BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE
1359-1399
"... At my birth
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes;
The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.
These signs have marked me extraordinary,
And all the courses of my life do show,
I am not in the roll of common men."
In these famous lines the Glyndwr of Shakespeare, though not, perhaps,
a very faithful portrait of the true Glyndwr, tells us of those dread
portents which heralded his birth. Thus far, however, tradition rings
true enough in the lines of the great poet, and is even shorn of some
of the most fearsome details it has sent down to us through various
channels. Shakespeare's Glyndwr might, for instance, have told us,
what all Welshmen of his day were well assured of, that on that
memorable night the horses of Griffith Vychan, his father, were found
standing in their stables up to their fetlocks in blood; and how he
himself, while still an infant in his nurse's arms, was accustomed to
greet with demonstrations of delight the sight of a sword or spear and
allow those around him no peace till the deadly weapon was placed
in his baby hand.
[Illustration: DOLGELLY AND CADER IDRIS.
Copyright
C. H. Young.]
There is great uncertainty as to the day, and some disagreement as to
the exact year, wherein old earth thus shook in labour with so heroic
a soul. This divergency of opinion extends over the period of ten
years, from 1349 to 1359. The evidence that seems to give the latter
date unquestionable preference will be alluded to shortly. In any case
the point to be noted is that the hero of this story, judged by the
standard of his time, was quite advanced in life when he began the
long and arduous undertaking that has made his name immortal, and
cherished by his countrymen as the most famous of all names in their
history. For there is no shadow of a doubt that if the Welsh people
were polled upon the subject, Owen Glyndwr would stand, by an
overwhelming majority, at the head of the list of national heroes.
Whether rightly or wrongly he holds the first place among Welsh
warrior patriots in the affections of his countrymen.
It was the fortune, as I have endeavoured to make plain in the
introductory chapter, of a long succession of Welsh chieftains, to
find themselves at the head of a people struggling desperately against
conquest and absorption. It is no wonder that with such opportunities
ever present, century after century, the list of those who seized them
and won distinction and some measure of success, and thereby preserved
their names to posterity, is no short one. It is not to the point that
the field of their exploits was a small one, and the people who
cherish their memory a small people,--so much more, rather, the
honour, seeing the odds against which they contended with such rare
tenacity; nor, again, is it to their discredit that English historians
have done as a rule scant justice to the vigour of the old Welsh
warriors. "Good wine needs no bush." The surface and the tongue of
Wales to-day are sufficient evidence to the vitality of its people and
their martial prowess in the days of old. Their heroes have happily
too long been dust to suffer in reputation at the hands of the modern
destroyer of historic ideals. But above them all, this last and most
recent of patriots, Owen ap Griffith Vychan of Glyndyfrdwy, distinctly
towers. Precisely why this should be is not readily explicable, and to
very many educated Welshmen the fact is not acceptable. But it is
unnecessary to advance here any reasons or theories for the particular
preference accorded to Glyndwr. Whether worthy or not, the fame is
his, and though, curiously enough, uncommemorated in marble, stone, or
brass, and recorded by the poet and historian in a fragmentary and
disconnected fashion, it is fame that seems to grow no dimmer with the
lapse of time. Genealogy has charms for few people, and Welsh
genealogy, to the Saxon who has not served some kind of apprenticeship
to it, is notoriously formidable. But there will be Welsh readers of
an assuredly more sympathetic turn of mind who, not having at their
fingers' ends, perhaps, the details of the national hero's origin,
will be not ungrateful for them.
Owen of Glyndyfrdwy, commonly called Owen Glyndwr, came of the
princely house of Powys, and was a direct descendant in the male line
of the celebrated Bleddyn ap Cynvyn, Prince of Powys, and for a short
time of Gwynedd also, whose reign almost exactly covered the period of
the Norman conquest of England. The second in descent from Bleddyn was
the last Prince of United Powys, and this was Madoc ap Meredith, who
died in 1159. Readers of the introductory chapter will remember that
Powys, between the upper millstone of Norman power and the nether one
of North Welsh patriotism, began to temporise and give way long before
the Edwardian conquest. Its Princes would have been more than mortal
if their politics had not been of an unsteady kind. They frankly
accepted the Norman as "Emperor in London" somewhat early, thus
accepting the inevitable, but could not resist the temptation when
Welsh affairs were prospering to break away to the national side.
