CONCLUSION
As I have led up to the advent of Glyndwr with a rough outline of
Welsh history prior to his day, I will now cast a brief glance at the
period which followed. English people have a tendency to
underestimate, or rather to take into small consideration, the wide
gulf which, not only in former days, but to some extent even yet,
divides the two countries. They are apt to think that after the
abortive rising of Glyndwr, provided even this stands out clearly in
their minds, everything went smoothly and Wales became merely a
geographical expression with an eccentric passion for maintaining its
own language. As, in the introduction to this book, I had to solicit
the patience of the general reader and crave the forbearance of the
expert for an effort to cover centuries in a few pages, so I must
again put in a plea for another venture of the same kind--briefer, but
none the less difficult.
The ruin left by Glyndwr's war was awful. It was not only the loss of
property, the destruction of buildings, the sterilisation of lands,
but the quarrels and the blood-feuds which the soreness of these
years of strife handed down for generations to the descendants of
those who had taken opposing sides. And then before prosperity had
fairly lifted its head, before bloody quarrels and memories had been
forgotten, the devastating Wars of the Roses were upon the country,
and it was plunged once more into a chaos not much less distracting
than that in which the preceding generation had weltered.
Though, by a curious turn of events, she ultimately gave to England a
Lancastrian king, Wales most naturally favoured the House of York.
Edmund Mortimer, uncle to the young Earl of March, had shared the
triumphs and the perils of Glyndwr's rising. The blood of Llewelyn ap
Iorwerth flowed in the veins of the Mortimers, and their great estates
lay chiefly in Wales and on the border. The old antagonism to
Bolingbroke's usurpation, and the sympathy with Richard and his
designated heir that half a century before accompanied it, were still
remembered. The Yorkists, however, had no monopoly of Wales,--Welsh
knights had fought victoriously in France under Henry V., and Marcher
barons of Lancastrian sympathies could command a considerable
following of Welshmen. The old confusion of lordship government still
retained half Wales as a collection of small palatinates. Once more
the castles that Glyndwr had left standing echoed to the bustle of
preparation and the stir of arms, and felt the blows of an artillery
that they could no longer face with quite the composure with which
they had faced the guns of Henry the Fourth. It was not so much the
actual damage that was done, for this war was not so comprehensive,
but rather the passions and faction it aroused among the Welsh gentry
of both races, though this new faction no longer ran strictly upon
racial lines. Nor, again, was it the amount of blood that was shed,
for this compared to Glyndwr's war was inconsiderable, but the legacy,
rather, of lawlessness that it left behind. Sir John Wynne of Gwydir,
in the invaluable chronicle which he wrote at his home in the Vale of
Conway during the reign of Elizabeth, draws a graphic picture of North
Wales as Henry the Seventh found it. Sir John's immediate forbears had
taken a brisk hand in the doings of those distracted times, and there
were still men living when he wrote who had seen the close of the
chaos with their own eyes, and whose minds were stored with the
evidence of their fathers and grandfathers. Harlech in these wars
stood once more a noted siege. It was held for the Lancastrians by a
valiant Welshman against the Herberts, who made a somewhat celebrated
march through the mountains to besiege it. The stout defence it
offered inspired the music and the words of the Welsh national march,
"Men of Harlech,"--as spirited an air of its kind, perhaps, as has
ever been written. The Vale of Clwyd, the garden of North Wales, was
burnt, says Sir John, "to cold coals." Landowners who had mortgaged
their estates, he goes on to tell us, scarcely thought them worth
redeeming, while the deer grazed in the very streets of Llanrwst. For
two or three generations the country was infested by bands of robbers
who found refuge in the mountains of Merioneth or the wild uplands
of the Berwyn Range, and fought for the privilege of systematically
plundering and levying blackmail on the Vale of Conway and the richer
meadows of Edeyrnion. Sir John's grandfather found it necessary to go
to church attended by a bodyguard of twenty men armed to the teeth.
"The red-haired banditti of Mawddy" kept the country between the Dovey
and Mawddach estuaries and inland nearly to Shropshire in a state of
chronic terror. The Carnarvon squires cherished blood-feuds that
almost resembled a vendetta, laid siege to one another's houses, and
engaged in mimic battles of a truly bloodthirsty description. The
first Wynne of Gwydir left West Carnarvonshire and preferred to live
among the brigands of the Vale of Conway rather than among his own
relatives, since he would "either have to kill or be killed by them."
To try and combat these organised bands of robbers, Edward IV.
instituted, in 1478, the Court of the President and Council of the
Marches of Wales, with summary jurisdiction over all breakers of the
peace--provided always that they could catch them! The legal machinery
of the lordships was wholly ineffectual, for though each petty monarch
had the power of life and death, the harbouring of thieves and outlaws
became a matter purely of personal rivalry and jealousy.
[Illustration: PEMBROKE CASTLE.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.
Copyright
F. Frith & Co.]
But this epoch of Welsh history ended with the advent of the Tudors,
which is in truth an even more notable landmark than the so-called
conquest of Edward I. Wales since that time had been governed as a
conquered country, or a Crown province--she had been annexed but not
united, nor had she been represented in Parliament, while outside the
Edwardian counties justice was administered, or more often not
administered, by two or three score of petty potentates. One must not,
however, make too much of what we now call union and patriotism.
Cheshire had been till quite recently an independent earldom, with
similar relations to the Crown as the lordship, say, of Ruthin or of
Hay. As regards national feeling, it is very doubtful if the
sentiments that had animated the heptarchy had been eradicated from
that turbulent palatinate who boasted the best archers in England and
were extremely jealous of their licentious independence.
[Illustration: KENTCHURCH COURT, WITH GLYNDWR'S TOWER.
Copyright
W. H. Bustin.]
But it was a pure accident that in the end really reconciled the Welsh
to a close union with the hated Saxon. Steeped as they were in
sentiment, and credulous to a degree of mysticism and prophecy, and
filled with national pride, the rise of the grandson of Owen Tudor of
Penmynydd to the throne of Britain was for the Cymry full of
significance. The fact, too, that Henry was not merely a Welshman but
that he landed in Wales and was accompanied thence by a large force of
his fellow-countrymen to the victorious field of Bosworth was a
further source of pride and consolation to this long-harassed people.
It would be hard indeed to exaggerate the effect upon Wales and its
future relationship with England, when a curious chain of events
elevated this once obscure princeling to the throne of England. It was
strange, too, that it should be a Lancastrian after all whose
accession caused such joy and triumph throughout a province which had
shed its blood so largely upon the opposing side. The bards were of
course in ecstasies; the prophecy that a British prince should once
again reign in London--which had faded away into a feeble echo,
without heart or meaning, since the downfall of Glyndwr--now
astonished with its sudden fulfilment the expounders of Merlin and the
Brut as completely as it did the audience to whom they had so long
foretold this unlikely consummation. Not for a moment, however, we may
well believe, was such a surprise admitted nor the difference in the
manner of its fulfilment. But who indeed would carp at that when the
result was so wholly admirable? It is not our business to trace the
tortuous ways by which fate removed the more natural heirs to the
throne and seated upon it for the great good of England as well as of
Wales the grandson of an Anglesey squire of ancient race and trifling
estate.
That the first Tudor disappointed his fellow-countrymen in some of
their just expectations, and behaved in fact somewhat meanly to them,
is of no great consequence since his burly son made such ample amends
for the shortcomings of his father. The matrimonial barbarities of
Henry the Eighth and his drastic measures in matters ecclesiastical
have made him so marked a personage that men forget and indeed are not
very clearly made to understand what he did for Wales, and
consequently for England too.
By an Act of Parliament in 1535 the whole of the Lordship Marcher
system was swept away, and the modern counties of Denbigh,
Montgomery, Monmouth, Glamorgan, Brecon, and Radnor were formed out of
the fragments. It is only possible to generalise within such compass
as this. The precise details belong rather to antiquarian lore and
would be out of place here. It will be sufficient to say that the
Welsh people of all degrees, after waiting with laudable patience for
their first King to do something practical on their behalf, petitioned
Henry the Eighth to abolish the disorders under which half their
country groaned and to grant that representation in Parliament as yet
enjoyed by no part of the Principality, and without which true
equality could not exist. The King appointed a commission to carry out
their wishes. The sources from which the new counties took their
names, though following no rule, are obvious enough. Glamorgan, the
old Morganwg, had been practically a County Palatine since Fitzhamon
and his twelve knights seized it in Henry the First's time, that is to
say, the inferior lordships were held in fealty, not each to the King
as elsewhere, but to the heirs of Fitzhamon, who for many generations
were the Clares, Earls of Gloucester, having their capital at Cardiff,
where higher justice was administered. Pembroke was something of the
same sort, though the Flemish element made it differ socially from
Glamorgan. Nor must it be forgotten that that promontory of Gower in
the latter palatinate was a Flemish lordship. But Pembroke was the
actual property of the Crown and its earls or lords were practically
constables. The rest of the Marches (for this term signified all Wales
outside the Edwardian counties) had no such definitions. That they
followed no common rule was obvious enough. Brecon took its name from
the old lordship of Brecheiniog that Bernard de Newmarch had founded
in Henry the First's time. The old Melynydd, more or less, became
Radnor, after its chief fortress and lordship. Montgomery derived its
shire name from the high-perched castle above the Severn, Monmouth
from the town at the Monnow's mouth. Large fragments of the Marches,
too, were tacked on to the counties of Hereford and Shropshire, the
Welsh border as we know it to-day being in many places considerably
westward of the old line. All the old lordship divisions with the
privileges and responsibilities of their owners were abolished, and
the castles, which had only existed for coercive and defensive
purposes, began gradually from this time to subside into those hoary
ruins which from a hundred hilltops give the beautiful landscape of
South Wales a distinction that is probably unmatched in this
particular in northern Europe. County government was uniformly
introduced all over Wales and the harsh laws of Glyndwr's day, for
some time a dead letter, were erased from the statutes. Parliamentary
representation was allotted, though only one knight instead of two sat
for a shire and one burgess only for all the boroughs of a shire; and
the two countries became one in heart as well as in fact. Till 1535
the eldest son of English Kings, as Prince of Wales, had been all that
the name implies. Henceforth it became a courtesy title; and one may
perhaps be allowed a regret, having regard to the temperament of a
Celtic race in this particular, that our English monarchs have allowed
it to remain so wholly divorced from all Welsh connection. The last
actual Prince of Wales was Henry the Eighth's elder brother Arthur,
who died at the then official residence of Ludlow Castle a few weeks
after his marriage with Catherine of Aragon.
