17 Engels 1973; Van Houts 1992, pp. xx–xxi, lxi–lxii, lxiii–lxv. 18 Sheehan 1963, pp.107–8, 110–11, 115–19. Deathbed gifts were sometimes the latest in a series of will-making ceremonies: Lowe 1998, pp. 37–38; Fellows 2016, pp. 78, 81–82. 19 Stokes 1897, p.102.Cf. the bequests to churches of Brian Ború (d. 1014) and the legendary will of Cathaír Már, King of Lagin as described in texts datable respectively to the early twelfth and the eighth centuries: Todd, 1867, pp.200–1; Dillon 1962; Ní Mhaonaigh 1995. 20 Evans 1977, p. 32. Cf. Spedding 2014. A roddes ynteu y esgob ac archdiagon, effeirieit ag urddolyon ag athrawon, ag y achanogyon kristyawn, y daoed hynny a gymynnaf fi y amddiffyn yr Yspryt Glan, yr hwn a wyr pob peth ag a’u hatwen. And he gave to the bishop and archdeacon, priests and ordained clergy and teachers, and needy Christians, these goods that I bequeath to the protection of the Holy Spirit, who knows and understands all things.20 huwpryce tronomer’s Vita Hludowici supplemented by passages from Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni praising Charlemagne and relating his burial in the palatine chapel in Aachen.17 However, there are no comparable literary borrowings in the account of Gruffudd’s death and bequests, and overall the description of the latter in his Vitaseems to bear a closer resemblance to the deathbed gift, comprising both land and moveable goods, which in England originated in the Anglo-Saxon period and continued beyond the Norman Conquest well into the twelfth century.18 In addition, the references to gifts of silver pieces to churches in the first section bear comparison with occasional reports of such royal bequests in Irish narrative sources, including the gold, silver and treasures bequeathed to the churches of Ireland by the powerful king Toirdelbach Ua Conchobair (Turlough O’Connor), who died in 1156.19 Interestingly, the early thirteenth-century Welsh translation of the LatinLife of Gruffudd seems to have tried to give greater verisimilitude to the account of the king’s bequests by a change of tense at the end of the first passage, on gifts to churches, from the third-person perfect indicative, used up to then, as it was throughout the Latin text (cited above), to the first-person present indicative – a change broadly comparable to the shift from the late twelfth to the early thirteenth century in the person and tense of dispositive verbs in English wills: 431
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