While gaining at this cost some immunity from Norman greed and a
measure of semi-independence, the Powys Princes were not wholly
trusted by either party, and sometimes felt the vengeance of both. In
1159 Powysland fell in half; Powys Uchaf, or, roughly speaking,
Montgomeryshire, being given to Madoc's famous nephew, Owen Cyfeiliog,
warrior, poet, founder of Strata Marcella Abbey, and author of _The
Hirlâs Horn_; Lower Powys, or Powys Fadog, the country of the Dee and
Ceiriog, fell to Madoc's son, Griffith ap Madoc. This last was
followed by another Madoc, who in 1200 founded the splendid Abbey of
Valle Crucis, whose ruins, standing as they do in the loveliest nook
of the Vale of Llangollen, are justly celebrated as presenting one of
the most exquisite pictures of the kind in Britain. Beneath its
grass-grown aisles lies the dust of the chieftain of this line of
Powys. To a height of eight hundred feet above its crumbled walls and
gables, still graceful in their decay, springs an isolated cone-shaped
hill, on whose sharp crown stands a pile of ragged, splintered ruins
placed in weird, suggestive fashion against a background of sky. This
is Dinas Brân, the most proudly perched mediæval fortress in Wales,
perhaps in all Britain. Here in this eagle's nest, swung betwixt earth
and heaven, lived the Princes of Powys Fadog; and no more fitting
refuge could be imagined for men who, like them, had sometimes to look
eastward for their foes and sometimes to the west. It was in 1270,
close to the final conquest, that Madoc's son Griffith died, after
dividing his life between friendship with the English King and
repentant alliances with his own race. He had married Emma, daughter
of James, Lord Audley, who had done great service for Henry III.
against the Welsh with a body of German cavalry. The death of this
Griffith ap Madoc is the last event recorded in the Welsh Chronicle.
It is supposed that the monks of Conway and Ystradfflur, who
conjointly compiled it, could not bring themselves to put on record
the sad events of the next twelve years, the last years of Welsh
independence. Griffith's son, another Madoc, followed, and died in
seven years, leaving two young sons, and dividing his inheritance
between them. The elder, Llewelyn, had Dinas Brân with Yale and
Bromfield, while Griffith had Chirk and the territory attached to
it. The orphan boys, their father having been tenant _in capite_ of
Edward the First, became that monarch's wards. Edward, as was
customary, handed them over to the guardianship of two of his nobles,
selecting in this case the great Marcher barons, Warren and Roger
Mortimer. Trusteeships were not in those days, even under favourable
conditions, the thankless and unprofitable affairs they are now.
Warren had Llewelyn and Dinas Brân; Roger Mortimer, Griffith and
Chirk. A Welsh ward in the hands of a Norman Lord Marcher must have
been a lamb among wolves indeed; and as every one, no doubt, expected,
under conditions so painfully tempting, the two boys in due course
disappeared and were no more seen, while two magnificent castles arose
at Chirk and Holt respectively, with a view to securing to these
unjust stewards their ill-gotten territory. A black tale, which
posterity has accepted, crept steadily about, to the effect that a
deep pool in the Dee beneath Holt Castle could tell of a midnight
tragedy therein enacted. The two boys at any rate disappeared, and the
Earls, according to custom, succeeded to their estates. Nor is it very
likely that the King, who himself had a slice of them in that outlying
fragment of Flint still conspicuous on the map of England, asked many
questions.
[Illustration: HOLT CASTLE.
FROM OLD PRINT.]
It seems that such conscience as Earl Warren possessed was smitten
with compunction as years went on, and these twinges he thought to
allay by restoring a fragment of the property to the family he had so
outraged. When the King was sitting at Rhuddlan in 1282 the
remorseful Earl petitioned that the manors of Glyndyfrdwy on the Dee
beyond Llangollen and of Cynllaeth a few miles to the south of it,
should be restored to Griffith, an uncle of the two boys whose fate
weighed, let us hope, upon his soul.
In this manner Griffith succeeded to these estates and was known as Y
Baron Gwyn, or "the White Baron," Lord of Glyndyfrdwy in Yale, dying
about 1300. Fourth in direct descent from him and occupying the same
position was Owen Glyndwr's father, Griffith Vychan (_i. e._, "the
little" or "the younger"), the preceding owner having been a Griffith
too. To him succeeded Owen, as eldest son, holding his two manors,
like his fathers before him, direct from the King. On his mother's
side Owen's descent was quite as distinguished,--even more so if one
is to believe that his mother, Elen, was a great-granddaughter of
Catherine, the daughter of the last Llewelyn. Putting this aside,
however, as mere tradition, it will be enough to say that Griffith
Vychan's wife came from South Wales and was a daughter of Thomas ap
Llewelyn ap Rhys, a descendant of the Princes of Deheubarth, Lord of
Iscoede Vchirwen in Cardigan and of Trefgarn in the parish of Brawdy,
Pembrokeshire. He had two daughters, co-heiresses, the elder of whom,
Elen, married Owen's father, while the younger became the wife of
Tudor ap Gronow of Penmynydd, the grandfather of the famous Owen
Tudor. It will be seen, therefore, that Thomas ap Llewelyn was the
ancestor both of Glyndwr and of our present King.