This reminds me too that one peculiarity remained to distinguish the
administration of Wales from that of England, namely that famous and
long-lived institution, the "Court of the Marches." This has already
been mentioned as introduced by Edward the Fourth, who was friendly to
Wales, for the suppression of outlaws and brigands. It was confirmed
and its powers enlarged by Henry the Eighth's Act, and with
headquarters at Ludlow, though sitting sometimes at Shrewsbury and
Chester, it was the appeal for all important Welsh litigation. Nor was
it in any sense regarded as a survival of arbitrary treatment. On the
contrary, it was a convenience to Welshmen, who could take cases there
that people in North Yorkshire, for instance, would have to carry all
the way to Westminster. For a long time, curiously enough, its
jurisdiction extended into the counties of Worcester, Gloucester,
Hereford, and Salop. It consisted of a president and council with a
permanent staff of subordinate officials. The presidency was an office
of great honour, held usually by a bishop or baron of weight in the
country, associated with the two justices of Wales and that of
Chester. The arrangement seems to have caused general satisfaction
till the reign of William the Third, when the growth of industry and
population made it advisable to divide Wales into circuits.
The petitions addressed from the Welsh people to Henry praying for
complete fusion with England are instructive reading. Marcher rule at
the worst had been infamously cruel, at the best inconvenient and
inequitable. It was a disgrace to the civilisation of the fifteenth
century, which is saying a great deal. To bring criminals to justice
was almost impossible when they had only to cross into the next
lordship, whose ruler, being unfriendly perhaps to his neighbour, made
it a point of honour to harbour those who defied him. The still
martial spirit of the Welsh found vent when wars had ceased in petty
quarrels, and with such a turbulent past it did them credit that they
recognised how sorely even-handed justice was wanted among them.
Lordship Marchers themselves were too often represented by deputies,
and something like the abuses that were familiar in Ireland in more
recent times owing to middlemen added to the confusion. According to
local custom the humbler people of one lordship might not move eight
paces from the road as they passed through a neighbouring territory.
The penalty for transgression was all the money they had about them
and the joint of one finger. If cattle strayed across the lordship
boundary they could be kept and branded by the neighbouring lord or
his representatives.
In the aforesaid petitions sent up to Henry VIII. the petitioners
dwell upon their loyalty to the throne and the unhappy causes that
had alienated them from it in the past. They remind him of how they
fought in France for Edward III., and of their loyalty to Richard II.,
which was the sole cause, they declare, of their advocacy of Glyndwr.
They indignantly declare that they are not "runaway Britons as some
call us," but natives of a country which besides defending itself
received all those who came to it for succour at the period alluded
to. Resenting the imputation of barrenness sometimes cast on their
country, they declare that "even its highest mountains afford beef and
mutton, not only to ourselves, but supply England in great quantity."
They recall the fact that they were Christians while the Saxons were
still heathen. They combat those critics who describe their language
as uncouth and strange and dwell on its antiquity and purity. If it is
spoken from the throat, say these petitioners, "the Spanish and
Florentines affect that pronunciation as believing words so uttered
come from the heart." Finally, with presumably unconscious satire,
they allude to the speech of the northern part of the island as "a
kind of English."
Henry accomplished these great reforms in the teeth of the baronial
influence of the whole Marches, and if the slaughter of the Wars of
the Roses had made his task somewhat easier, he should have full
credit for achieving a piece of legislation whose importance as an
epoch-marking event could hardly be exaggerated, not only as affecting
Wales but the four powerful counties that adjoined it.
To create and organise six new counties out of chaos, to enfranchise
and give representation to twelve, to permanently attach one of the
three tributary kingdoms to the British Crown, is a performance that
should be sufficient to lift the reign of a monarch out of the common
run. Every schoolboy is familiar with the figure of Henry VIII.
prancing in somewhat purposeless splendour on the Field of the Cloth
of Gold. But who remembers the assimilation of Wales to England which
was his doing?
Wales, though small in population, was numerically much greater in
proportion to England than is now the case. To-day she is a twentieth,
then perhaps she was nearly a seventh, of the whole. It was of vital
importance that her people should be satisfied and well governed. The
accession of the Tudors and the common sense of their second monarch
achieved without difficulty what might have been a long and arduous
business.
The palmy days of Elizabeth saw Wales, like England, advance by leaps
and bounds. The native gentry, the tribesmen, the "Boneddigion,"
always pressing on the Norman aristocracy, now came again in wholesale
fashion to the front. The grim castle and the fortified manor
developed into the country house. Polite learning increased and the
upper classes abandoned, in a manner almost too complete, the native
tongue. The higher aristocracy, taking full and free part in English
life, became by degrees wholly Anglicised, and the habit, though very
gradually, spread downwards throughout the whole gentry class. The
Reformation had been accepted with great reluctance in Wales. The
people were conservative by instinct and loyal to all such constituted
authorities as they held in affection. They would take anything,
however, for that very reason, from the Tudors, and swallowed, or
partly swallowed, a pill that was by no means to their liking. In
Elizabeth's time the Bible and Prayer-Book were translated into Welsh,
which marked another epoch in the history of Wales much greater than
it at first sounds. It was not done without opposition: the desire in
official circles to stamp out the native language, which became
afterward so strong, had already germinated, and it was thought that
retaining the Scriptures and the Service in English would encourage
its acquisition among the people. The prospects, however, in the
actual practice did not seem encouraging, and in the meantime the
souls of the Welsh people were starving for want of nourishment. The
Welsh Bible and Prayer-Book proved an infinite boon to the masses of
the nation, but it did more than anything else to fix the native
tongue.
Wales readily transformed its affection for the Tudors into loyalty
for the Stuarts. The Church, too, was strong--the bent of the people
being averse to Puritanism, and indeed nowhere in Britain did the
survivals of popery linger so long as among the Welsh mountains. Even
to-day, amid the uncongenial atmosphere that a century of stern
Calvinism has created, some unconscious usages and expressions of the
peasantry in remoter districts preserve its traces. The Civil War
found Wales staunch almost to a man for the King. There were some
Roundheads in the English part of Pembroke, as was natural, and a few
leading families elsewhere were found upon the Parliamentary side.
Such of the castles as had not too far decayed were furbished up and
renewed the memories of their stormy prime under circumstances far
more injurious to their masonry. Harlech, Chirk, Denbigh, Conway, and
many others made notable defences. The violent loyalty of Wales
brought down upon it the heavy hand of Cromwell, though himself a
Welshman by descent. The landed gentry were ruined or crippled, and
the prosperity of the country greatly thrown back. It is said that the
native language took some hold again of the upper classes from the
fact of their poverty keeping them at home, whereas they had been
accustomed to flock to the English universities and the border grammar
schools, such as Shrewsbury, Chester, or Ludlow. Welsh poetry and
literature expended itself in abuse of that Puritanism which in a
slightly different form was later on to find in Wales its chosen home.
But in all this there was of course little trace of the old
international struggles. The Civil War was upon altogether different
lines. The attitude of Wales was, in fact, merely that of most of the
west of England somewhat emphasised.
Smitten in prosperity, the Principality moved slowly along to better
times in the wake of England, under the benevolent neutrality of the
later Stuarts and of William and Anne. It still remained a great
stronghold in outward things, at any rate, of the Church, and kept
alive what Defoe, travelling there in Anne's reign, calls "many
popish customs," such as playing foot-ball between the services on
Sunday, and retiring to drink at the public house, which was
sometimes, he noted, kept by the parson, while even into the
eighteenth century funeral processions halted at the crossroads and
prayed for the soul of the dead. The Welsh landowning families were
numerous and poor, proud of their pedigrees, which unlike the
Anglo-Norman had a full thousand years for genealogical facts or
fancies to play over. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there
were very few wealthy landowners in Wales who stood out above the
general level, which was perhaps a rude and rollicking one. There was
no middle class, for there were neither trade nor manufactures worth
mentioning, and little shifting from one class to another. Hence the
genealogy was simple, and consequently, perhaps, more accurate than in
wealthier societies. The mixture of English blood over most of the
country was almost nil among the lower class, and not great even among
the gentry.
