Trouble at a Tavern

[11] It is widely conjectured that the town in the poem is Newborough, Anglesey, a borough established by the Crown to house the inhabitants of Llanfaes, who had been cleared from their village to facilitate the building of Beaumaris Castle.

This technique is much used in the stricter Welsh metres and is well suited to a narrative poem full of incident, tending to point up the comic anarchy of the action.

Uncooperative husbands, quick-triggered alarms, crones and walls, strong locks, floods and fogs and bogs and dogs are for ever interposing themselves between him and golden-haired Morfudd, black-browed Dyddgu, or Gwen the infinitely fair.

But the critic Tony Conran sees "Trouble at a Tavern" as being not just a comic romp but a poem shot through with multiple layers of irony, most notably in its hints that the Welsh hero is playing at being an Anglo-Norman lordling, and therefore getting a justified comeuppance.

[20] Dafydd may have derived the theme of sexual comedy from the fabliaux, rollicking tales in verse of a type which originated in France and spread across Europe, though he differs from them in making the poet himself the butt of the story.

[22] It has also been argued that the poem was based on the form of medieval morality tale known as exemplum,[23] or that it was intended as a parody of the chivalric romance in which the narrator's humiliation is a judgement on his uncourtly attitude to love.