The large body of surviving poetry and prose from medieval Wales contains many references to the performance and practice of music, to musical instruments and to the reception of musical events by both noble and urban audiences. The medieval Welsh word for music, cerdd, also signifies ‘craft’, ‘song’, ‘poetry’ or ‘musical instrument’, indicating the close links between music, poetry and the craft of making instruments. It also indicates that both music and poetry were regarded as a type of professional craft, moderated by their own particular standards and hierarchies. The commonest entertainments offered at the courts of the nobility in medieval Wales were poetry, storytelling and music, and these three arts were closely intertwined. Well-known examples include the poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym (c.1325–60) to his beloved as she plays the harp, while other references can be found in the prose tales of the Mabinogion. However, the private entertainments of the nobility and gentry were not the only occasions for the performance of music; travelling minstrels also performed in the streets of towns and at local fairs. This chapter examines a range of such references to music, performers and instruments in medieval Welsh literature, looking at the different kinds of entertainers, their professional hierarchies, the patronage of nobility and gentry and the popular entertainments characteristic of urban culture.

The dominant genre of secular music in medieval Wales was cerdd dant (literally ‘string craft’), a highly distinctive repertory played on the harp or crwth. Its delivery relied on highly trained professional instrumentalists, who worked in close partnership with Welsh strict-metre poets: both crafts were an intrinsic part of Welsh medieval ‘high culture’, linked to an exclusive bardic order. Though largely transmitted orally, some thirty items from the repertory were entabulated by the Anglesey harper Robert ap Huw c.1613. Cerdd dant largely retained its status until the 1560s, when the fashion for acquiring an English education gradually brought about a sea change in musical taste, effected by the importation of English tunes, texts, instruments and books. Some of the Welsh nobility nevertheless retained a loyalty to the practitioners of the traditional bardic crafts well into the seventeenth century, resulting in a mixed economy in some households, where vernacular music and poetry might rub shoulders with the latest English-style entertainments.