The peasantry still submitted themselves without question to their own
social leaders, and the latter, though they had mostly abandoned their
own language, still took a pride in old customs and traditions, were
generous, hospitable, quarrelsome, and even more addicted to convivial
pleasures than their English contemporaries of that class. Defoe was
at a cocking match in Anglesey and sat down to dinner with forty
squires of the island. "They talked in English," he says, "but swore
in Welsh." That the Welsh gentleman of the present day, unlike his
prototype of Scotland or Ireland, shows no trace worth mentioning of
his nationality is curious when one thinks how much farther removed he
usually is in blood from the Englishman than either. It should be
remembered, however, that there were no seats of learning in Wales
such as Ireland and Scotland possessed. The well-to-do young Welshman
went naturally to England for his education, even in days when
difficulties of travelling were in favour of even indifferent local
institutions.
Surnames became customary in Wales about the time of the Tudor
settlement; previously only a few men of literary distinction had
adopted them, such as Owen Cyfylliog, Prince of Upper Powys, Dafydd
Hiraethog, etc. The inconvenience of being distinguished only by the
names of his more recent ancestors connected by "ab" or "ap" was found
intolerable by the Welshman and his English friends as life got more
complex. It is said that Henry VIII. was anxious for the Welsh
landowners to assume the name of their estates in the old Anglo-Norman
fashion, and it is a pity his suggestion was not followed, in part at
any rate. But the current Christian name of the individual was adopted
instead and saddled for ever on each man's descendants. So a language
full of euphonious place-names and sonorous sounds shows the paradox
of the most inconveniently limited and perhaps the poorest family
nomenclature in Europe.
In 1735, just two hundred years after its complete union with England,
began the movement that was in time to change all Wales, I had almost
said the very Welsh character itself. This was the Methodist revival.
All Welshmen were then Church people. The landed families for the most
part supplied the parishes with incumbents, grouping them no doubt as
much as possible so as to create incomes sufficient for a younger son
to keep a humble curate and ruffle it with his lay relatives over the
bottle and in the field. The peasantry may have been cheery and happy,
but they were sunk in ignorance. They seem, however, to have been good
churchgoers--the old instinct of discipline perhaps surviving--but the
spiritual consolation they received there was lamentably deficient,
and the Hanoverian régime was making matters steadily worse. Its
political bishops rarely came near their Welsh dioceses. All the
higher patronage was given to English absentees, for the poor Welsh
squires could be of little political service and had no equivalent
wherewith to pay for a deanery or a canon's stall. To be a Welshman,
in fact, was then, and for more than a century later when the landed
class had nearly ceased to enter the Church, of itself a bar to
advancement. The mental alertness and religious fervour, however, of
the Welsh people had only lain dormant under circumstances so
discouraging, and were far from dead. They presented a rare field for
the efforts of the religious reformer, though it seems more than
likely that the beauty and ritual of an awakened Anglican Church would
have appealed to their natures more readily even than the eloquence of
the Calvinistic school that eventually led them captive. The Welsh
people were imaginative, reverential, musical. Their devotion to the
old faith in both its forms was sufficiently shown by the pathetic
fidelity with which they clung to their mother churches till, both
physically and mentally, they tumbled about their ears.
The Methodist revivalists of the eighteenth century were, as everyone
knows, for the most part Churchmen. Many of them were in orders,
valiant and devoted men, who not only preached in the highways and
hedges, but founded schools all over Wales, whose peasantry at that
time were almost without education. They suffered every kind of
persecution and annoyance from the Church, while the country clergy
headed mobs who treated them with physical violence. No effort was
made to meet this new rival upon its own grounds,--those of
ministerial energy and spiritual devotion,--but its exponents were met
only with rotten eggs. The bishops were not merely absentees for the
most part, but from 1700 to 1870 they were consistently Englishmen,
ignorant of the Welsh tongue, and regarded in some sort as agents for
the Anglicising of Wales. Men who with some exceptions were destitute
of qualifications for their office found themselves in positions that
would have taxed abilities of the highest order and all the energies
of a modern prelate. The holders of Welsh sees laid neither such
slender stocks of ability nor energy as they might possess under the
slightest contribution on behalf of Welsh religion. With the funds of
the Church, however, they observed no such abstention, but saddled the
needy Welsh Establishment with a host of relatives and friends. As for
themselves, with a few notable exceptions they cultivated a dignified
leisure, sometimes at their palaces, more often in London or Bath. One
prelate never saw his diocese at all, while another lived entirely in
Cumberland. With the Methodist revival one could not expect them to
sympathise, nor is it surprising that their good wishes were with the
militant pot-house parsons who were in favour of physical force. One
must remember after all, however, that this was the Hogarthian period;
that in all these features of life England was at its worst; and that
the faults of the time were only aggravated in Wales by its aloofness
and its lingual complications. The Welsh Methodist, it is true, did
not formally leave the Church till 1811, but by that time Calvinism
had thoroughly taken hold of the country, and the Establishment had
not only made no spiritual efforts to stem the tide, but was rapidly
losing even its social influence, as the upper classes were ceasing to
take service in its ranks. The Welsh parson of indifferent morals and
lay habits had hitherto generally been of the landowning class. Now he
was more often than not of a humbler grade without any compensating
improvement in morals or professional assiduity. The immense
development of dissent in Wales during the last century is a matter of
common knowledge. The purifying of the Welsh Church and clergy in the
latter half of it and the revival of Anglican energy within the last
quarter are marked features of modern Welsh life. We have nothing to
do here with the probabilities of a success so tardily courted. But it
is of pertinent interest to consider the immense changes that have
come over Wales since, let us say, the middle of the Georgian period;
and by this I do not merely mean those caused by a material progress
common to the whole of Great Britain. For there is much reason to
think that the character of the Welsh peasantry has been steadily
altering, particularly in the more thoroughly Welsh districts, since
they fell under the influence of Calvinistic doctrines. There is much
evidence that the old Welshman was a merry, light-hearted person, of
free conversation and addicted to such amusements as came in his way;
that he still had strong military instincts,[16] and cherished feudal
attachments to the ancient families of Wales even beyond the habit of
the time among the English. This latter instinct has died hard,
considering the cleavage that various circumstances have created
between the landed gentry and the peasantry. Indeed it is by no means
yet dead.
[16] Recent events have demonstrated that this spirit is still far
from extinct.
The drift of the native tongue, too, since Tudor times has been
curious. Its gradual abandonment by the landed gentry from that period
onwards, with the tenacity with which their tenants for the most part
clung to it, is a subject in itself. The resistance it still offers in
spots that may be fairly described as in the very centre of the
world's civilisation is probably the most striking lingual anomaly in
Europe. Its disappearance, on the other hand, in regions intensely
Welsh is worthy of note. Radnorshire, for instance, penetrating the
very heart of the Principality, populated almost wholly by Cymry,
forgot its Welsh before anyone now living can remember. Bits of
Monmouth, on the other hand, long reckoned an English county, still
use it regularly. It is the household tongue of villagers in Flint,
who can see Liverpool from their windows, while there are large
communities of pure Celts in Brecon and Carmarthen who cannot even
understand it.
The great coal developments in South Wales have wholly transformed
large regions and brought great wealth into the country, and replaced
the abundant rural life of Glamorgan and its ancient families, Welsh
and Norman, with a black country that has developed a new social life
of its own. Slate quarrying has proved a vast and profitable industry
among the northern mountains, while thousands of tourists carry no
inconsiderable stream of wealth across the Marches with every
recurring summer. But neither coal-pits, nor quarries, nor tourists
make much impression on the Welsh character such as it has become in
the North, more particularly under the influence of Calvinism, and
very little upon the language which fifty years ago men were
accustomed to regard as doomed.
The history of Welsh land since the time of the Tudor settlement is
but that of many parts of England. Wales till this century was
distinguished for small properties and small tenancies. There were but
few large proprietors and few large farmers. In the matter of the
former particularly, things have greatly altered. The small squires
who lived somewhat rudely in diminutive manor-houses have been
swallowed up wholesale by their thriftier or bigger neighbours, but
the general and now regretted tendency to consolidate farms scarcely
touched Wales, fortunately for that country. Save in a few exceptional
districts it is a land of small working farmers, and in most parts the
resident agricultural labourer as a detached class scarcely exists.
Few countries in the world contain within the same area more elements
of prosperity and happiness than modern Wales, and fewer still are so
fortunately situated for making the most of them. Coal, iron, slate,
and other minerals in great abundance are vigorously exported and give
work and good wages to a large portion of the population. In the rural
districts a thrifty peasantry are more widely distributed over the
soil, to which they are peculiarly attached, than in almost any part
of Britain, and occupied for the most part in the more hopeful and
less toilsome of the two branches of agriculture, namely, that of
stock-breeding. Surrounded on three sides by the sea, there are ready
facilities for the trader, the sailor, or the fisherman. The romantic
scenery of the country is another valuable asset to its people and
brings an annual and certain income that only one small corner of
England can show any parallel to. Education is in an advanced state,
while the humbler classes of society have resources due to their taste
for music and their sentiment for their native language, which have no
equivalent in English village life.
