Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Meurig ab Arthfael/archive1

Meurig ab Arthfael

Featured article candidates/Meurig ab Arthfael/archive1

Nominator(s): Dudley Miles (talk) 10:07, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Meurig ab Arthfael was a king in south-east Wales in the ninth century, but the extent of his territory is disputed by historians. Although little is known of him, he is mentioned in Asser's life of Alfred the Great, and he is described as one of the few kings who tried to protect the church against lawlessness and abuse of power. Dudley Miles (talk) 10:07, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Images are appropriately licensed, though the second could have a better alt text. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:48, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Nikki. Expanded alt text a bit. Dudley Miles (talk) 09:18, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Llewee

The article appears to be in a good condition. It is a little short but I assume not much information is available about this individual's life. I would suggest adding a Template:Subject bar at the end with links to Portal:Middle Ages, Portal:Wales and Portal:Monarchy.--Llewee (talk) 15:34, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

UC

I'm not totally sold on the prose, as yet. I appreciate there's not masses of information about Meurig and much is unsound, but there are a few bits where the grammar isn't quite right, and/or the flow doesn't quite, well, flow as neatly as I would like -- it's slightly tough going to get through and I'm not sure I fully understand what's being said.

The usual pointers and nitpicks below:

Note 1: I would advise adding that ab/ap are both contractions of mab ('son'), and that the consonant/vowel rule is only mostly true -- see here p. 8, with note).
Hywel ap Rhys, King of Glywysing: this came up in previous FACs -- the MoS is tricky here, but I'd advise decapitalising for consistency.
I don't think "Book of Llandaff" is generally italicised -- neither Sims-Williams nor the National Library of Wales do this.
Two charters state that he ordered all churches were to be free from obligations to laymen: I found this difficult to parse -- better as "he freed all churches from their obligations..."?
in the view of the historian Wendy Davies, he was one of the few kings who attempted to guarantee ecclesiastical immunity: "kings" is a big crowd -- can we narrow this down to Welsh kings, medieval kings, British kings...?
from widespread lawlessness and arbitrary use of power: this implies that his kingdom had widespread lawlessness and arbitrary use of power; is that correct?
Historians disagree about his death date. Some ... think that the Meurig whose death is recorded in 849 is also possible: the grammar has gone a bit wonky here.
later Morgannwg and then Glamorgan: when is later here -- are these terms that postdate the subject of this article by a long way?
However, they are undated, and it is not always clear which Meurig is being referred to.: does they refer to all the charters, or just the possibly-genuine ones? I think the second/third clause might be clearer if it stepped back and said more explicitly that there are several people called Meurig named in the charters.
The n of e.g. n. 27 needs a space after it, just like the p. when it stands for "page".
two independent sources: independent of what? Not of the Book of Llandaff, since one of them is a charter from it, though we only indirectly say that.
We need a date for Asser, I think.
Almost nothing is known of history in south-east Wales immediately before his time as his reign follows a gap in the Llandaff charters of some fifty years: so the Llandaff charters are the only way we know anything about Welsh history? That sounds surprising, put mildly, and I'm sure would put some archaeologists' noses out of joint.
cording to a Harleian genealogy: I think we need to give the reader some idea of what they're working with here.
Charles-Edwards suggests that he and his brother Rhys ab Arthfael probably ruled Glywysing successively: as written, it sounds as though C-E has been moonlighting as an early medieval warlord.
You could consider dropping the patronymic from names where the sentence explicitly sets them up as the son of someone, such as Meurig ab Arthfael and his sons, Brochfael ap Meurig and Ffernfael ap Meurig,.
When we mean "the Church" as in the big institution headquartered in Rome, I would capitalise, to distinguish from when we're talking about the stone building in the village.
Why are the names in the "Charters" section italicised?
I'm a little wary of how hard we dive into charters after the warning that most of them might be fraudulent. Do we have a particular reason to trust the authenticity of the ones mentioned here?
From the "Charters" section, the tone gets a bit more insiderish than I think we want here -- it's the sort of writing you would expect from an academic in the field to other academics, but not really the right stuff for a general encyclopaedia whose writers claim no scholarly authority. For instance, (Little Dewchurch?) -- we would do better to replace the question mark with an explanation of what it's doing there -- maybe "conjectured to be the village of..."? Similarly the Annales Cambriae for 873, recte 874): recte isn't quite right here, as we normally use it when correcting scribal errors -- do we mean the entry for 874, which is written under the number 873? If so, I'd give it in text as 874, and footnote the detail -- most readers won't be very interested in it, quite frankly, and we lose less by relegating it to the notes than we do by making them all read Latin.
"the claims of the relative chronology of the witness sequence are such as to suggest that Meurig ab Arthfael, the King Meurig of grants 169b-171b, 199bii (214?), 216b, 225 died in 874 rather than 849": not sure I see the reason for a long quote here -- why not just "Davies argues that Meurig died in 874, rather than 849, on the basis of [a slightly clearer explanation of what he claims to have seen in the charters]"?
The royal line descended from Meurig appears to have ended with Brochfael: remind the reader of when he died?
Check the abbreviation of AD in the title of Bartrum 1993.
What's the need for the Lloyd citation -- it seems to appear only once, and to be triple-cited with two much more recent works?

UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:23, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]