Geoffrey of Monmouth places the laws after the civil wars of Britain's legendary king-list. Dunvalo Molmutius, whom Geoffrey calls Dunwallo Molmutius, is the son of Cloten of Cornwall. He defeats rival rulers and gains authority over the island. After fashioning a golden crown, he establishes the laws named after him. The sequence gives conquest a second stage: the king must turn military supremacy into a peace that his subjects can recognise. This is Geoffrey's twelfth-century account of an imagined ancient Britain, not a contemporary record of a pre-Roman legislature.

The protections described in Geoffrey's Book II concern places where violence is to be restrained. Temples and cities offer refuge, and the roads leading to them share that privileged safety. The ploughs of husbandmen are also protected. The account connects these rules with the end of robbery and other violence during the king's reign. It does not supply a complete surviving legal text with articles that can be reconstructed from this short passage. The Temple of Concord at Trinovantum, later London, serves as a monument to the settlement, and Geoffrey places the king's burial near it after forty years of rule.

Belinus continues the legal story in Book III. After overcoming his rival, he confirms his father's laws and orders justice to be maintained. Disputes over the routes protected by the peace lead him to construct four great roads across the island. Geoffrey then claims that Gildas translated the Molmutine Laws from British into Latin and that King Alfred translated them into English. These claims belong to the chronicle's account of transmission; they are not independent evidence that an unbroken series of such translations survives. Belinus is therefore a central figure in the code's legendary continuation, not another name for its first lawgiver.

Welsh legal tradition associates Dyfnwal with measures, a strand distinct from the fuller sanctuary narrative. Those strands should not be compressed into the claim that every later rule came from a single preserved ancient code. Writers reused Molmutius for different purposes. Spenser's account in The Faerie Queene associates his laws with the safety of highways, religious property and the ploughman's work. Shakespeare's Cymbeline invokes him as Britain's lawgiver during an argument over Roman tribute. In these literary settings, an ancient legal inheritance gives the imagined nation a past of its own.

A further layer belongs to Iolo Morganwg and the purported ancient legal triads associated with his antiquarian work. These belong to a later reconstruction of the past; the National Library of Wales documents his wider production of forged bardic and Druidic material. Such texts are evidence of later ideas about the past, not newly recovered legislation from ancient Britain. Their promises of protection and communal obligation help explain the legend's appeal without authenticating its date. The Molmutine Laws are therefore classified as Legendary: a remembered code in chronicles and literature, distinct from an archaeological object or a verified first constitution.