White Book of Hergest
The White Book of Hergest (, sometimes given as Llyfr Gwyn o Hergest) was an important Welsh manuscript compiled in c. 1450. It contained many Welsh poems and prose texts and was a significant source for several antiquaries of the 17th and 18th centuries, but disappeared in the early 19th century, probably being destroyed in a fire in a London bookbinder's shop in around 1810. History The manuscript was one of several associated with the Vaughan family of Hergest Court near Kington, Herefordshire, but was originally, at least in part, the work of the poet and scribe Lewys Glyn Cothi, who is thought to have compiled it at Margam Abbey using texts found there. Glyn Cothi was a close associate of the Vaughans of Hergest and wrote elegies on the deaths of both Thomas ap Vaughan (d. 1469) and his son Richard. As befitted a manuscript produced for wealthy patrons, the White Book was a substantial document written on costly vellum, taking its name from the colour of its binding. The scholar John Davies of Mallwyd transcribed a number of poems from the White Book into a manuscript now known as Peniarth 49. The 17th-century antiquary Robert Vaughan, who referred