"The five royal tribes of Wales" and "The fifteen tribes of Gwynedd" refer to a class of genealogical lists which were compiled by Welsh

bard In Celtic cultures, a bard is a professional story teller, verse-maker, music composer, oral historian and genealogist, employed by a patron (such as a monarch or chieftain) to commemorate one or more of the patron's ancestors and to praise ...

s in the mid-15th century. These non-identical lists were constructed on the premise that many of the leading Welsh families of their time could trace their descent to the "five royal tribes of Wales" or the "fifteen noble tribes of Gwynedd". In the surviving manuscripts, the first occurrence of the "fifteen tribes of Gwynedd" is probably in parts written by

Gutun Owain Gutun Owain (fl. 1456–1497) was a poet in the Welsh language. He was born near Oswestry in what is now north Shropshire and was a student of Dafydd ab Edmwnd Dafydd ap Edmwnd (fl. c. 1450–97) was one of the most prominent Welsh language poets ...

in NLW, Peniarth MS 131.Bartrum, "Hen Lwythau Gwynedd a'r Mars", p. 233 The Welsh headings which stand above the pedigrees of Eunydd of Dyffryn Clwyd and Hwfa ap Cynddelw on p. 85 and the tribe of Gollwyn ap Tangno on p. 90 all read something like "one of the 15 tribes ()". A related list is found in BM. Add. MS 14.919, f. 121v. A more developed example is to be found on two folios of a 16th or 17th-century manuscript in the British Library, Harley MS 1970, folios 34r-v, where the list is accompanied by a number of heraldic designs. The basic idea of five regal and fifteen common (i.e. noble) tribes was later used by the antiquarian and genealogist Philip Yorke as a model for his ''Royal Tribes of Wales'' (1799).

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