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Here's the information we have on the name "Tomos Penfoel ap Gwilym" as used in late 14th-century Wales. Your name is generally historically accurate, although we do suggest a couple of minor changes based on an examination of medieval Welsh records.
Most of the information in this letter comes from a list of names taken from records in Anglesey from 1406. Anglesey was less influenced by English-speakers than other parts of Wales, so if your persona is from a more Anglicized area this data may not be wholly accurate.
The Anglesey records list the following forms of Thomas (with their frequency in the document):
"Thom" and "Tom" may represent scribal abbreviations, so we can't be sure that they were used as names by the people they refer to. "Twmlyn" is a diminutive, but may have been used as an independent name. While "Tomos" is the standard spelling in Modern Welsh, there was a fairly strong tendency in the medieval period toward using the "standard" English spellings of borrowed names, unless those names became popular enough to be "naturalized". Thomas never achieved a particularly high popularity, which may explain why the basic name seems to have shown up so frequently in the borrowed spelling "Thomas." The spelling "Tomas" (for the apostle) appears in the work of the mid-14th century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, and this is also the spelling found in 13th century entries in the Welsh chronicles and also in Meyick's late 16th century heraldic visitations in Wales. This evidence makes it safe to say that "Tomas" was the usual spelling of the name when used in Welsh.
"Moel", meaning "bald", was consistantly one of the more popular descriptive nicknames in medieval Wales. In the Merioneth Lay Subsidy Roll of 1292, 5% of the men listed had some form of "moel" as a byname and it was the third most popular byname (after "black" and "red"). By the early 15th century Anglesey submissions, it had dropped to 7th in popularity among bynames, with only 1% of the men bearing it--which still makes it a very common byname.
Although there were a number of Welsh bynames that combined "pen" (head) with a modifier -- e.g. "pen<color>" or "pen<size or shape>," we found no examples of "Penfoel" in "Welsh Surnames" by Morgan & Morgan, the standard source for information on medieval Welsh surnames. In the Anglesey documents, "Moel", as a byname, appears in the following forms (again, with frequencies):
Either the lenited form "Voel" or the unlenited "Moel" would be correct for this period. The reasons why one or the other would be chosen are sufficiently complex that it is enough to say that either form can be validly used.
Both the English form William and the Welsh Gwilym appear in this document. The most common form of the name is actually the abbreviation "Wm" (with the "m" written as a superscript). I wonder whether this abbreviation might not have been used for both pronunciations. The forms appearing in the document (with frequencies) are:
Morgan & Morgan note a survey of the name in the major texts of 13-14th century Wales, in which the results come to:
They also note that the name was normally rhymed (in poetry) with words using "-ym" even when spelled with the "-im" ending, which supports the use of the "-ym" spelling.
The overall form of the name fits a fairly common pattern in Welsh names; the pattern <given name> <descriptive byname> ap <given name> is found in 2% of the names in the Anglesey document, which makes it quite "normal" statistically).
Based on the above information (which is somewhat limited, being drawn largely from a single document), the most typical form for the name would be "Thomas Moel ap William". "Thomas Moel ap Gwilym" would be perfectly reasonable as a spelling based on other documents of the time, and "Tomas Moel ap Gwilim" or "Tomas Moel ap Gwilym" can also be supported.
On the whole, this is a _very_ authentic and typical name -- both in structure and in individual elements (with the change of "penmoel" to "moel") -- for the time and place desired. My congratulations to the client on his excellant taste and sense!
Alan Fairfax edited this letter.
We hope that this has been helpful.
In service,
Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn
Academy of S. Gabriel