Owen was actually born in the South Welsh home of his mother's family
and inherited property from her which no doubt added to his wealth and
consequence. Trefgarn Owen, Trefgarn West (or "_castel_"), still
exists as a farmhouse, and the tradition that Owen was born in it is
likely long to outlast the edifice itself. This event occurred
probably in the year 1359, in the heyday of the successful wars in
France, so that it is quite possible that Griffith Vychan may have
been among the crowd of Welsh gentlemen who followed the banners of
Edward the Black Prince across the Channel. This would quite account
for the presence of Owen's mother at such a time in the home of her
fathers; and as we know nothing of his childhood, it is perhaps
permissible to indulge in conjectures that have about them some
reasonable probability.
Of Owen's early manhood and domestic life, however, quite enough is
known to dissipate the notion engendered by Shakespeare, and but
faintly discouraged by English historians, that he was a wild Welsh
chieftain, a sort of picturesque mountaineer. On the contrary, he was
a man accustomed to courts and camps, and, judged by the standard of
his time, an educated and polished gentleman. The first actual record
we have of him is on September 3, 1386, when he gave evidence at
Chester as a witness in the greatest and most prolonged lawsuit that
had ever, in England, filled the public eye. This was the celebrated
case of Scrope and Grosvenor, the point in dispute relating solely to
a coat of arms. It lasted four years and nearly every prominent person
in the country at one time or another gave evidence. Among these
appears the name of "_Oweyn Sire de Glendore de age XXVII ans et
pluis_," also that of "_Tudor de Glindore_," his brother, who was some
three years younger than Owen, and fell ultimately in his service. Of
the nature of his evidence we know nothing. The entry is only valuable
as giving weight to the year 1359 as the most likely date of his
birth.
In the social economy of Wales, Owen's forbears, since they lost at
the Edwardian conquest, in the manner related, the chieftainship of
Powys Fadog, had been simply minor barons or private gentlemen of fair
estate. They had nothing like the official position, the wealth, or
the power of the Lord Marchers. Still they owed no allegiance, as did
many of the lesser nobility, to any great Marcher baron, but held
their estates in North Wales direct from the King himself. And we may
well suppose that with the long memories of the Welsh no Marcher
baron, no Mortimer, nor Gray, nor Talbot, whether in peace or war, was
in their eyes so great a man as simple Owen of Glyndyfrdwy, on whose
modest patrimony the vast estates of these interlopers encroached. As,
in the ancient tribal laws of Wales, it took nine generations for an
alien or servile family to qualify for admission to full rights, so it
was equally difficult to make a medieval Welshman realise that the
ejected landowners and princes of their own race were other than
temporary sufferers. They could not believe that Providence intended
to perpetuate so great an outrage. They recognised in their hearts no
other owner but the old stock, whatever the exigencies of the times
might compel them to do with their lips, and even their spears and
bows, while every vagrant bard and minstrel helped to fix the
sentiment more firmly in their breasts.
Owen himself, as a man of the world, had, of course, no such
delusions. No one, however, when the time was ripe, knew better than
he how to work upon the feelings of those who had. A family grievance
of his own, as we have shown, he might justifiably have nursed, but
there is no reason to suppose that he was on bad terms with the houses
either of Warren or Mortimer. Indeed, he is said to have been esquire
at one time to the Earl of Arundel. His local quarrels lay, as we
shall see, to the north and rested wholly on personal grounds, having
no relation whatever to the wrongs of his great-great-grandfather.
In the only signature extant of Owen previous to his assumption of
princely honours, we find him describing himself as "Oweyn ap
Griffith, Dominus de Glyn D'wfrdwy." To dwell upon the innumerable
ways in which his name and title were spelt by Norman and Celtic
writers, contemporary and otherwise, in times when writers' pens
vaguely followed their ears, would be, of course, absurd. The somewhat
formidable sounding name of Glyndyfrdwy simply means the Glen of the
Dwfrdwy or Dyfrdwy, which in turn is the original and still the Welsh
name for the river Dee. About the first syllable of this word
philologists have no scope for disagreement, "Dwr" or "Dwfr"
signifying water; but concerning the terminal syllable there is room
for some difference of opinion. It will be sufficient for us here to
say that the derivations which seem to the eye most obvious are not
so much in favour as that from "Diw," sacred or divine. This attribute
at any rate has been bestowed on the chief and most beautiful of North
Welsh rivers by English and Welsh poets from Spenser to Tennyson and,
according to the former, "by Britons long ygone."
