''Urien Yrechwydd'' (in English: ''Urien of Yrechwydd'') is a late

Old Welsh Old Welsh ( cy, Hen Gymraeg) is the stage of the Welsh language from about 800 AD until the early 12th century when it developed into Middle Welsh.Koch, p. 1757. The preceding period, from the time Welsh became distinct from Common Brittonic ...

Middle Welsh Middle Welsh ( cy, Cymraeg Canol, wlm, Kymraec) is the label attached to the Welsh language of the 12th to 15th centuries, of which much more remains than for any earlier period. This form of Welsh developed directly from Old Welsh ( cy, Hen G ...

heroic poem found uniquely in the

Book of Taliesin The Book of Taliesin ( cy, Llyfr Taliesin) is one of the most famous of Middle Welsh manuscripts, dating from the first half of the 14th century though many of the fifty-six poems it preserves are taken to originate in the 10th century or before ...

. It is among those poems in the manuscript thought by

Ifor Williams Sir Ifor Williams, (16 April 1881 – 4 November 1965) was a Welsh scholar who laid the foundations for the academic study of Old Welsh, particularly early Welsh poetry. Early life and education Ifor Williams was born at Pendinas, Tregarth near ...

possibly to have originated as part of a sixth-century corpus of ''Canu Taliesin'', a series of poems really composed by the semi-legendary sixth-century court poet of Rheged,

Taliesin Taliesin ( , ; 6th century AD) was an early Brittonic poet of Sub-Roman Britain whose work has possibly survived in a Middle Welsh manuscript, the '' Book of Taliesin''. Taliesin was a renowned bard who is believed to have sung at the courts ...

Location of Yrechwydd

This poem and another of the Taliesin corpus '' Argoed Llwyfain'', characterise Urien as lord of Yrechwydd/Erechwydd, a place whose whereabouts has occasioned much debate, with implications for guessing the historical extend of the kingdom of

Rheged Rheged () was one of the kingdoms of the ''Hen Ogledd'' ("Old North"), the Brittonic-speaking region of what is now Northern England and southern Scotland, during the post-Roman era and Early Middle Ages. It is recorded in several poetic and ba ...

. The Welsh word ''echwydd'' is thought to have meant 'fresh (of water); fresh water; ?cataract', suggesting that Yrechwydd was in the vicinity of fresh water. The most recent extensive studies, by

Andrew Breeze Andrew Breeze FRHistS FSA (born 1954), has been professor of philology at the University of Navarra since 1987. Early life Breeze was born in 1954 and educated at Sir Roger Manwood's School, the University of Oxford and the University of C ...

, conclude that

Sir Ifor Williams thought it might be the Lake District, with plenty of fresh water (if not too much), where he is hesitantly followed by John Koch. But this makes no sense. The great area of fresh water in the Old North was that on the lower Ouse and Trent, a prodigious marsh that stretched from north of York to south of Gainsborough, sixty miles away in Lincolnshire. We can be sure that Yrechwydd was the area bordering that marsh, and hence equivalent to modern North Yorkshire, including York itself.Cf. Andrew breeze, 'Lancashire and the British Kingdom of Rheged', ''Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire'', 167 (2018), 1–19,

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References

{{reflist Medieval Welsh literature Taliesin