Even those strangely constituted minds that like to dig up racial
grievances from the turmoil of the Middle Ages, when right and might
were synonymous words the world over, and profess to judge the
fourteenth century by the ethics of the nineteenth, must confess that
the forced partnership with England has had its compensations. The
reasonable Welshman will look back rather with much complaisance on
the heroic and prolonged struggle of his ancestors against manifest
destiny, remembering always that the policy of the Norman kings was an
obvious duty to themselves and to their realm.
Had the Ireland of that day, with its larger fighting strength and
sea-girt territory, possessed the national spirit and tenacious
courage of Wales, who knows but that she might have vindicated her
right to a separate nationality by the only test admissible in
mediæval ethics, that of arms? Geography at any rate in her case was
no barrier to an independent existence, and there would have been
nothing illogical or unnatural in the situation. But geography
irrevocably settled the destiny of Wales, as it eventually did that of
Scotland. If the conditions under which Wales came into partnership
were different and the date earlier, that, again, was partly due to
its propinquity to the heart of England. Yet with all these centuries
of close affinity to England, the Welsh in many respects--I had almost
said in most--have preserved their nationality more successfully than
the Celts of either Ireland or the North, and in so doing have lost
nothing of such benefits as modern civilisation brings.
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APPENDIX
THE BARDS
The Bards as a class were so deeply interwoven with the whole life of
ancient Wales and, though long shorn of most of their official glory,
played so prominent a part in the rising of Glyndwr, that it seems
desirable that a chapter touching on the subject should be included in
this book. Within such limits the subject can only be treated in the
most general and elementary manner. Yet such treatment is excusable
from the fact that the slenderest and most inefficient description of
Welsh song and Welsh singers must contain matter unknown to most
English readers. I imagine that few of these would resent being asked
to divest their minds of the time-honoured notion that the teaching of
the Druids was nothing but a bloodthirsty and barbarous superstition.
At any rate, Bardism and Druidism being practically the same thing,
one is obliged to remind those readers who may never have given the
matter any attention at all, that among the ancient Britons of the
Goidel stock who inhabited most of Wales and the West previous to the
Cymric immigration, Druidism was the fountain of law, authority,
religion, and, above all, of education. The Druids, with their three
orders, were a caste apart for which those who were qualified by good
character and noble birth to do so, laboriously trained themselves.
They decided all controversies whether public or private, judged all
causes, from murder to boundary disputes, and administered both
rewards and punishments. Those who ventured to defy them were
excommunicated, which was equivalent to becoming moral and social
lepers.
The three orders were known as Druids, Bards, and Ovates. The first
were priests and judges, the second poets; the third were the least
aristocratic, practised the arts and sciences, and were, moreover, a
probationary or qualifying order through which candidates for the
other two, who were on the same level of dignity, had to pass. As
everyone knows, there was an Arch-Druid of the Isle of Britain who had
his sanctuary in Anglesey. But it is a matter of much less common
knowledge how close was the connection between the Druids and
Christianity in the Roman period and even afterwards. The Romans, with
conquest foremost in their minds, most naturally aimed at the native
rulers of the people and made these bardic orders the objects of their
special attack. Their slaughter on the banks of the Menai as described
by Tacitus, and the destruction of the Sacred Groves of Mona, are
among our familiar traditions.
The Druid orders fled to Ireland, Brittany, and elsewhere. But in
time, when the Romans, strong in their seats, grew tolerant, the
exiles returned and quietly resumed, in West Britain at any rate,
something like their old positions.
When Christianity pushed its way from the West into the island, the
bardic orders, unable to resist it, seem by degrees to have accepted
the situation and to have become the priests of the new faith, as they
had been the custodians and expounders of the old. This transition was
the less difficult seeing that the Druids preached all the ordinary
tenets of morality, and the immortality of the soul. To what extent
the early Christianity of western Britain was tainted with the
superstition of the Druids is a question upon which experts have
written volumes, and it need not detain us here. A notable effort was
made in the fourth century to merge Christianity, so to speak, in the
old British faith, and Morgan or Pelagius, "seaborn," of Bangor Iscoed
was the apostle of this attempted reaction. He left the island about
A.D. 400, and his converts in what we now call Wales were numerous and
active. The movement is historically known as the "Pelagian heresy"
and has some additional importance from the number of ecclesiastics
that came from over the sea for the purpose of denouncing it.
But all this is rather the religious than the secular side of Bardism,
the leading feature of whose teaching in pre-Roman days had been the
committal to memory of its literature, both prose and verse. Writing
was discountenanced, as the possession of these stores of learning
thus laboriously acquired were a valuable asset of the initiated.
Three was the mystic number in the recitation of all axioms and
precepts, for many of these were committed to writing later on in the
seventh and tenth centuries, and are now familiar as the Welsh
"Triads."
The bards, as a lay order, remained of great importance. In the laws
of Howel Dda (tenth century) the royal bard stands eighth among the
officers of the State. The fine for insulting him was six cows and
twenty silver pennies. His value was 126 cows, his land was free, and
he had the use of a house. His noblest duty was to sing "The Monarchy
of Britain" at the head of his chieftain's army when victorious. The
number of songs he had to sing to the King and Queen respectively
during the social hours was clearly defined, as were his claims upon
each. Among the latter was a specified portion of the spoils of war, a
chessboard made from the horn of a sea-fish from the King, and a ring
from the Queen. It was the business of the bards, moreover, to
preserve genealogies, and they were practically tutors to the rising
generation of the aristocracy. Every family of position in Wales had
its domestic bard, while below these there were a great number of
strolling minstrels who visited the dwellings of the inferior people,
from whom they exacted gifts of money ("cymmorthau") as well as free
quarters.
In treating of individual and well-known bards one naturally turns for
a beginning to the sixth century, when that famous quartet, Taliesin,
Merddyn, Aneurin, and Llywarch Hên, flourished. Several poems either
actually their work or purporting to be so are extant. To linger over
a period so dim, however great the names that adorn it, would be out
of place here. That all four were great kings of song in their time is
beyond doubt. The legends that distinguish them are comparatively
familiar: how Taliesin was found floating in a leather bottle in
Prince Elphin's salmon weir near Aberdovey, how Merddyn as a boy
astonished the advisers of Vortigern and became his good angel, and
how Llywarch Hên, at a hundred and fifty years of age, witnessed the
slaughter of the last of his four-and-twenty sons in battle against
the Saxons. His poem on the death of Cynddylan, Prince of Powys,
seizes the imagination, not so much from the description the
poet-warrior gives of the death of his friend and his own sons in a
decisive combat which he himself took part in, but from the almost
certain fact that from the top of the Wrekin he saw the Saxons destroy
and sack Uriconium ("the white town"), whose ruins are such a striking
feature among the sights of Shropshire.
From these four giants until 1080 there is little left whereby to
judge of the merits of the bards, and no great record of their names.
That they sang and played and gave counsel and kept genealogies is
beyond question, but it was not till after the Norman conquest of
England that they began to leave much behind them in the way of
written documents.
When Prince Griffith ap Kynan returned from Ireland to Wales and the
poet Meilir arose to sing his triumphs and good qualities, a new era
in bardic history may be said to have commenced. The intellectual and
religious revival that distinguished the twelfth century in Western
Europe was conspicuous in Wales. The bards were no longer singing
merely of battles, but of nature and kindred subjects, with a delicacy
that showed them to be men of taste and culture. In the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, in spite of war and conquest,
the age was a golden one in Welsh song. Between eighty and ninety
bards of this period have left poems behind them as a witness of their
various styles and merits, while there are no literary remains
whatever of very many who are known to have been quite famous in their
day. Thousands, too, of popular songs must have existed that the
jealousy of the composers or, more probably, the price of parchment
consigned to oblivion.
"When the literary revival of this period reached Wales, its
people," says Mr. Stephens in the _Literature of the Kymri_,
"were better prepared than their neighbours for intellectual
effort." "An order of bards existed, numerous and well
disciplined; a language in all its fullness and richness was
in use among all classes of people, and as a necessary
consequence their literature was superior, more copious, and
richer than that of any contemporaneous nation. The fabulous
literature so prized by others was in no great repute, but
gave way to the public preference for the more laboured and
artistic productions of the bards."
Several Welsh Princes of commanding character and unusual ability came
to the front in the long struggle with the Norman power, and were no
unworthy sources of bardic inspiration. Many of them aspired
themselves to literary as well as martial fame, of whom Owain
Cyfeiliog, Prince of Upper Powys, was the most notable. Poetry was in
high repute. Eisteddfodau were held periodically with much ceremony
and splendour, and were sometimes advertised a year in advance, not
only throughout Wales but in Ireland and other portions of the British
Islands. Not poetry alone but literature generally and music, of
course, both vocal and instrumental, were subjects of competition,
while Rhys ap Tudor, a long-lived and distinguished Prince of South
Wales, revived, after a sojourn in Brittany, the system of the Round
Table. To Englishmen the long list of bards who adorned the period
between the Norman arrival and Glyndwr's rising would be mere names,
but even to those who may only read the works of the most notable in
translations, they are of great interest if only as a reflection of
life and thought at a time when England and English were still almost
silent.