In regard, however, to the pronunciation of the name of Owen's
patrimony, when I have said that the very natives of the historic
hamlet slur the name into something like Glyndowdy,--a rare luxury
among the Welsh,--it is not surprising that Anglo-Norman chroniclers
and others have made havoc of it with their phonetic spelling. Even
Welsh writers have been unsteady upon the point. And Owen of
Glyndyfrdwy probably figures under more designations than any hero who
ever lived: Glendour, Glindor, Glindore, Glendurdy, Glyndurdu, and
Glendowerdy, are but a few selected specimens.
English historians, with characteristic contempt of Welsh detail, have
selected the last and the most unlikely of them all. In his own
country Owen was generally known during his later life and ever since
his death as Glyndwr, the spelling to which I have adhered in these
pages. It may perhaps not be out of place to note that the Welsh "w"
is equivalent to a "ōō," and by a Welsh tongue the terminal "r" is,
of course, strongly marked.
[Illustration: POWYS CASTLE.
FROM AN OLD ENGRAVING FROM PAINTING BY W. DANIELLS.]
Of the early youth of Glyndwr history tells us nothing, nor, again, is
it known what age he had reached when his father died and the estate
came into his possession. It is supposed that like so many Welshmen
of his time he went to Oxford; but this, after all, must be mere
surmise, though, judging by the bent of his life at that period, we
seem to have good grounds for it. In such case it is likely enough
that he took a leading part in the ferocious faction fights with which
the jealousies of English, Welsh, and Irish students so often
enlivened the cramped streets of medieval Oxford. It is quite certain,
however, that Owen went to London and became a student of the Inns of
Court, a course virtually confined in those times to the sons of the
wealthy and well-born. There is something very natural in the desire
of a large Welsh landowner of that time to familiarise himself with
English law, for the two codes, Welsh and English, to say nothing of
compromises between them, existed side by side over nearly all Wales,
and one can well understand the importance of some knowledge of
Anglo-Norman jurisprudence to a leading Welshman like Glyndwr, who
must have had much to do, both directly and indirectly, with both
kinds of courts. That he was no wild Welsh squire has been already
shown, and it was not unnatural that a youth of handsome person, high
lineage, and good estate should drift, when his law studies were
completed, into the profession of arms and to the English Court. Here
he soon found considerable favour and in course of time became squire
of the body, or "scutiger," not, as most Welsh authorities have
persisted, and still persist, to King Richard the Second, but to his
cousin of Bolingbroke, the future Henry the Fourth. This latter view
is certainly supported by the only documentary evidence extant, as
Mr. Wylie in his able and exhaustive history of that monarch points
out. "Regi moderno ante susceptum regnum," is the sentence in the
_Annales_ describing Glyndwr's position in this matter, and it surely
removes any doubt that Bolingbroke is the King alluded to. In such
case Owen must have shared those perils and adventures by land and sea
in which the restless Henry engaged. It is strange enough, too, that
men linked together in a relationship so intimate should have spent
the last fifteen years of their lives in a struggle so persistent and
so memorable as did these two. Bolingbroke began this series of
adventures soon after the loss of his wife, about the year 1390, and
we may therefore, with a fair probability of truth, picture Glyndwr at
that grand tournament at Calais where Henry so distinguished himself,
and poor Richard by comparison showed to such small advantage. He may
also have been present at the capture of Tunis, where English and
French to the wonder of all men fought side by side without friction
or jealousy; or again with Bolingbroke on his long journey in 1393 to
Jerusalem, or rather towards it, for he never got there. There were
adventures, too, which Owen may have shared, with German knights upon
the Baltic, and last, though by no means least, with Sigismund, King
of Hungary, at that memorable scene upon the Danube when he was forced
into his ships by the victorious Turks.
Yet the tradition is so strong that Glyndwr was in the personal
service of Richard during the close of that unfortunate monarch's
reign, that one hesitates to brush it aside from mere lack of written
evidence. Nor indeed does the fact of his having been Henry's esquire
constitute any valid reason for doing so. It is not very likely that,
when the latter in 1398 was so unjustly banished by Richard to an
uneventful sojourn in France, Glyndwr, with the cares of a family and
estate growing upon him, would have been eager to share his exile. On
the other hand, he must have been by that time well known to Richard,
and with his Pembrokeshire property and connections may well, like so
many Welshmen, have been tempted later on to embark in that ill-fated
Irish expedition which promised plunder and glory, but turned out to
be incidentally the cause of Richard's undoing. That this feckless
monarch possessed some peculiar charm and a capacity for endearing
individuals to his person seems tolerably evident, however strange.
