Myddfai is a small village in the hills south of Llandovery, and for centuries it was famous across Wales for its doctors. Rhiwallon and his three sons, Cadwgan, Gruffudd and Einion, were physicians to Rhys Gryg, lord of Dinefwr, in the first half of the thirteenth century. A collection of medical remedies credited to them was copied into the Red Book of Hergest in the late fourteenth century, and later scholars including Edward Lhuyd made copies too.
The story that explains their knowledge is the legend of Llyn y Fan Fach. Rhiwallon, in the folk version, is the eldest son of the farmer and the lady of the lake. After she had gone back under the water, she appeared again to her sons, in the valley called Cwm Meddygon, the physicians' valley, and taught them the healing virtues of plants, or, in Sikes's telling, gave them a magic box of remedies. From then on they were the most skilful doctors in Wales.
The line lasted a remarkably long time. A memorial in St Michael's Church, Myddfai, commemorates David Jones, who died in 1719, and his son John Jones, who died in 1739, as the last of the physicians in the direct male line, though descendants carried on in medicine long afterwards. A second manuscript of Myddfai remedies, in the National Library of Wales, may have been improved by the antiquarian Iolo Morganwg, which is a reminder that the physicians' fame attracted embroidery as well as belief.
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