He lived in a Wales whose political independence had become memory, whose language occupied an increasingly precarious position in the institutions of power, and whose cultural inheritance could too easily be reduced to picturesque relics for somebody else's antiquarian cabinet. The question was not simply what Wales had been. It was whether Wales possessed a past powerful enough to resist becoming somebody else's footnote.

Iolo's answer was extravagant.

Wales, he insisted, had depth. It had bards and druids, lineages and ceremonies, an antiquity that reached back beyond the reach of ordinary historical memory. He populated the darkness with ancestors.

It is tempting to laugh at this now but there is something almost desperate in it.

A conquered people can lose a territory and still remain a people. More dangerous is the moment when they begin to doubt the value of their own inheritance. 

Political power may be taken by force; cultural confidence can be eroded more quietly. A language becomes “old-fashioned”. A tradition becomes “folklore”. A literature becomes “minor”. Eventually, the people themselves begin to look at their inheritance through the eyes of those who have already dismissed it.

Iolo's great rebellion was imagination. He refused the diminished version of Wales. If history would give him fragments, he would give Wales a mythology of wholeness. He was a patriot and patriots need not be flawless.

This is where his relationship with literature becomes so revealing. We do not reject Arthurian legend because Arthur cannot be located neatly in an archive. We do not read The Odyssey as though it were a police report. We understand that invented stories can carry truths that factual documents cannot easily contain.

The problem, of course, is that Iolo wanted both kinds of authority. He wanted the freedom of the poet and the credibility of the historian. There lies his great failure. He crossed the boundary between invention and evidence and then erased the footprints.

That very transgression is what makes him so compelling to a modern reader. He stands at the unstable frontier between history and literature, where the desire to know the past becomes indistinguishable from the desire to create it.

His modern Gorsedd tradition is the great paradox. Its supposed ancient origins cannot simply be accepted as historical fact. Yet the institution itself became real. The ceremonies survived. The symbols survived. Poets gathered. Generations inherited a cultural ritual that Iolo had helped bring into being.

The invention acquired descendants. The fiction became history. Not ancient history, certainly but something even more interesting: modern history.

Here lies the strange afterlife of the forgery. Once a fabrication enters the world, it does not necessarily remain under its maker's control. People believe it, reject it, adapt it, ritualise it. It begins to do things. It enters memory. It changes the landscape of culture.

Iolo's creative fabrications therefore cannot simply be peeled away and discarded, because the consequences of those fabrications have themselves become part of the historical record.

The counterfeit became an artefact. The invented past became part of the real past.

This does not mean that truth is unimportant. 

Quite the opposite. 

Iolo's example reminds us why historical truth matters. A culture deserves to know the difference between what its ancestors left behind and what later generations wished they had left behind. Wales does not need invented greatness. Its actual literary and cultural inheritance is more than astonishing.

However, neither should we imagine that facts alone constitute cultural memory. They do not.

A people lives not only by what happened but by what it believes happened, by the stories through which the dead become intelligible to the living. History provides the stones; imagination decides what kind of house they might make.
Iolo was reckless with those stones.

But he understood the house.

Perhaps this is why the word fraud feels simultaneously correct and insufficient. A fraud deceives for advantage. Iolo's deception was tangled with something stranger: a hunger to rescue, magnify and reanimate. He wanted the Welsh past to speak with such authority that nobody could mistake its existence.

When the dead would not speak loudly enough, he spoke for them. It is indefensible as scholarship. It is fascinating as cultural psychology and there is something profoundly human in it. We all inherit the dead through stories. We all arrange fragments. We all, to some extent, make ancestors out of what remains. Iolo simply performed the process without the restraints that modern scholarship would later impose.

He made the private act of remembering public.

He made it theatrical.

He made it national.

That is why the proper response to Iolo is neither belief nor ridicule. We should expose the forgeries and preserve the facts. But once the debunking is complete, we should remain long enough to ask the more difficult question:

Why did he need to invent this?

The answer may be more revealing than the forgery itself.

He needed Wales to possess a past because he feared what might happen to a people who could be persuaded that their past was negligible. His methods were sometimes dishonest. His anxiety was not. His antiquity was largely imagined. His cultural consequence was real.

Thus Iolo remains, hovering between the manuscript and the myth: a forger, certainly, but also a poet of cultural survival; a man who falsified the dead because he could not bear the possibility that the living might forget them.

We should not believe him, nor should we neglect to read him because Iolo Morganwg does not tell us what Wales was, he tells us something more unsettling: what it means for a people to feel that its past is slipping away—and how far the imagination may travel in order to bring it back.

Read last week's Editorial 

Taz Rahman holds a masters in ethics and social philosophy from Cardiff University. He is a South Wales based writer and literary documentary maker. His debut poetry collection 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was published by Seren Books and longlisted for the Laurel prize in 2024. He is widely published in leading poetry magazines and anthologies and had founded Wales' first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet. 

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