Congratulations: Dr Ben Guy awarded an AHRC Standard Grant for project on early Welsh charters

We are delighted to announce that Dr Ben Guy, Assistant Professor of Celtic in the department, has been awarded an AHRC Standard Grant of just over £900,000 for a three-year collaborative project called ‘Pushing the Boundaries of Early Medieval Wales: An Edition of the Earliest Welsh Charters’. The project brings together textual scholarship, landscape archaeology, and GIS expertise from the University of Cambridge, Cardiff University and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

Beginning in October 2025, Dr Guy and his team will tackle an under-researched corpus of around 180 documents, in Latin and Old Welsh, that survive from Wales before 1100. Dr Guy, working alongside Research Associate Dr Eleanor Smith, will edit, translate and discuss the documents for a major co-written publication. Dr Andy Seaman and another Research Associate in Cardiff will map the approximately 118 detailed boundary descriptions in the corpus, drawing on the latest archaeological research and the untapped resources of early modern mapping.

We are also delighted to be collaborating with Dr Scott Lloyd at the Royal Commission, whose GIS expertise will allow us to produce a digital atlas of early Welsh boundaries that will be freely accessible to all.