Gwalchmai, the son of a distinguished father, Meilir, already
mentioned, was among the first of the revived school, whose work is
regarded by Celtic scholars as of the first quality. His love of
nature is prominent in many of the poems he has left:
"At the break of day, and at evening's close,
I love the sweet musicians who so fondly dwell
In dear, plaintive murmurs, and the accents of woe;
I love the birds and their sweet voices
In the soothing lays of the wood."
Owain Gwynedd was the hero-king of Gwalchmai's day. His repulse of an
attack made by Henry the Second's fleet under the command of an
unpatriotic Prince of Powys in Anglesey is the subject of the bard's
chief heroic poem:
"Now thickens still the frantic war,
The flashing death-strokes gleam afar,
Spear rings on spear, flight urges flight,
And drowning victims plunge to-night
Till Menai's over-burthened tide,
Wide-blushing with the streaming gore,
And choked with carnage, ebbs no more;
While mail-clad warriors on her side
In anguish drag their deep-gash'd wounds along,
And 'fore the King's Red chiefs are heap'd the mangled throng."
Owain Cyfeiliog, a Prince of Powys in the end of the twelfth century,
though a noted warrior, is a leading instance of a royal bard. His
chief poem, _The Hirlâs Horn_ (drinking-cup), is famous wherever Welsh
is spoken:
"This horn we dedicate to joy;
Then fill the Hirlâs horn, my boy,
That shineth like the sea,
Whose azure handles tipped with gold
Invite the grasp of Britons bold,
The sons of liberty."
This is one of the longest poems of the twelfth century. The scene is
the night after a battle, and the Prince with his warriors gathered
round him in the banqueting-hall sends the brimming cup to each of his
chieftains successively and enumerates their respective deeds. A
leading incident in the poem is when Owen, having eulogised the
prowess of two favourite warriors in glowing terms, turns to their
accustomed seats, and, finding them vacant, suddenly recalls the fact
that they had fallen in the battle of the morning:
"Ha! the cry of death--And do I miss them!
O Christ! how I mourn their catastrophe!
O lost Moreiddig--How greatly shall I need thee!"
A most suggestive poem by another Prince is a kind of summary of his
progress through his dominions from the Ardudwy mountains,
"Fast by the margin of the deep
Where storms eternal uproar keep,"
to the hills above Llangollen where he proposes "to taste the social
joys of Yale." This is Howel, the illegitimate son of Owain Gwynedd,
who seized and held for two years his father's kingdom. Though so
strenuous a warrior, his poems are rather of love and social life. He
sings with much feeling of the joys of Wales; her fair landscape, her
bright waters and green vales, her beauteous women and skimming
seagulls, her fields clothed with tender trefoil, her far-reaching
wilds, and plenteousness of game. Himself a successful stormer of
castles, there is something richly suggestive in the action of a man
laying down the torch and bloody sword and taking up the pen to
describe his havoc:
"The ravens croaked and human blood
In ruddy streams poured o'er the land;
There burning houses war proclaimed;
Churches in flames and palace halls;
While sheets of fire scale the sky,
And warriors 'On to battle!' cry."
Then the author wholly changes his mood:
"Give me the fair, the gentle maid,
Of slender form, in mantle green;
Whose woman's wit is ever staid,
Subdued by virtue's graceful mien.
Give me the maid, whose heart with mine
Shall blend each thought, each hope combine;
Then, maiden fair as ocean's spray,
Gifted with Kymric wit's bright ray,
Say, am I thine?
Art thou then mine?
What! silent now?
Thy silence makes this bosom glow.
I choose thee, maiden, for thy gifts divine;
'Tis right to choose--then, fairest, choose me thine."
There is much misunderstanding as to the fashion in which the bards
were treated by Edward the First. During war the leading minstrels
were naturally identified with the patrons whose banners they followed
and whose praises they sang; but the statement that they were put to
death as bards rests on wholly secondary authority and seems doubtful.
Stringent laws were certainly made against the lower order of
minstrels who wandered homeless through the country, but they seem to
have been devised as much for the protection of the common people, who
were called on to support them, as against the men themselves, who
were regarded by the authorities as mendicants and idlers. The
superior bards, who kept strictly to the houses of the great, were
probably not often interfered with. These, though they had regular
patrons and fixed places of abode, made extended tours from time to
time in which there seems to have been no special distinction between
North and South Wales. The hatred of the bards towards England was a
marked feature of their time, and was so consistent that though many
Welsh princes, in their jealousy, lent their swords, as we have seen,
to the invader, no bards, so far as one knows, turned against their
countrymen. For generations they prided themselves in being
intellectually superior to the Saxon. They also saw, after the Norman
conquest, the English race despised and held down by their conquerors,
and a species of serfdom in use among the Saxons which had no
prototype in their own country. The ordinary bards, however, had
beyond all doubt sacrificed much of their old independence and become
the creatures of their patrons and ready to sell their praises for
patronage. Even the respectable Meilir confesses:
"I had heaps of gold and velvet
From frail princes for loving them."
Llewelyn the Great, the second, that is to say, of the three
Llewelyns, aroused the enthusiasm of Bardic literature and was the
subject of much stirring eulogy:
"None his valour could withstand,
None could stem his furious hand.
Like a whirlwind on the deep,
See him through their squadrons sweep.
Then was seen the crimson flood,
Then was Offa bathed in blood,
Then the Saxons fled with fright,
Then they felt his royal might."
Dafydd Benvras, the author of this stanza, left many poems, and later
on Griffith ap Yr Ynad Goch wrote what is regarded as among the finest
of Welsh odes, on the death of the last Llewelyn, laying the blame of
that catastrophe on the wickedness of his countrymen:
"Hark how the howling wind and rain
In loudest symphony complain;
Hark how the consecrated oaks,
Unconscious of the woodman's strokes,
With thundering crash proclaim he's gone,
Fall in each other's arms and groan.
Hark! how the sullen trumpets roar.
See! how the white waves lash the shore.
See how eclipsed the sun appears,
See! how the stars fall from their spheres,
Each awful Heaven-sent prodigy,
Ye sons of infidelity!
Believe and tremble, guilty land.
Lo! thy destruction is at hand."
After the Edwardian conquest in 1284 the note of the bards sensibly
softened and attuned itself much more generally to love and nature.
The song-birds particularly were in great request as recipients of
poetic addresses and confidences.
"And thou, lark,
Bard of the morning dawn,
Show to this maid
My broken heart."
While the same singer, Rhys Goch, describes thus the light tread of
his ladylove:
"As peahens stride in sun-ray heat,
See her the earth elastic tread;
And where she walks, neath snow-white feet
Not e'en a trefoil bends its head."
The latter part of the 14th century was extremely prolific in poetry
which, with some notable exceptions, is regarded rather as showing a
good general level than as producing any masterpieces. Dafydd ap
Gwilym, the Welsh Ovid, is of course a striking exception. Over 250 of
his poems are preserved, while Lewis Glyncothi, Gutyn Owain, Iolo
Goch, Glyndwr's bard, and two or three more have left behind them
something like 300 others. Dafydd ap Gwilym, who was buried at Strata
Florida, holds one of the highest places in Cymric literature. It is
as a love poet that he is chiefly distinguished, but his love of
nature and his own beautiful country finds sole expression in many of
his productions. His ode to Fair Glamorgan, written from "the heart of
wild, wild Gwynedd," asking the summer to be his messenger, is
regarded as one of his best. In translation it is interesting as a
contemporary picture, though a poetic one, of the richest Welsh
province.
"Radiant with corn and vineyards sweet,
And lakes of fish and mansions neat,
With halls of stone where kindness dwells,
And where each hospitable lord
Heaps for the stranger guest his board,
And where the generous wine-cup swells,
With trees that bear the luscious pear,
So thickly clustering everywhere.
Her lofty woods with warblers teem,
Her fields with flowers that love the stream,
Her valleys varied crops display,
Eight kinds of corn and three of hay;
Bright parlour with her trefoiled floor!
Sweet garden, spread on ocean shore."
Quotations have already been made in the body of this book from Iolo
Goch's ode to Glyndwr, and throughout the Wars of the Roses Lewis
Glyncothi, Gutyn Owain, and Tudor Aled continued to sing of
contemporary events.
The leading charge against Cymric poetry is that it is too prone to
elaborate the mere art of versification at the expense of fire and
animation. Alliteration was of course the chief method of ornament,
though the rhyming of the terminal syllable was by no means always
ignored. But, speaking generally, skill in the arrangement of words
according to certain time-honoured conventions occupied more than an
equitable share in the making of Welsh verse. A tendency to put mere
sound above feeling and emotion did much to cramp it, and often forced
it into mannerisms and affectations that would rather destroy than
enhance the intrinsic merits of a composition.
"Beyond all rhetorical ornaments," says Giraldus Cambrensis,
"they preferred the use of alliteration and that kind more
especially which repeats the first letters or syllables of
words. They made so much use of this ornament in every
finished discourse that they thought nothing elegantly spoken
without it."