That the Welsh were devoted to him we know, so that perhaps the
loyalty to Richard with which most Welsh writers credit Glyndwr arose
from such personal service rendered after the departure of Bolingbroke
for France. And it is quite possible that he went, as they assert,
with the King on that last ill-timed campaign which cost him his
crown.
Some declare that he was among the small knot of faithful followers
who, when his army abandoned the slothful Richard on his return to
Pembrokeshire from Ireland, rode across country with him to Conway,
where Salisbury in despair had just been compelled to disband his
freshly mustered Welshmen for lack of food and pay. If this is true,
Glyndwr, who most certainly never lost battles from sloth or timidity
when he became in one sense a king, must have witnessed with much
sympathy the lamentations of the faithful Salisbury:
"O, call back yesterday, bid time return,
And thou shalt have ten thousand fighting men;
To-day, to-day, unhappy day too late,
O'erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune, and thy state."
All this occurred in September of the year 1399. Henry, taking
advantage of Richard's absence, had landed, it will be remembered, at
Ravenspur in Yorkshire some two months earlier. He found discontent
with the existing state of affairs everywhere prevalent and the
recognised heir to the throne but lately dead. The situation was
tempting to a degree. Bolingbroke's first intention had almost
certainly aimed at nothing more than the recovery of his own immense
estates of which he had been most unjustly and unscrupulously deprived
by his royal cousin. But unexpected temptations confronted him. He was
met on landing by the Percys and soon afterwards by other great
nobles, who, from what motives it matters little, encouraged him to
seize the throne. To make a short story of a famous episode in English
history, Bolingbroke found himself by September, when Richard was
returning with fatal tardiness from Ireland, not indeed actually
crowned, but in full possession of London and other districts and
virtually acknowledged as King. In the same month he was heading a
triumphant march by way of Bristol at the head of a great and
gathering army towards North Wales, where Richard lay, as we have
seen, at Conway, helplessly wringing his hands and cursing the fate he
had brought upon himself.
[Illustration: LLANGOLLEN AND DINAS BRÂN.
Copyright
F. Frith & Co.]
According to the Welsh version, Glyndwr must have been present when
Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who in years to come was to be so
vitally bound up with his fortunes, entered the great hall of Conway
Castle, to all appearances a friendly and unarmed envoy of Henry of
Bolingbroke. We all remember his soft speech and how with the utmost
deference and humility he told King Richard that all his dear cousin
required of him was to ride back by his side to London and there
summon a Parliament, and bring to justice certain persons, who, for
the past few years, had been his evil counsellors. If Glyndwr was in
truth there, he must almost certainly have seen these two illustrious
personages commit that astounding piece of perjury and sacrilege in
Conway church, when they knelt side by side and swore before the altar
and upon the sacred elements that their intentions towards each other
were wholly friendly and without guile. He must then, too, have heard
King Richard, when scarcely off his knees, swear that if only he could
get his dear cousin of Bolingbroke into his hands he would put him to
such a cruel death it should be long spoken of even in Turkey. Perhaps
it was the memory of the spectacle that decided Glyndwr on certain
occasions in his after life to show a curious reluctance to "put his
trust in princes," however loyal in the abstract he might be to their
memory. If we follow the Welsh tradition, he saw this game of
duplicity to the bitter end and made one of the small band of
horsemen who crossed the estuary of the Conway in the dawn of an
autumn morning with the puling king on their way to Rhuddlan Castle,
whose ivy-mantled ruins still make such a charming picture amid the
meadows where the Clwyd winds its tidal course towards the sea. Long
before Richard got there, and while still surmounting the steep
headland of Rhos above Old Colwyn, he caught sight of the troops which
the crafty Northumberland had left there in concealment. It was too
late to retreat. The waves roared far beneath him and rocky crags
towered high above his head. He saw that he was undone and read in the
situation the black treachery he would have himself dealt out with
scant scruple to anyone lingering in the path of self-indulgence,
which he had so long trodden.
"O that I were as great
As is my grief, or greater than my name,
Or that I could forget what I have been,
Or not remember what I must be now."
