Welsh Legal History Society
Cymdeithas Hanes Cyfraith Cymru

AN INTERESTING CASE ON LAW AND LANGUAGE

Law and language are obviously intimately connected. It is probably well known to readers of this particular website that English was officially established as the language of Welsh courts following Henry VIII's union legislation, and that use of Welsh did not become formally permissible until the twentieth century, though it was necessarily to be heard earlier "unofficially" in courts notwithstanding. What is perhaps less well known is that English was not the only language used by English lawyers, Latin, and the curiously debased offspring of Anglo-Norman called "Law French, were employed for certain purposes until a statute of 1731, entering force in 1733, finally prohibited its use.

The image above shows a report of a case, Lloyd v Bethell, as reported in Law French in Rolle's Reports of 1675 (the proceedings themselves would have been conducted in English). The substance of the case is rather obscure, since the proceedings were concerned with a writ of error, namely a form of appeal based on a legal failing in the original trial. In this case the proceedings concerning seizure of property ("distress") had begun in the court of Great Sessions in Wales, and the writ of error was determined by the Court of King's Bench at Westminster. It is the second allegation of error which concerns us here. It is alleged that on the distress return three jurors were named as "Pells" whereas on the jury they were called "Bells". This discrepancy would invalidate the proceedings and the problem was exacerbated by the fact that the Sheriff who could amend the error was now dead. But counsel for the defendants uses the remarkable argument that in the Welsh language there is no such error, for the letter P could mutate into a B where it follows another P "ephoniae gratia" ("for the sake of euphony"): "ap Pell" and "Ap Bell" were the same thing and historically the family used Bell and Pell interchangeably. The King's Bench threw out the argument. Untroubled by arguments about Welsh orthography, they say they were different names.
RWI

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