Mr. Stephens, by way of illustration, points out poems by the greater
bards which from the first line to the last commence with the same
letter. He also attributes the extraordinary elaboration in structure
with which fashion was prone to cumber Welsh poetry to a desire for
increasing the difficulties of composition and in consequence the
exclusiveness of the bardic order. It is not surprising that in a
country where war was the chief business of life it should be by far
the favourite subject of the minstrel, particularly when one remembers
that the celebration of his employer's exploits or intended exploits
was the chief source of the domestic poet's livelihood. The wars of
Glyndwr stirred again the old fighting note which after the Edwardian
conquest had given way in a great measure to gentler themes. The old
laws against the bards, enunciated by Edward I., now for long a dead
letter, were renewed, but after this final submission of Wales it is
doubtful if they continued to have much meaning, particularly amid the
chaos of the ensuing Wars of the Roses, when the bards most certainly
did their full share of singing.
I have said nothing of the music which both in early and mediæval
Wales played such a prominent part in the national life. The harp was
always the true national instrument, though the pipe or bagpipe was
well known and in frequent use; but it was never really popular, as
in Ireland and Scotland, and this was surely a valuable testimony to
the superior culture of the Welsh musicians. Griffith ap Kynan, King
of North Wales about 1100, already mentioned, introduced it into the
Eisteddfod as the result of his Irish education. The pipes had
hitherto been forbidden, and the result at the celebrated Eisteddfod
at Caerwys was that Griffith's prize of a silver pipe went to a
Scotsman. The Welsh, in short, despised the instrument. Lewis
Glyncothi has left an amusing satire on a piper. He finds himself in
Flint at an English marriage, where the guests would have none of him
or his harp, but "bawled for Will the Piper, low born wretch" who
comes forward as best he may, "unlike a free enobled man."
"The churl did blow a grating shriek,
The bag did swell, and harshly squeak,
As does a goose from nightmare crying,
Or dog crushed by a chest when dying,
This whistling box's changeless note
Is forced from turgid veins and throat;
Its sound is like a crane's harsh moan,
Or like a gosling's latest groan."
Giraldus, half Welshman himself, writing after his extended tour
through Wales, about 1200, with Archbishop Baldwin, says:
"The strangers who arrived in the morning were entertained
until evening with the conversation of young women and with
the music of the harp, for in this country almost every house
is provided with both. Such an influence had the habit of
music on the mind and its fascinating powers, that in every
family or in every tribe, they esteemed skill in playing on
the harp beyond any kind of learning. Again, by the sweetness
of their musical instruments they soothe and delight the ear.
They are rapid yet delicate in their modulation, and by the
astonishing execution of their fingers and their swift
transitions from discord to concord, produce the most pleasing
harmony."
The part-singing of the Welsh seems also to have greatly struck
Giraldus in contrast to the unison in which he heard the musicians of
other nations perform.
To draw the line between the bard and musician would be of course
impossible. Many writers of verse could only declaim; some could sing
to their own accompaniment. The mass of musicians, how ever, we may
take it, belonged to the lower grade of wandering bards, who played
first, as we have seen, upon the national instrument, the harp, as
well as upon the pipe and "crwth" (a kind of rude violin).
The tone of morality was certainly not high among the mediæval Welsh
bards. They had long lost all touch with the order of the priesthood,
and indeed monks and poets had become almost as a matter of course
inimical to one another. The latter, too, maintained a steady hatred
of the Saxon that was almost creditable, seeing how often their
masters, for the sake of interest or revenge, took up arms against
their fellow-countrymen.
It is sufficiently difficult merely to touch, and that in the
slightest manner, so vast a subject as this. In recognising the
insufficiency of such an attempt, I am almost thankful that the
period of Glyndwr and the succeeding turmoil of the Wars of the Roses
puts a reasonable limit to my remarks. For it goes without saying that
when Wales settled down under the Tudors to its happy and humdrum
existence, the martial attitude of the bards as feudal appanages and
national firebrands altogether ceased. Welsh poets hereafter were
private individuals, their song ceased for the most part to be of war;
nor was the Saxon or the Lloegrian any longer an object of invective.
The glory of this new United Britain to which they belonged was not
without its inspiration, but it has been by no means a leading note in
Welsh verse, which, speaking generally, has since in this particular
sung upon a minor key.
[Decoration]
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INDEX
A
Aber, 60, 72
Aberdaron, 201, 264-269
Aberffraw, 25
Abergavenny, 143
Abergavenny, Lord of, 227
Aberystwith, 231, 284-293
À'Court, Sir Francis, 262, 286
Adam of Usk, 130, 133, 150, 156, 159, 163
Albans, St., 193
Anarawd, 20
Anglesey, 70, 71, 75, 127, 135, 217, 218, 279
Anne, Queen, 323
Arundel, Earl of, 99, 177, 298
Arvon, cantref of, 295
Asaph, St., 66
Audley, Lord, 68, 86, 216
Augustine, St., 8, 9, 10
Avignon Pope, the, 234, 269-271, 299
B
Baldwin, Archbishop, 48
Bangor, 57, 75, 148, 299
Bangor Iscoed, 6
Bardolph, Earl, 252, 264, 268
Bards, the, 123, 134, 143, 163
Bardsey, Isle of, 53
Barmouth, 118
Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, 195, 229, 290
Beaufort, Earl, 128
Beaumaris, 279
Berkeley, James, Lord, 290
Berkhampstead, 170, 180
Berkrolles, Sir A., 231
Berkrolles, Sir Laurence, 281-283
Berwick, 203, 204
Bifort, Llewelyn, 234, 251, 252, 279, 299
Blanche, Princess, 168, 169
Bleddyn ap Cynvyn, 85
Bolde, John, 148-152, 219
Bramham Moor, battle of, 268
Brân the Blessed, 232
Brecon, 36, 142, 193, 194, 221, 317
Breiddon Hills, 17
Bristol, 212;
sailors of, 220, 287, 288
Brith, David, 134
Bromfield, Lordship of, 106
Browe, Sir Hugh, 141
Bryn Owen, battle of, 245
Brynsaithmarchog, 157
Builth, 152
C
Cader Idris, 141
Cadvan, King, 16
Cadwallader, 231
Cadwgan of the battle-axe, 260
Caer Drewyn, 122, 144
Caerleon, 2, 215, 245
Caerphilly, 215-217, 245
Canterbury, Archbishop of, 73, 79
Cardiff, 214, 215, 316
Cardigan, 5, 71, 79, 142, 149, 152
Carew, Thos., Earl, 191, 192, 202
Carmarthen, 28, 71, 79, 142, 152, 191, 192, 197, 198, 212-217, 256, 287
Carnarvon, 78, 86, 128, 139, 148, 190, 247
_Carnarvon, Record of_, 240, 287, 301
Carte, 303
Charles, King of France, 224, 225
Charltons, the, 146, 217, 229, 230, 297
Cheshire, 315
Chester, 1, 28, 32, 43, 44, 135, 140, 143, 144, 177, 203, 210, 302, 318
Chirk, 44, 87, 106, 155, 323
Clares, the, 316
Clear's, St., 191
Clwyd, Vale of, 18-20, 77, 135, 312
Coed Eulo, 43
Coity Castle, 37, 231, 259, 260, 275
Colwyn, 98
Colwyn ap Tangno, 232
Conway, 52, 61, 64-66, 75-78, 97, 98, 138-140, 218, 219, 323
Cornwall, conquest of, 16
Cornwall, Sir John, 217
Corwen, 44, 106, 122
Courtenay, Richard, 291
Courtenays, the, 214
Craig-y-dorth, battle of, 229
Creton, M., 121
Criccieth Castle, 62, 190, 219
Croesau Common, 111
Crofts, 104
Cunedda, 5
Cwm Hir Abbey, 53, 145
Cymmer Abbey, 166
Cynddylan, 7
Cynllaeth, 88
Cyrnwigen, 223
D
Dafydd ap Griffith, 71, 72, 74, 76