Amid faces from which the friendly mask had already half fallen and
spears that may well have had an ominous glitter in his eyes, the
disheartened King passed on to Rhuddlan and from Rhuddlan to the
strong castle of Flint. Here in the morning came to him his cousin of
Bolingbroke, inquiring, among other things, whether he had broken his
fast, for he had a long ride before him. Whereat Richard demanded what
great army was that which darkened the sands of Dee below the castle
walls. Henry replied curtly that they were Londoners for the most
part, and that they had come to take him prisoner to the Tower, and
nothing else would satisfy them. If Glyndwr were indeed present it
must have been a strange enough sight for him, this meeting of his
former patron and his present master, under such sinister
circumstances, in the gloomy chambers of Flint Castle. If he were
still here it may be safely assumed that, like the rest of Richard's
escort, he went no farther. Even if he were absent, quietly hawking
and hunting at Glyndyfrdwy, there would be nothing irrelevant in
calling to the reader's recollection a famous episode, the chief
actors in which had so far-reaching an influence on the Welsh hero's
life; how all semblance of respect for the King's person was dropped;
how, mounted of design upon a sorry nag, he was led with many
indignities along the weary road to London and there made to read his
own abdication in favour of his captor and cousin; and how he was
hurried from fortress to fortress, till at Pontefract he ended his
misspent life in a manner that to this day remains a mystery--all this
is a matter of historic notoriety. Whether the unfortunate Richard
died of grief, failing health, and lack of attention, or whether he
was the victim of deliberate foul play, only concerns us here from the
fact of his name occurring so frequently in our story as a
rallying-cry for Henry's enemies, and from the mystery attaching to
the manner of his death being for years a genuine grievance among the
rank and file of the disaffected, and a handy weapon for their more
designing leaders.
How much of his life Glyndwr had so far spent in his native valleys
of the Dee or Cynllaeth it is impossible to guess. Perhaps at odd
times a good deal of it; seeing that he was now over forty, had found
time to marry a wife, a lady of the neighbourhood, by whom he had
become the father of a numerous family, and to win for himself great
popularity and a name for hospitality. The famous Welsh poet, Gryffydd
Llwyd, much better known by his bardic name of "Iolo Goch," or the Red
Iolo, was his constant friend and companion at this time, and became,
later on, the Laureate of his Court and of his cause. In the thick
volume which the extant works of Iolo fill he has left us a graphic
though somewhat fantastic picture of Glyndwr's domestic life. I have
already shown how the Welsh chieftain owned the two estates of
Glyndyfrdwy and Sycherth or Cynllaeth in his native district, while
from his mother he inherited property in Pembroke. The two former
places were near together. If the mountain fringes of Glyndyfrdwy,
which ran east and west, did not actually touch the Sycherth estate,
which ran north and south with the waters of the Cynllaeth brook,
there could have been little but the deep Vale of the Ceiriog to
divide them. There were mansions upon both estates, and, though
Glyndyfrdwy was the more important property, it was in the less
striking but still charming valley down which the Cynllaeth babbles to
meet the Tanat beneath the woodlands of Llangedwyn, that Sycherth or
Sychnant, the more imposing of Glyndwr's two houses, was situated.
This valley lies snugly tucked away behind the first ridge of hills
which rises abruptly behind Oswestry and so conspicuously marks the
Welsh frontier. It practically skirts the English border, and Offa's
Dyke trails its still obvious course along the lofty summit of its
eastern boundary. Scarcely anywhere, indeed, does the Principality
begin in a social sense with such striking abruptness. Once over the
hill from Shropshire, and within a short hour's drive from Oswestry,
and you are for every practical purpose in the heart of Celtic Wales.
Few travellers come this way, for it is on the road to nowhere that
the outside world takes count of, and few strangers but an occasional
antiquary ever see the well-defined and flat-topped tumulus on which
the manor house of the most famous of all Welshmen stood. It lies in a
meadow between a wooded hill and the Cynllaeth brook, not far from
Llansilin, and is very conspicuous from the road leading up the valley
to the little hamlet, whose churchyard holds the dust of another
famous Welshman, the seventeenth-century poet, Huw Morris. The inner
and the outer moat of Sycherth are still more or less perfect, and
there are even yet, or were not long ago, plain traces of stonework
beneath the turf. It will be well, however, to let Iolo, who was there
so much and knew it so well, tell us what it looked like in his time,
five hundred years ago.
[Illustration: SYCHERTH, FROM THE SOUTH.
Copyright
W. D. Haydon.]
There was a gate-house, he says, a strong tower, and a moat. The house
contained nine halls, each furnished with a wardrobe filled with the
raiment of Owen's retainers. Near the house on a verdant bank was a
wooden building supported upon posts and roofed with tiles. Here were
eight apartments in which the guests slept. There was a church, too,
in the form of a cross, and several chapels. The mansion was
surrounded with every convenience and every essential for maintaining
a profuse hospitality: a park, warren and pigeon-house, mill,
orchards, and vineyard; a fish-pond well stocked with "gwyniads" from
Bala Lake, a heronry, and plenty of game of all sorts. The cook, Iolo
declares with much enthusiasm, was one of the very best; and the
hospitality of the establishment so unstinted that the office of gate
porter was a sinecure. Our bard indeed makes his poetic lips literally
smack over the good things beneath which Glyndwr's table groaned. Nor
does he forget his hostess:
"The best of wives,
Happy am I in her wine and metheglyn;
Eminent woman of a knightly family,
Honourable, beneficent, noble,
Her children come forward two by two,
A beautiful nest of chieftains."
