Gwerful Mechain: Female Voice in a Male World Wendi Rank Women in the Middle Ages: Sources from the Celtic Regions, HPCS7004 Professor Jane Cartwright University of Wales Trinity St. David March 15, 2026 Gwerful Mechain has the largest extant volume of work of any medieval female Welsh poet. Adelaide Greig calls her a poet ‘best known for […] poetry which explored the feminine condition, including experiences of sex and marriage.’ Katie Gramich, in her introduction to The Works of Gwerful Mechain, states that Mechain: often speaks with a female voice and overtly sees things from a woman’s point of view, taking her peers to task for their male arrogance, but she jousts with them verbally as their equal, confident in her own craft and opinions.1 This description emphasizes the distinctive tone of Mechain’s poetry. Mechain did not consistently adhere to the rules of Welsh strict meter poetry like her male contemporaries. Her sexual imagery was not camouflaged in religious sanctity like her female predecessors.1 Mechain did not write the laudatory and elegiac poems common to Welsh bards of her era. And the amount of her work that survives sets her apart from other female poets; Gramich and Nerys Ann Howells claim fourteen poems as certainly Mechain’s work, with five more likely being hers. Mechain may have such a significant body of work surviving today because of contemporary appreciation for her skill. However, Gramich’s introduction also notes the way Mechain’s style keeps pace with the male bards of her poetic circle – so much so that some works identified as Mechain’s have been identified as that of her male peers, and their work as hers. Mechain’s bawdiness is not unusual for her time. And overall, her work demonstrates, much like her contemporaries, a fluency with the strict meter poetry of her male contemporaries and predecessors. It is this dichotomy – Gwerful Mechain’s similarities to her contemporaries while maintaining an individualistic tone – that makes Gramich’s description of Mechain so authentic. The accuracy of Gramich’s praise can be demonstrated by exploring the time in which Mechain lived, examining her work, and discussing her work in the context of her male contemporaries. Wales 1460-1502 To understand Gwerful Mechain and her work, it is helpful to examine the time in which she lived, approximately 1460-1502, in the setting of the known circumstances of her life. Mechain was born to a lower nobility class family in Montgomeryshire. She was married and had at least one child, a daughter. Being a woman in Mechain’s time could be fraught. ‘The Church and the aristocracy’ developed the standards of medieval womanhood, and they did so harshly. Eileen Power describes these groups as not without their own biases, and the church specifically as ignorant of women’s experiences. Power’s observation underscores the medieval woman’s second-class citizenship, particularly when she describes the routine denigration of women in religious sermons. Indeed, Jennifer Garrison describes a medieval tendency to personify lust as a female to be resisted and subdued. Marriage was seen as secondary to a woman committing her life to Christ. Virginity was prized, with marriage functioning as an outlet to sate the oversexed female. Women were thought to be more libidinous than men; they were the bad actors, and the failure to remain pure even in marriage was theirs alone. Marriages could be arranged in childhood, with boys considered adults at fourteen, girls at twelve. However, girls could be married to men much older and, as in the case of Margaret Beaufort, give birth to children while still themselves adolescents. Mechain – or, more importantly, her husband John ap Llywelyn Fychan - may have adhered to The Laws of Women as laid out in the Hywel Dda. Significantly, Hywel Dda allowed a husband to beat his wife with ‘three blows’ using ‘a rod as long as a man’s forearm and as thick as a long finger.’ Shahar believes some husbands took this permission to the extreme. Even female anatomy and physiology were misunderstood. Their tendency to be physically less imposing than men was perceived as a failure. The uterus was paradoxical –a warm, safe organ for hosting the infant, but also a source of danger to the penis; the uterus endeavored to exert intentional harm to the male organ. Anatomical attention was rarely paid to the clitoris, and medical texts failed to agree on the mechanics of birth. In short, ‘no other part of the medieval body played such a defining role as the womb or the penis in plotting the bounds of how a person’s life might unfold.’ Literature of the day treated women no better than reality. Women were depicted negatively, particularly in the trendy French fabliaux. Female characters ran the gamut from duplicitous to senseless; even praise could be tempered with a parting shot. Power cautions that these portrayals may have belied sentiments as fictitious as the stories in which they appeared. But she adds that these portrayals of women flourished because they amused their audiences. It is, perhaps, no surprise then that literature penned by women was a relatively recent development in Mechain’s time. Circumstances of the time were not all negative, however. By the time of Henry VII’s ascension to the throne in 1485, the Welsh were beginning to flourish. Davies argues the uptick in poetry beginning in 1440 hardly indicates an economy without disposable income. The next roughly one hundred years would prove a rich era of skilled Welsh bards. Perhaps a factor in this economic stability is the advent of employed women. Llinos Beverley Smith calls ‘marriage or widowhood…the essential passports to work opportunities’ in Mechain’s time. Further, middle echelons of society, like Mechain, were literate. That being said, the experience of Virginia Woolf, as relayed by Barbara Hanawalt, provides a barometer of Mechain’s time as viewed through G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England, whose text covers not just England, but Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as well: In her search for information on the ordinary lives of women, Virginia Woolf took down Trevelyan’s History of England from the shelf, and looked up ‘women, position of’ and found only that ‘wife-beating was a recognized right of man,’ betrothals took place against the will of daughters, and children were married in the cradles in Trevelyan’s England of 1470. Male Medieval Welsh Poetry As women struggled with their societal role in medieval Wales, Welsh society struggled with independence. As the English ruler Edward I encroached on Wales’s territory in the thirteenth century, the Welsh aristocracy saw a decline. Up until this time, the aristocracy was responsible for subsidizing the nation’s poets. The Welsh gentry rose to fill the aristocracy’s vacancy. In this setting, the Welsh strict meter poetry known as cynghanedd took hold. Cynghanedd sets a measured, sophisticated flow to the poet’s words; it is a detailed and elegant enough meter to warrant categories within categories. Common to the cywydd, a forty- to eighty-line poem made up of rhyming couplets, themselves seven syllables each, and the englyn, a poem of just four lines, cynghanedd was deftly employed by Mechain. Englyn, in particular, is ideal for dispatching pithy, clever bon mots, something at which Mechain excelled. An additional method used by Welsh bards of this time - and adroitly appropriated by Mechain - is dyfalu, in which symbolic imagery is used repeatedly throughout a poem. The patriarch of cynghanedd is Dafydd ap Gwilym, and, as editor of The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English, Gwyn Jones is effusive in praising him. Dafydd ap Gwilym was a ‘master’ who wrote about ‘stars and sunshine, trees and birds…with the same zest as he narrated his adventures with girls.’ Cynghanedd is malleable, enabling application to a vast array of topics, from Christian praise to battle to romance. Jones describes Welsh strict meter poetry as ‘sinewy, masculine, and handsomely controlled.’ Poets telling their stories through cynghanedd often interwove the French themes of pastourelles and fabliaux. In the first, the narrator stumbles across a beautiful woman in a bucolic setting. By force or seduction, the two have intercourse. Often, the outdoor setting of their tryst is a wooded area - a favorite scene of ap Gwilym’s. In the latter, fabliaux, the story focuses on a canny, libidinous married woman. The complexity of cynghanedd meant the poets who employed it underwent extensive training. This training was almost exclusively the purview of wealthier men, but it was at times passed on to less affluent bards. Dafydd Llwyd was one of these informally educated poets. Unlike ap Gwilym, who was active a century before Mechain, Dafydd Llwyd was a contemporary of Mechain. As a female, Mechain was barred from formal training in Welsh strict meter poetry. Given Mechain’s skill, Gramich speculates Mechain was taught cynghanedd by Llwyd through their affiliation within a shared poetic troupe. The two traded poems, with some exchanges veering into the flirtatious and bawdy. Gramich, Cartwright, and Lasman all speculate on the nature of the relationship between Mechain and Llwyd, with conclusions ranging from harmless flirtation to sexual. The male poetry of this era was, in many works, itself sexual. Dafydd ap Gwilym famously wrote a poem called ‘Cywydd y gal / Poem to the Penis.’ ‘Cywydd y gal’ camouflages ap Gwilym’s sexual aptitude in a lament to his disobedient phallus. ap Gwilym was notorious for having sexual encounters throughout Wales; it is these antics that appear to have entangled him in a legal quagmire: ‘By God penis, you must be guarded […] because of this lawsuit […] because of complaint a bridle must be put on your snout […] so that you are not indicted again.’ It’s possible this is hyperbolic; ap Gwilym may have simply angered a paramour or been caught in some other trivial trouble. But in ‘Merch Gyndyn / A Stubborn Girl,’ ap Gwilym seems affronted that a woman he just met is immune to his charms; he calls her a ‘perverse hussy’ when it appears she never shows for a scheduled rendezvous. Predictably, then, ‘Cywydd y gal’ simmers with braggadocio. ap Gwilym calls his penis ‘milk-giving shaft,’ a subtle reminder the female is unlikely to produce milk – and will never produce young – without the male seed. The penis, the poem reminds the reader, is a ‘stick for planting children.’ Whether ap Gwilym is in legal trouble or is merely exaggerating, he abdicates all responsibility for his behavior; the blame is laid solely at the door of his anthropomorphized penis. ‘I consider you the vilest of rolling pins,’ he says. ‘[…] do not rise up […] accursed pole […] which sees every woman as fair […] door-nail which causes a lawsuit and trouble.’ Although ap Gwilym wrote one hundred years before Mechain, he is important to consider with Mechain’s work; Greig calls Mechain ‘his direct female counterpart.’ Dafydd Llwyd, however, was Mechain’s contemporary, friend, possible tutor, and possible lover. The two exchanged poems; some were political discussions, others cheeky flirtations. Llwyd was famously a supporter of the Tudors and wrote praise poetry to their presaged ascendency. Llwyd’s political poetry has the feeling of a modern-day editorial; he calls Henry Tudor ‘a chieftain’ who ‘will make our island into a single nation.’ He openly accuses Richard III of executing his nephews and suggests Richard’s fall is God’s punishment for executions ordered under his rule. Helen Fulton calls such literary political predictions ‘characteristic of medieval Welsh […] political propaganda.’ But Llwyd, like ap Gwilym, was no stranger to the erotic poetry of this time. In ‘Dialedd y Barrd / The Poet’s Revenge,’ he describes a duo of sexual encounters that left him with a sexually transmitted infection. His tone is jocular; when the infection appears in his genitals, the poem exclaims, ‘I’ll be damned if its head is smaller than a pole!’ and complains of ‘a testicle bigger than a goose’s body.’ Much like ap Gwilym, Llwyd is blameless for the repercussions of his indulgences; rather than taking responsibility for his choice to have multiple sexual partners in quick succession, he laments, ‘If reproach is to be dealt out, I don’t know which of the two [women] it was.’ Llwyd’s works also demonstrate a running fixation on ‘fine-browed’ women. He uses variations of the term in ‘Dialedd y Barrd,’ as well as in two poems to Gwerful Mechain, calling her ‘fine-browed’ and ‘delicate browed.’ Even when their poetic exchange becomes graphically sexual and full of references to each other’s genitals, there is no praise for any anatomy beyond her ‘brows [which] are slender.’ In ‘Cywydd llateiaeth i Werful Mechain ac i yrru Llywelyn ap Gutun ati yn llatai / A love-message poem to Gwerful Mechain, sending Llywelyn ap Gutun to her as a messenger,’ Llwyd entreats Mechain to leave her home for a liaison with him. The order in which Mechain and Llwyd’s exchanges were written is unknown, but Mechain balks in ‘I Lywelyn ap Gutun / To Llywelyn ap Gutun,’ contending such activity would reflect harshly and publicly on her. ‘A girl can’t be seen escaping from the world / A woman must be correct, greatly religious.’ Llwyd is dismissive, telling her to keep her face covered and that, like livestock or raptors, she’ll ‘come back to the same hand that held’ her. Whether that ‘same hand’ is her father or husband is unclear; the timing of Mechain’s exchanges with Llwyd in relation to her marriage is also unknown. Regardless of the order of the duo’s exchanges, Llwyd appears to lack appreciation for the accountability he places on his female partners, and ‘Dialedd y Barrd’ reflects his era’s contempt for women. Dafydd ap Gwilym and Dafydd Llwyd’s perspectives can be forgiven as typical of their societal mores, particularly when compared to another Mechain contemporary, Ieuan Dyfi. Dyfi, a member of the poetic coterie in which Mechain and Llwyd participated, had a sexual relationship with a woman called Anni or, as Dyfi calls her, Anni Goch, ‘Red Anni.’ The nature of their liaison is murky; they were tried for adultery more than once, with Anni eventually claiming her husband prostituted her to Dyfi and that Dyfi raped her. Anni can be viewed through a lens of punishment or of pity; documents indicate she’d been unfaithful before and tried to kill her husband. Her husband, John Lippard, can be viewed through those same lenses; there is not enough documentation to assess the veracity of any involved party’s claim. What is clear is that this sexual dalliance bought Dyfi the penance of six lashes. The entire situation obviously ignited Dyfi’s ire; he drafted a poem called ‘I Anni Goch / To Red Anni.’ While the poem recounts storied men of history who are in some way felled by a woman, it is also peppered with aspersions of women in general and frank condemnation of Anni. ‘Women are all the same,’ Dyfi claims, with the male historical figures of the poem having ‘lost their lives to heartless women and their wiles.’ Hippocrates even intentionally takes the poison proffered by his wife to escape her ‘nagging.’ Like ap Gwilym and Llwyd, Dyfi casts not only himself, but the men of ‘I Anni Goch’ as blameless and, as illustrated by Garrison, powerless in the face of the female Siren’s song. ‘All these lost their lives because of women’s work, and I’m the same as them,’ Dyfi laments. Although Dyfi throws out a tepid plea to refrain from blaming Anni, he closes ‘I Anni Goch’ with a mission to kill her and a prediction she’ll be punished by God. Mechain composed a poem in defense of Anni - and women in general - Grieg calls ‘wonderful to read.’ The Poetry of Gwerful Mechain Gramich’s conclusion that Mechain ‘speaks with a female voice and…sees things from a woman’s point of view,’ interacting with the men of her poetic community with confidence, writing as their equal, and calling attention to their restrictive male interpretations is the culmination of Mechain’s time and Mechain’s presumed exposure to their works. The poem Mechain is often most recognized for composing is ‘Cywydd y cedor / Poem to the Vagina.’ It is, if not a direct response to ap Gwilym’s ‘Cywydd y gal,’ at least a ‘natural partner’ to ap Gwilym’s cywydd, a century after ‘Cywydd y gal’ was drafted. Mechain, however, composes ‘Cywydd y cedor’ with a timbre quite different from ‘Cywydd y gal.’ Absent is ap Gwilym’s bragging; in its place is a love letter to the vagina and a scolding of the bards who ignore it. ‘Every drunken fool of a poet is quick […] to […] praise the eyebrows above the eyes’ Mechain writes, in an impish tweak at Llwyd’s perpetual fawning over ‘fine-browed’ women. Mechain praises her genitalia’s power, in a time when its anatomy is misunderstood and its parturition is esoteric. Cartwright calls ‘Cywydd y cedor’ ‘a celebration of the female body.’ Mechain uses the poetic conventions of dyfalu and pastourelle against her male contemporaries in ‘Cywydd y cedor,’ defying them to lavish the vagina with the attention to which they pay the rest of the female body. The dyfalu of ‘Cywydd y cedor’ strings together compliments couched in nature imagery, mocking the absurdity of pastourelles. Mechain’s rebuttal doesn’t blame the vagina for being overlooked; that blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the men who have ‘left the middle unpraised […] The warm bright quim he does not sing.’ She slyly exposes the clergy, suggesting they, ‘don’t abstain […] when they get a chance […] to give it a good feel.’ In a time when the church set the standards for female behavior, and instituted harsh punishment when women failed to measure up, Mechain uses her narrative to suggest it is the clergy that has failed to maintain expected standards. Mechain is also not punitive towards her genitalia, as seen in ‘Cywydd y gal.’ ‘Noble bush, may God save it,’ she proclaims. She even acknowledges ap Gwilym’s jibe of ‘milk-giving shaft…stick for planting children’ with her own reminder that the female reproduction system as a whole is ‘that palace where children are conceived.’ Mechain’s praise is so effusive, Hartnell claims that for Mechain, the vagina is ‘aggressive poetic fuel.’ Mechain’s poetic exchanges with Dafydd Llwyd continue that theme. When Llwyd arrogantly wonders if Mechain, ‘lovely girl,’ can accommodate his penis, Mechain confidently assures him she has a ‘hairy pit […] to tame your prick.’ She does not shrink, apparently taking over the exchange; Llwyd dispatches four lines to Mechain’s sixteen. Lasman calls the conversation ‘a celebration of sexuality,’ implying the two poets are equal counterparts in the dialogue. Miles Latham argues Mechain’s language in her exchanges with Llwyd depicts a woman who enjoys sex, and that the vagina’s role in the act should be praised. Mechain leans into female pleasure in the sex act in ‘I wragedd eiddigus/ To jealous wives,’ rebuking wives reluctant to allow their ‘well-hung’ husbands further than ‘one inch from her fist.’ Her stance flaunts the nefarious roles women are cast in by, as Power puts it, ‘the Church and aristocracy,’ while embracing the medieval perception of carnal women. Mechain takes a swipe at the Hywel Dda in her poem ‘I Lywelyn ap Gutun.’ Llywelyn ap Gutun was a poet who ferried Mechain and Llwyd’s poems between the two. Mechain is ribbing ap Gutun in the poem, calling him a ‘blagger’ and ‘swarthy incompetent.’ Mechain’s complaint that ap Gutun ‘loved sheep […] he sheltered […] pigs/ And he ran to get his corn’ is reminiscent of the Hywel Dda’s division of marital property, in which the male half gets the pigs and the corn because ‘no wife in the world is entitled to have any of the corn,’ while the female half of the couple gets the sheep. Mechain’s parting lines ‘unless he gives me generous compensation for all his sheep rustling’ can be read not only as ap Gutun wasting Mechain’s time as such a poor messenger, but also as another reference to the Hywel Dda – ap Gutun shouldn’t have the sheep; as the woman, Mechain should. Notably, Mechain’s existing works do not promote the Tudors as mab darogan like Llwyd; Mechain recognizes God as ‘truly high above everyone’ in her poem ‘Angau abarn / Death and judgement.’ Instead, she queries Llwyd on his predictions for the future of Wales. Mechain’s language reflects a disappointment in the nation’s circumstances current to her time (‘tell me when independence will come’); she is neutral as to who alleviates Welsh suppression. It is Llwyd who likely alludes to liberation by the Tudors. But for Mechain, it is God and Jesus alone holding salvation. She describes them in ‘Angau abarn and Dioddefaint Crist / Christ’s Passion’ with deference, calling them ‘a worthy great God,’ ‘one strong God,’ and ‘steady and all-knowing.’ Yet in their own way, these poems are as graphic as ‘Cywydd y cedor.’ Mechain’s choice of words evokes strong images of blood, bondage, and the tenets of Christianity as they relate to Christ’s death, the Resurrection, and their significance for humanity. Nowhere is Mechain’s mastery of vocabulary, religion, and history on display more than ‘I ateb Ieuan Dyfi am gywydd Anni Goch / A response to Ieuan Dyfi’s poem on Red Annie.’ The poem is exactly what it says it is, yet it could not stand in more contrast from Ieuan Dyfi’s ‘I Anni Goch.’ Where Dyfi is caustic and, like ap Gwilym before him, assigns no responsibility to himself or his male victims in ‘I Anni Goch,’ Mechain composes an eloquent cywydd, listing female accomplishments throughout history. Mechain’s opening salvo cleverly nods to a queen jilted for her husband’s lover – deftly pointing out the legacy of male infidelity standing beside Anni’s. Mechain responds to Dyfi’s condemnation of Helen of Troy with two women who ended combat and decries the deaths of St. Ursula’s eleven thousand virgins, a counterpoint to the mass deaths of the Trojan War. Most telling is the contrast between the two works when historical references are set aside. Dyfi assigns blame to all women; ‘women are all the same,’ he says. ‘I don’t know of any poison worse than pursuing / Nothing worse than trying to win a girl.’ Mechain, on the other hand, speaks directly to Dyfi, calling him an ‘adulterer […] who’s sinned at both ends.’ It is a staple of Mechain’s poetry that she carries through ‘I’w gŵr am ei churo / To her husband for beating her.’ Despite envisioning brutal retaliation on an abusive husband – who may have been exercising the abusive rights permitted by the Hywel Dda – Mechain never slanders him. Further, she calls Anni ‘a lovely woman,’ allying herself with the sexual relations outside of marriage she so openly discusses in ‘I wragedd eiddigus.’ Read through the lens of both her time and the poets around her, the manner in which Mechain’s work reflects her experiences as a woman is clearly visible. Whether she’s praising the female reproductive tract, pointing out the inequitable treatment of women, or defending and elevating women, one can’t help but notice the impact on Mechain’s poetry of not only being a woman, but raising one as well. Greig reminds the reader that, despite Mechain’s poetry having a modern feel, she was, in fact, a medieval woman. She knew only the experiences of her time, relaying them as she interpreted them. Virginia Woolf’s search for the position of women in 1470 left her discouraged, but she apparently stopped at G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England; in Mechain, she would have found a woman well aware of her place – and unafraid to elucidate its inequity. Cartwright characterizes female Welsh medieval poetry as descriptive of everyday life; Mechain goes a step further in directly communicating that everyday life to her male peers. Her words darn the holes in the tapestry of male poetry, completing the woven picture of the medieval human experience, and her viewpoint gained enough recognition to shift from the spoken to the written, more so than any female contemporary. While Mechain composed poetry distinctively female in tone, such as ‘Gwlychu pais/ Wetting my petticoat’ and ‘I’w morwyn wrth gachu/ To her maid as she shits,’ describing wardrobe frustrations familiar to any modern woman, it is her poetic duels – or, as in the case of ‘Cywydd y gal,’ supposed poetic duel – that display Mechain’s work as so insistently female. A contemporary called her a ‘horrible hag’ who was ‘shouting,’ but true to form, at least five ‘Cywydd y gal’ manuscripts credit Mechain as the composer, while Johnston contemplates the possibility that Mechain was completely absent from the suggestive poems she exchanged with Llwyd; her voice may be feminine, but it’s bold enough to both appropriate and be appropriated by male Welsh poets. There is, perhaps, no better argument in favor of Gramich’s contention that Mechain ‘jousts with [her male contemporaries] verbally as their equal’ than this mutual appropriation; it is also a rebuttal of Gwyn Jones’s assertion of the cynghanedd as ‘masculine.’ Gramich opens her introduction to The Works of Gwerful Mechain by stating that Mechain ‘engages in poetic dialogues with her male contemporaries, using the same forms, metres, tropes, and vocabulary as they.’ By examining the time in which she lived, the male poetry and poets contemporary to Mechain, and dissecting Mechain’s compositions, it becomes evident Mechain has a distinctive voice, a singular talent, and a lasting effect on Welsh culture.