Dafydd ap Gwilim, 149, 235
Dafydd ap Llewelyn, 61-65
Dafydd ap Owen Gwynedd, 47
Dafydd ap Sinion, 232
Danbury church, 164
Danes, the, 17, 28
Daron, David, Dean of Bangor, 251, 252, 264, 279
David, St., 5
David's, St., 12, 28, 33, 48, 80
Dean, Forest of, 287
Dee River, 88, 91, 122
Defoe, 323, 324
Deganwy Castle, 57, 64
Deheubarth, description of, 14
Denbigh, 72, 118, 135, 141, 323
Denbigh County, 78
Deorham, 6
Despencer, Lady, 217, 242-244
Dinas Brân, 86, 87, 107, 118
Dolbadarn Castle, 66, 157, 301
Dolgelly, 141, 223
Dolwyddelan, 56, 301
Don, Henry, 190, 225
Doncaster, 125
Douglas, Lord, 181, 182, 203-206, 264
Dovey, the, 142, 143
Durham, 125
Dynevor Castle, 185, 190, 202
Dysanni River, 280
E
Eadgar, King, 26
Edeyrnion, Vale of, 102, 123, 240
Edinburgh, 126
Edward I., 67, 69-71, 75, 78, 79, 213
Edward II., 80
Edward III., 285
Edward IV., 313
Einion, 34, 35
Eleanor, Queen, 80
Elen, Glyndwr's mother, 88
Elfreton, Henry de, 138
Elizabeth, Queen, 321
Elizabeth Scudamore, 105
Ellis, Sir Henry, 189
Eltham, palace of, 242
Emma, wife of Dafydd ap Owen Gwynedd, 47
Emma, wife of Lord Audley, 86
Ethelfred, King, 10
F
Faireford, John, 193
Fitzhamon, 35-37, 316
Flemings, the, 40, 41, 144, 145
Flint, 43, 45, 78, 98, 99, 330
France, Charles, King of, 224, 225, 299
Franciscans, their plot, 169
G
Gam, Davy, 221-223, 298, 302
Gascoine, Judge, 252
Giraldus Cambrensis, 11, 47-52, 215
Glamorgan, 33-35, 175, 214, 245, 246, 251, 252, 259, 277, 278,
303, 316-330
Gloucester, Earl of, 75, 291, 318
Glyncothi, Lewis, 306
Glyndwr, his birth, and legends connected with it, 82, 83;
as a popular hero, 84;
descent, 87, 88;
place of birth, 89;
first recorded appearance, 90;
his designation, 91;
his youth, 92, 93;
esquire to Bolingbroke, 94;
supposed adherence to Richard II., 95, 99;
home life, 100-103;
wife and family, 104, 105;
estate and hospitality, 106, 107;
quarrel with Grey of Ruthin, 112;
refused a hearing, 113;
further persecution by Grey, 114, 115;
attacked by Earls Grey and Talbot and escapes, 120;
heads the Welsh forces, 122;
supported by the bards, 123;
declared Prince of Wales, 124;
eludes King Henry's forces, 127;
excluded from pardon, 128;
winters at Glyndyfrdwy, 131, 132;
attitude towards Hotspur and Prince Henry, 135, 136;
turns his army southwards, 138;
occupies Plinlimmon, 142, 143;
gains a victory at Mynydd Hyddgant, 144;
ravages South and Mid-Wales, 145, 146;
creates panic in England, 147;
frustrates Henry's second invasion, 149, 150;
all-powerful in Wales, 151;
goes to Carnarvon, 152;
meeting with Hotspur, 153, 154;
winters again at Glyndyfrdwy, 155;
attempts the capture of Harlech, 156;
captures Grey and ransoms him, 156-158;
sends letters to Scotland and Ireland, 159, 160;
destroys St. Asaph, 164;
adventure with Howel Sele, 165-168;
leaves North Wales, 170;
battle of Pilleth and capture of Edmund Mortimer, 171, 172;
devastates Glamorgan, 175;
his doings in Carnarvonshire, 176;
attacks west coast castles, 177;
established reputation as a magician, 178;
baffles Henry's third attempt to crush him, 180;
marries his daughter to Mortimer, 183;
his affairs prospering, 185;
invests west coast castles, 188;
his houses at Sycherth and Glyndyfrdwy destroyed by Prince
Henry, 186-188;
activity in South Wales, 190;
captures Carmarthen, 191;
checked by Carew, 192;
creates alarm in England, 193;
consults a soothsayer, 197;
meditates invasion of England, 198;
collision with the Percys, 201;
causes of his absence from battle of Shrewsbury, 202;
visits North Wales, 209;
invades Herefordshire, 211;
baffles Henry again, 211-214;
takes border castles, 215;
receives aid from the French, 217;
his Anglesey troops, 218;
attacks Carnarvon, 218;
captures Harlech, 220;
holds a parliament at Machynlleth, 221;
arrests Davy Gam, 222;
holds a council at Dolgelly, 223;
sends envoys to the King of France, 224;
letter to Henry Don, 225;
active on the Marches, 226;
defeat at Mynydd-cwm-du and victory at Craig-y-dorth, 229;
holds court at Llanbadarn and Harlech, 231-234;
situation in 1405, 237-242;
attempt to carry off the young Earl of March, 242;
victory at Pant-y-wenol, 245;
defeat at Grosmont, 247;
defeat at Pwll-Melyn and death of his brother, 249;
sends envoys to the North, 250;
his supposed wanderings, 252, 253;
summons a parliament to Harlech, 254;
meets his French allies at Tenby, 255;
marches to Worcester, 256-258;
retreats to Wales, 259;
his magic art again, 260;
dissatisfied with the French, 261;
secures exemption money from Pembroke, 262;
signs the tripartite indenture at Aberdaron, 264-268;
his famous letter to the King of France, 269-273;
his fortunes sensibly waning, 276;
traditions of his wanderings, 280-283;
movements uncertain, 284;
relieves Aberystwith, 291;
still active but no longer the same terror to England, 294;
loses Harlech and Aberystwith, 295;
his family captured, 296;
his fortunes sink, 300;
relapses gradually into a mere outlaw, 302;
legends concerning his wanderings, 303;
offered pardon by Henry V., 303;
claims of Monnington and Kentchurch as scene of his death, 307;
estimate by Welshmen of his position, 308
Glyndwr's Mount, 103
Glyndyfrdwy, 88, 91, 100, 104, 106, 120, 122, 128, 131, 186-190, 198
Gower, 197
Grendor, Sir John, 145, 184, 259, 290
Grenowe ap Tudor, 127
Grey, Reginald, Earl of Ruthin, 109-124, 154-159, 172, 173
Grey, Richard, Earl de, 177
Griffith ap Dafydd, 115-118
Griffith ap Llewelyn I., 28, 30, 31
Griffith ap Llewelyn II., 53, 68
Griffith ap Madoc, 85-87
Griffith, Sir John, 252
Griffith, son of Glyndwr, 165, 233, 249, 275, 306
Griffith y Baron Gwyn, 88
Grosmont, 246, 247, 304
Gutyn, Owen, 235
Gwenllian, illegitimate daughter of Glyndwr, 306
Gwent, 303
Gwynedd, description of, 13
H
Hall, 258, 259
Hanard, Jankyn, 190
Hanmer, family of, 104, 105
Hanmer, Griffith, 128
Hanmer, John, 224
Hardyng, Chronicle of, 154-159, 173, 174, 179
Harlech, 78, 156, 186, 190, 219, 220, 231-233, 262, 275, 287,
288, 293, 295, 296, 323
Harold, 29
Haverford-west, 41, 255
Hebog, Moel, 280
Henry I., King, 40
Henry II., King, 42-45
Henry III., 59-66
Henry IV., 93, 94, 121, 125-131, 136-140, 147-151, 154, 157, 158,
168-170, 177-181, 185, 200-207, 210-214, 230, 241-244, 256-261,
278, 284-292, 298, 302
Henry VII., 314
Henry VIII., 315, 319, 325
Henry, Prince, 117, 121, 125, 128, 135-137, 148, 185-190, 198,
202, 205, 210, 227, 240-247, 259, 276, 278, 284-295, 302,
303
Herbert, Lord, 232
Hereford, 193-195, 212-214, 226, 250, 251, 256, 257, 287, 288, 295, 317
Heytely field, 204
Higham Ferrers, 200
Hoare, Sir R. C., 168
Holinshed, 164, 204
Holt Castle, 87
Homildon, battle of, 181, 182
Hopkyn ap Thomas, 198
Hotspur, 131, 135-137, 139-142, 153, 154, 181, 182, 203-207
Howel ap Edwy, 28
Howel ap Owen Gwynedd, 45, 46
Howel Dda, 21-24
Howel Sele, 165-168
Howel Vychan, 219
Hugueville, Sire de, 255-258
I
Iago ap Idwal, 28
Iestyn, 38
Innocent, Pope, 58
Iolo Goch, 100-102, 124, 163, 208, 234, 283, 309
Iolo Morganwg MSS., 245, 281, 294
Isabel, daughter of Glyndwr, 105, 129
Isabella of France, 126
J
Janet Crofts, Glyndwr's daughter, 105
Jevan ap Meredith, 254
Joan, wife of Llewelyn II., 56, 60, 62
Joanna of Brittany, 168, 183
John, King, 56, 57
John ap Howel, 276
K
Katherine, wife of Edmund Mortimer, 233, 296
Kentchurch, 304
Kidwelly, 191
Kingeston, Archdeacon, 195, 196, 226, 227
L
Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, 135
Lampadarn, 186, 275
Lampeter, 152
Leget, David, 134
Leicester, 125
Leland, 189
Leominster, 211
Lichfield, 177, 202
Lilleshall, 177
Lincoln, 177
Lionel, son of Edmund Mortimer, 296
Llanbadarn, 28, 224, 231
Llandilo, 76, 185
Llandovery, 152, 185
Llanfaes Abbey, 60
Llangollen, 102, 123, 280
