¹ I am indebted for descriptions and photographs of the Carmarthenshire examples to the report of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales (1896), pp. 690 ff., and to the Commission’s Secretary, Sir D. Lleufer Thomas, who has placed in the National Museum of Wales a number of plans and photographs prepared for that report but which did not appear in it. But for his foresight this valuable evidence would have been lost.

^* For this type see Innocent, C.F.: The Development of English Building Construction, pp. 23–61.Google Scholar

² P.R.O. MS. Wales 4–141–3. Reference given by Prof. E. A. Lewis of Aberystwyth. Acknowledgment is made to Miss Amy Foster, the Central Library, Cardiff, for transcribing this manuscript.

³ In Béaloideas, 1935, p. 68.Google Scholar

⁴ [Dickinson, W.]: Cumbriana, 1875, p. 197.Google Scholar

⁵ I am indebted to Principal Rees, J.F., University College, Cardiff, for this reference.Google Scholar

⁶ Roussell, Aage, Norse Building Customs in the Scottish Isles, 1934.Google Scholar

⁷ Stenberger, Mårten: ‘Remnants of Iron Age Houses on öland’ in Acta Archaeologica, 1931, 2, 93–104.Google Scholar

⁸ This word tyle was translated by Lady Guest as ‘couch’. Its gender in Breuddwyd Rhonabwy is feminine, whereas generally it is masculine. Over a large area of Wales its one meaning is ‘hill, raised ground, mound’. With this, cf. Irish tulach, ‘hill’, which seems to be related (for -ach=-e, cf. imbdrach-bore). Lewis’s tyle=Irish tolg ‘bed’ must be rejected. Irish colg, bolg correspond with col, coly, and bol, boly not with ^∗ cyle and ^∗ byle. But tolg-+lie i.e. ‘the place of a bed’ would not only give the form tyle but also account for the gender of the noun in this tale, since lie used to be feminine. Sofie, lit. ‘place to stand’ and tyle ‘place to lie’ would then be antithetical nouns. In Ancient Laws, i, 454, reference is made to a sow ar y thyle and ii, 77, ‘partus suis dum sit ar e thele’ with the explanation ‘[in suili]’. It is noteworthy that the sty is always raised above the sty-yard in the same way that the ‘raised platform’ of the house is above the byre. I am confident therefore that the tyle of medieval times when used in relation to buildings referred to a raised platform in house and pigsty alike on which straw was, generally laid to form a bed. It may be that tyle ‘hill’ (masculine) and tyle ‘raised platform’ (feminine) are two different words derived, as suggested, from different sources : but this is a problem for the philologists to whom I leave it.

I am indebted to DrWilliams, Ifor, University College, Bangor Google Scholar, for exhaustive references to and notes on this word, and for many suggestions. This note owes its origin to the information he has given me, but he is not of course responsible for the conclusions which I have reached.

⁹ Seebohm, F., The English Village Community, 1883, pp. 239–41.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Richmond, I.A.: ‘Irish Analogies for the Romano-British Barn Dwellings’, Journal of Roman Studies, 22, 96–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ op. cit., p. 66.

^* cf. also Nant-y-ffîn, Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire (FIG. I).