Charming, however, as is the site of Sycherth, nestling beneath its
wooded hill and looking out towards the great masses of the Berwyn
Mountains, it would ill compare with that almost matchless gem of
Welsh scenery, where the vales of Edeyrnion and Llangollen meet among
the mantling woodlands and sounding gorges of Glyndyfrdwy. It is a
curiously apt coincidence that one of the most romantic spots in Wales
should have been the cradle of the man who is without doubt the most
romantic personage in Welsh history. Scarcely anyone, as I have said,
ever finds his way to Sycherth; but thousands of travellers every
summer follow by road or rail that delightful route which, hugging the
Dee from Ruabon almost to its source beyond Bala Lake, reveals new
beauties at every turn. Such being the case I would venture to ask any
intending traveller from Ruabon to Bala and Dolgelly to take special
note of a spot just five minutes to the westward of Glyndyfrdwy
station, where the wide torrent of the Dee, after clinging to the
railroad for some distance, takes a sudden bend to the north.
Precisely here, but perched high upon the other side of the railroad
and so nearly overhanging it as not to be readily visible, is a green
tumulus crowned by a group of windswept fir trees. This is locally
known as "Glyndwr's Mount," not because, as was probably the case at
Sycherth, it was erected as a foundation for the chieftain's
house,--since this one here is evidently prehistoric,--but merely from
the fact that the house stood at its foot. Vague traces of the house
are still visible beneath the turf of the narrow meadow that lies
squeezed in between the Holyhead Road on the upper side and the river
and railroad on the lower side.[6] Whether Sycherth was Owen's
favourite home in peace or not, Glyndyfrdwy was most certainly his
more natural headquarters in war, while in his own district. Both,
however, were burnt down by Prince Henry, as we shall see later on, in
one of his expeditions against the Welsh. As for the mound, it is a
notable landmark, being one of a series which are sprinkled along the
Dee valley in such fashion as to indicate beyond a doubt that if they
were indeed the tombs of dead warriors, they were also most admirable
signal-stations for living ones. But whatever the origin of this one
it had at any rate no connection with times so recent as those of
Glyndwr. The only surviving relic of that hero's residence is a long,
narrow oaken table of prodigious thickness, which is yet treasured in
a neighbouring farmhouse. A meadow below is still called "Parliament
field," while the massive old stone homestead of Pen-y-bont, half a
mile up the valley, contains a portion of the walls which formed, it
is believed, Glyndwr's stables, or, more probably, his farm buildings.
But as many of these local points will come up in the course of my
story, it is time to say something of the lady who, so entirely blest
in her earlier years, was to spend her later ones amid such stress and
storm, and to share so precarious a crown.
[6] A friend of the writer, who lived to an advanced age, was told
in his youth by old men in the neighbourhood that they could
remember when there was a good deal of stonework to be seen lying
about. Now, however, there is little to mark the spot but the
suggestive undulations of the turf.
This lady bountiful of Sycherth and Glyndyfrdwy, so extolled by Iolo,
came of a notable Flintshire house. She was the daughter of Sir David
Hanmer of Hanmer, a family long settled in that detached fragment of
Flint known then as Maelor Seisnig, or "English Maelor." Sir David had
been appointed by Richard the Second one of the Justices of the King's
Bench and at the same time knighted. There are Hanmers even yet in
those parts; till comparatively lately there were still Hanmers of
Hanmer. More enduring than a human stock, there are monuments in stone
and brass that tell the story, common enough in England, of a family
that for centuries were great in their own district without ever
making their name a familiar one to the average British ear. The
Hanmers, too, were a fair specimen of many families in the Welsh
Marches who had both English and Welsh blood in their veins, and whose
sympathies were divided when social animosities took a warlike turn.
It was very much so indeed with the Hanmers when Glyndwr's war by
degrees forced everyone to take a side in self-defence. Of Glyndwr's
sons only two are directly mentioned, Griffith and Meredith, both of
whom we shall find fighting by his side, but at such an advanced stage
of the struggle that it seems probable they were but boys when
hostilities broke out. We hear dimly of three more, Madoc, Thomas, and
John. Of the daughters somewhat more is known; and they must for the
most part have been older, since it seems that three were married
before the troubles began. The eldest, Isabel, became the wife of a
Welshman, Adda ab Iorwerth Ddu. The second, Elizabeth, married Sir
John Scudamore of Kent Church and Holme Lacy in Herefordshire, whose
descendants still retain the name and the first of these historic
manors. Another, Janet, was given to John Crofts of Croft Castle in
the same county, and the youngest, Margaret, called after her mother,
took another Herefordshire gentleman, Roger Monnington of Monnington.