Llanrwst, 25, 61, 312
Llansantffraid, 172
Llansilin, 101, 127
Llewelyn ap Griffith, last Prince of North Wales, 65-72
Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, Prince of North Wales, 55-60
Llewelyn ap Madoc, 86, 87
Llewelyn ap Seisyllt, Prince of North Wales, 27, 28
Llewelyn of Cayo, 150
Lleyn, promontory of, 53, 217
Lloid, John, 134
Llywarch, Hên, 7
London, 80
Ludlow, 177, 318
Lupus, Hugh, Earl of Chester, 32, 33
Lussan, Mme. de, 255
M
Machynlleth, 220-225, 269
Madoc ap Griffith, 85
Madoc ap Meredith, 80
Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd, 46
Maelgwyn, Prince of Gwynedd, 232
Maidstone, 244
Manorbier Castle, 41, 47
March, Earl of, 170, 242
Margaret Monnington, Glyndwr's daughter, 105
Matthew of Paris, 74
Melynydd, 317
Meredith, son of Glyndwr, 105, 233, 276, 304, 306
Meredith ap Owen, 118
Merioneth, 78, 215, 287, 301, 313
Milford, 254, 255
Monmouth, 259, 317, 330
Monnington, 104, 303-305
Monnow River, 246
Montgomery, 32, 146, 177, 317
Morgan of Coity, 37
Mortimer, Earl of, 87
Mortimer, Sir Edmund, 106, 170-172, 183, 184, 200, 201, 232, 242,
287, 296
Mortimer, Sir Ralph, 65
Mynydd-cwm-du, battle of, 229
Mynydd-Hyddgant, battle of, 144
N
Nannau, 165-168
Nevin tournament, 80
Newcastle, 126
Newmarch, Bernard de, 36
Newport, 215, 245
Newport, Sir Edward, 247
Northampton, 125, 193, 294
Northumberland, Earl of, 199, 200, 201, 209, 251, 252, 264-269, 279
Nottingham, 177
O
Offa, King of Mercia, 8, 13, 19
Ogof Dinas, 303
Oldcastle, Sir John, 290
Oswestry, 101, 116
Owen ap Griffith, 65, 66
Owen Cyfeiliog, 85
Owen Gwynedd, 42-45
Oxford, 133, 134
P
Pant-y-wenol, 245
Pauncefote, John, 216
Pembroke, 40, 41, 262, 316
Pengwern, 7
Penmynydd, 138, 314
Pennal, 269
Pennant, 143, 257
Perfeddwlad, the, 54, 57, 67, 71
Pilleth, battle of, 171, 181
Plinlimmon, 142, 143
Pontefract, 99, 125
Powys, description of, 14
Powys Castle, 146
Pulestone, 128
R
Radnor, 142, 317, 329
Radnor, New, 145
Rhondda valley, 260
Rhuddlan, 19, 32, 43, 78, 190
Rhys ap Gethin, 171, 190, 233, 246, 247
Rhys ap Griffith, 289
Rhys ap Jevan, 234
Rhys ap Tudor, 33
Rhys Ddu, 298
Rhys Dwy, 234
Richard II., 93-99, 121, 203
Rieux, Jean de, 255
Robert ap Jevan, 234
Roderic the Great, 15, 16
Rûg, 306
Ruthin, 106, 107, 110, 111, 156
Rutland, Lord, 152
S
Salisbury, Earl of, 95, 96
Salusburys of Rûg, 305
Scott, Sir Walter, 168
Scrope, Archbishop, 252
Scrope, Sir Henry, 216
Scrope and Grosvenor trial, 89
Scudamore, Alice, 104, 304
Scudamore, Philip, 298
Shakespeare, 181
Shrewsbury, 7, 58, 68, 77, 125-128, 177, 198-202, 297, 318
Shrewsbury, Abbot of, 205
Shrewsbury, battle of, 203-209
Shropshire, 226, 229, 317
Simon de Montfort, 68
Skidmore, 194
Snowdon, 70, 76, 128, 158, 172, 222
Somerset, Earl of, 306
Stafford, Lord, 206
Stanley, Sir John, 254
Stove, Morres, 134
Strata Florida Abbey, 149, 152, 291
Strathclyde, 19, 20
Strongbow, Gilbert de, 286
Sycherth, 100-103, 120, 128, 188, 190, 198, 306
T
Talbot, Earl of, 120
Talbot, Gilbert, 247, 295, 303
Tenby, 41, 256
Thomas, Prince, 177
Thomas ap Llewelyn, 80
Towy, Vale of, 278, 279
Towyn, 280
Trefgarn, 89
Tren, 8
Trevor, Bishop of St. Asaph, 113, 164, 165, 225, 226, 234, 249, 299
Tripartite Indenture, 201
Tudor, Glyndwr's brother, 90, 218, 233, 249
Tudor, Owen, 314
Tudor, William and Rhys, 138-140, 233, 252
Turberville, 38
Tutbury, 230
U
Uriconium, 2, 7
Usk, 215, 245
V
Valle Crucis Abbey, 52, 85, 280
Vychan, Griffith, Glyndwr's father, 82, 88, 89
Vychan, Roger, 222
W
Warren, Earl, 87
Warwick, Earl of, 178
Waterton, Hugh de, 195, 242
Welshpool, 146, 177, 217, 229, 290, 297
Whitmore, David, 254
William III., 323
William Rufus, 34
William the Conqueror, 33
Winchester, 77
Windsor Castle, 298
Woodbury hill, 257
Worcester, 210, 227, 228, 252, 256, 278
Worcester, Percy, Earl of, 152, 205, 206
Wynne, Sir John, of Gwydir, 312, 313
Y
Yale, Lordship of, 106
Yonge, Griffith, 224, 234
York, 77, 206, 251
York, Duke of, 214, 227, 242, 244, 290, 293
[Decoration]
Heroes of the Nations.
EDITED BY
EVELYN ABBOTT, M.A.,
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WALES AND CORNWALL. Owen M. Edwards.
Transcriber's Note
The author uses some extensive variations in the spelling of proper
nouns. This is sometimes variation between Welsh and English, or
sometimes within either the Welsh or the English. Except where there
was a definite error or clear prevalence of one form over another,
these variations are preserved as printed. Those which have been
amended are as follows:
Page ix--Geraldus amended to Giraldus--... Giraldus Cambrensis
on the Welsh ...
Page x--Plimlimmon amended to Plinlimmon--... Owen Goes to
Plinlimmon ...
Page xv--VALLEY amended to VALLE--VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY
Illustration facing page 54--VALLEY amended to VALLE--VALLE
CRUCIS ABBEY
Page 189--Sagherne amended to Saghern--... and explain Prince
Henry's "Saghern" in that manner.
Page 217--Despenser amended to Despencer--... was in the
charge of a Châtelaine, Lady Despencer.
Page 226--Kingston amended to Kingeston--Archdeacon Kingeston
at Hereford once again takes up his pen ...
Page 293--Bardolf amended to Bardolph--... and with Bardolph
and Bifort, Owen's Bishop of Bangor, ...
Page 317--Brecheniog amended to Brecheiniog--Brecon took its
name from the old lordship of Brecheiniog ...
The author explicitly thanks a W. D. Haydon for photographs used in
the book, however the List of Illustrations references this person as
W. D. Hayson. The List of Illustrations and the credit under the
photograph have both been amended, as the transcriber found other
photographs attributed to Haydon, but none to Hayson.
Page 267 mentions Lœgira. This is probably an error for Lœgria, but
as it is part of an extended quotation, is preserved as printed.
Minor punctuation errors have been repaired. Hyphenation usage has
been made consistent.
The following amendments have been made:
Page xvi--MANORBRIER amended to MANORBIER--MANORBIER CASTLE
262
Page xvi--ABERYSWITH amended to ABERYSTWITH--ABERYSTWITH
CASTLE 290
Page 52--Florada amended to Florida--... Ystradfflur (_Strata
Florida_) in Cardigan ...
Page 91--Dwrfdwy amended to Dwfrdwy--... simply means the Glen
of the Dwfrdwy or Dyfrdwy, ...
Page 107--repeated 'the' deleted--... to make himself popular
upon the banks ...
Page 121--depositition amended to deposition--... for some
time after his deposition at the English Court.
Page 222--Glynwdr amended to Glyndwr--When next Glyndwr went
campaigning ...
Page 224--intrument amended to instrument--By this instrument
Glyndwr and the French King ...
Page 297--viligance amended to vigilance--... showed a
vigilance in Wales ...
Page 298--Aberyswith amended to Aberystwith--... we have seen
at Aberystwith, Harlech, and elsewhere.
Page 308--decendants amended to descendants--... which their
descendants, if they showed much vigour ...
Page 353--Glyncothe amended to Glyncothi--Glyncothi, Lewis,
306
Page 355--Holinshead amended to Holinshed--Holinshed, 164, 204
Page 355--Llandovey amended to Llandovery--Llandovery, 152,
185
The index entries for Sir John Cornwall, Doncaster, and Lichfield,
were out of order. They have been moved to the correct place. Note also
that Elizabeth Scudamore is listed in the index under E, while Alice
Scudamore and Philip Scudamore are listed under S. These have been
preserved as printed.
The frontispiece illustration has been moved to follow the title page.
Other illustrations have been moved where necessary so that they are
not in the middle of a paragraph.
Credits in the List of Illustrations were originally set as footnotes.
The transcriber has instead put the appropriate credit below each item.