The most celebrated was the fourth daughter, Jane, whom we shall find
being united under romantic circumstances to her father's illustrious
captive and subsequent ally, Sir Edmund Mortimer. She it is, of
course, whom Shakespeare brings upon his stage and, in her song to
Hotspur and Mortimer,
"Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower."
The Commote of Glyndyfrdwy, which formed Owen's Dee property, lay in
the then newly formed county of Merioneth, though it was wedged in by
the Marcher lordships of Chirk, Bromfield, and Yale on the east; while
to the north, Denbighshire as yet having no existence, it touched the
Norman lordships of Ruthin and Denbigh in the Vale of Clwyd. But
Glyndwr held his estates direct from the King, having manor courts of
his own, and resorting in more important matters to the assize towns
of Dolgelly and Harlech. Corwen must have been actually on his
property but, though a notable gathering-spot in war time, it had no
corporate existence, and was probably even more insignificant in size
than the other Merioneth towns. The Welsh did not herd together in
towns or villages. Each individual or group of individuals dwelt on
their small homesteads scattered about the hillsides or cut out of the
forests which then covered so much of the country and had contributed
so greatly to its defence.
* * * * *
Owen in his home life must have been something of an unique
personality. He was the equal in breeding and in knowledge of the
world of the great barons around him,--the Greys, Talbots, and
Charltons,--and of sufficient estate to be himself a grand seigneur.
Yet his hospitable house must have offered a remarkable contrast in
the eyes of the natives to the grim fortresses of Chirk, or Dinas
Brân, or Ruthin, whose owners' mission in life, so far as the Welsh
were concerned, was to make themselves unpleasant. Their claws, it is
true, had been considerably cut down by Edward the First, but the same
blood was there; and the habit of former years, which looked upon the
killing of a Welshman as a meritorious action, only wanted an
opportunity to reassert itself.
Owen's rent-roll was about two hundred pounds a year, and some slight
mental effort is required to realise that this was a very large one,
both actually when judged by the contemporary value of money, and
relatively as regards the financial standing of private landowners,
particularly in Wales, where this was low. Owen was probably one of
the richest native Welshmen of his day. Few if any in the north had
such an opportunity of showing the contrast between the simple and
profuse hospitality of a native aristocrat, and the stiff,
contemptuous solemnity of the lord of a Norman fortress. It was easy
enough for the descendant of Madoc ap Griffith to make himself popular
upon the banks of the upper Dee, and Owen seems to have added a desire
to do so to the personal magnetism that the whole story of his life
shows him to have possessed in a very high degree. All the bards of
his own time and that immediately following unite in this praise of
his hospitality. Amid much fanciful exaggeration, such for instance
as that which compares Sycherth to "Westminster Abbey and Cheapside,"
there is no doubt about the esteem and admiration in which Owen was
held by the Welsh and particularly by the bards who lived at free
quarters in his roomy halls. But all this began before he had any idea
of utilising his position and popularity in the manner that has made
him immortal. There is really no authority at all for making him a
follower of Richard. All Wales and Cheshire were indignant at the
King's deposition and treatment, and Glyndwr, even supposing his Irish
expedition to have been mythical, may well have shared this
indignation. But in such a case his antecedents were, from private
attachments, wholly Lancastrian. Not only had he been Bolingbroke's
squire, but his former master, the Earl of Arundel, had been a
pronounced foe of the late King. Discontent and turbulence were
brooding everywhere, but we have no reason to suppose that Glyndwr at
this date, the last year of the century, had any excuse whatever for
entering into dynastic quarrels. On the contrary, unless the story of
his recent connection with Richard be true, he had much reason to be
contented with Bolingbroke's accession. At this moment he was in all
probability living quietly at Sycherth, hunting deer amid the birchen
woods and bracken glades of the Berwyn and hawking in the meadows of
Llansilin. Amid all the pleasures, however, which filled his rural
life there rankled one deep and bitter grievance, and this concerned
the upland tract of Croesau that lay upon the north-western fringe of
his Glyndyfrdwy manor, over which he and his powerful neighbour,
Reginald Grey, Lord of Ruthin, had been falling out this many a long
day. The details of this quarrel, the primary cause of that decade of
strife which desolated Wales and profoundly influenced the reign and
embittered the life of Henry of Bolingbroke, must be reserved for
another chapter.
[Decoration]
[Decoration]