Medieval Wales c.1050-1332

Centuries of Ambiguity

David Stephenson

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786833860
• eBook ISBN: 9781786833884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

After outlining conventional accounts of Wales in the High Middle Ages, this book moves to more radical approaches to its subject. Rather than discussing the emergence of the March of Wales from the usual perspective of the 'intrusive' marcher lords, for instance, it is considered from a Welsh standpoint explaining the lure of the March to Welsh princes and its contribution to the fall of the native principality of Wales. Analysis of the achievements of the princes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries focuses on the paradoxical process by which increasingly sophisticated political structures and a changing political culture supported an autonomous native principality, but also facilitated eventual assimilation of much of Wales into an English 'empire'. The Edwardian conquest is examined and it is argued that, alongside the resultant hardship and oppression suffered by many, the rising class of Welsh administrators and community leaders who were essential to the governance of Wales enjoyed an age of opportunity. This is a book that introduces the reader to the celebrated and the less well-known men and women who shaped medieval Wales.

1

An outline survey of Welsh political history, c.1050–1332

This chapter will be devoted to outlining a fairly conventional narrative of developments in the political history of Wales between the high point of the career of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn in the 1050s and early 1060s, and the years that followed the tumultuous reign of Edward II, who had been the first of the English princes of Wales. It will therefore sketch the story of what is known as the Age of the Princes, covering much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and then the half century that followed the conquest of large parts of Wales by Edward I in the wars of 1277 and 1282–3. This is intended principally both as an introduction to the subject and as a point of departure for the following chapters, which will cover the ground in rather less familiar ways.

The record of events in the Welsh chronicles for the tenth and eleventh centuries depicts a period of considerable chaos. It has been well said that the chronicle entry for 1043 that ‘Hywel ab Owain, king of Morgannwg, died in his old age’ is quite exceptional in describing the death of a king who had reached old age and is not explicitly described as having been killed.1 For a century and more before Hywel’s death the chronicle of events in Wales had been a record of killing and maiming, the devastation of whole regions, now by Vikings, now by Welsh, less frequently by English. It is clear from this record that chroniclers had been impressed by the prevalence of violence.

But already in 1043 the career of a new force in Wales was under way. Emerging as the victor in a battle with English forces at Rhyd y Groes (possibly near Buttington in mid Wales) in 1039, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn of Gwynedd, son of a former ruler of that region, had made himself by degrees the master of most of Wales by the mid-1050s.2 There are many indications that Gruffudd’s progress to dominance in Wales was accomplished with considerable brutality: stories that circulated long after his death credited him with bitter jokes about his killing of rivals, and something of the character of his ascendancy may be judged from the chronicler’s comment that when he encountered the southern ruler Hywel ab Edwin at the battle of Pencadair in 1041 ‘there Gruffudd defeated Hywel, and he seized his wife and took her for his own’.3 But for all his savagery here was a man who for a time might be called without exaggeration the king of Wales, a man who quite possibly did adopt that title, and who commanded respect even from his English neighbours until he was brought down by a great assault led by Harold Godwinson in 1063, and was finally killed by his own men.4

Gruffudd’s importance has been debated: some have seen him as a statesman of considerable stature, whose rule within Wales prefigured the ascendancies of the great leaders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Others have seen his career as simply an interlude in a general pattern of dynastic strife and confusion, and indeed, Gruffudd’s rule was far from tranquil: his ascendancy occupied only some seven years before his fall and death, while after his demise the pattern of instability soon reasserted itself across Wales. His successors, in the northern half of Wales at least, were his half-brothers Bleddyn and Rhiwallon the sons of Cynfyn, but they were challenged in 1069 by the sons of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, Maredudd and Ithel. At a major battle in Mechain, Ithel was killed, and Maredudd died of exposure while fleeing; but Rhiwallon was also killed, leaving Bleddyn as the only surviving credible claimant to rule in the north.5

Bleddyn ap Cynfyn’s reign was not an ignoble one for he left a reputation as a just ruler who had made significant improvements to the Welsh law.6 But he was killed by the leading men of Ystrad Tywi in 1075, probably attempting to secure control of at least part of the south. The Welsh chronicles for that year record the multiple conflicts and deaths that then took place as others scrambled to seize or to maintain regional power. An adventurous and aggressive lord, Trahaearn ap Caradog, apparently from the land of Arwystli in mid Wales, established himself as ruler of the combined polity of Gwynedd and Powys, and for a time managed to fend off the efforts of a rival, Gruffudd ap Cynan, to remove him until Gruffudd killed Trahaearn and his ally Caradog ap Gruffudd of Morgannwg at the battle of Mynydd Carn in south-west Wales in 1081.7 But any hopes that Gruffudd ap Cynan may have entertained of establishing himself as the dominant force in Wales were dashed when, shortly after Mynydd Carn, he was captured by the earls of Chester and Shrewsbury and imprisoned in Chester for some thirteen years. Gruffudd’s abrupt departure from active participation in the scramble for territories allowed a son of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, Cadwgan, to become powerful enough to make his presence felt in regions as diverse as Gwynedd, Ceredigion, Powys, Dyfed and the Anglo-Welsh borderland.8

THE ARRIVAL OF THE NORMANS AND THE CREATION OF THE MARCH

Gruffudd ap Cynan’s confinement in Chester is a reminder that since the 1060s a new element had entered into the politico-military situation in Wales with the arrival of the Normans. Bleddyn ap Cynfyn and his brother Rhiwallon had joined forces with an English rebel, Eadric Silvaticus, in opposing the Normans for a time in the 1060s as the newcomers consolidated their hold on the border region adjacent to Wales, and later Bleddyn had suffered a defeat at the hands of Robert of Rhuddlan, a henchman of the newly installed earl of Chester.9 In the aftermath of Mynydd Carn, King William himself had made a journey – certainly a military progress – through Wales to St David’s. The claim of one Welsh chronicle that his purpose was to offer prayers to the saint cannot disguise the near certainty that William had decided to assert his control over southern Wales, while his barons began the occupation of much territory in the central and northern parts of the land.

By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 Norman lords operating from the earldom of Chester had claimed much of the north, and others, led by the Montgomery family, earls of Shrewsbury, had made significant inroads into mid Wales, from where they were able to raid into Ceredigion, and Arnulf of Montgomery even established himself at Pembroke, while parts of the south-east were coming under Norman control.10 Thereafter the limits of Norman dominion fluctuated. Much of north Wales, particularly Gwynedd west of the Conwy, was re-taken by native forces by the end of the century, by which time Gruffudd ap Cynan had escaped from his prison in Chester and had begun the process of consolidating his hold on Gwynedd.11

In mid Wales, following the fall of the house of Montgomery in the aftermath of Robert of Bellême’s revolt against Henry I in 1102, the earldom of Shrewsbury was allowed to lapse, thus creating a patchwork of lesser lordships in its place, while sons and grandsons of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn fought among themselves until one, Maredudd ap Bleddyn, was able to secure primacy in a re-constituted polity of Powys, and was not dislodged even by an attack led by Henry I himself.12 But in the south Norman lords seized control of Brycheiniog and lowland Glamorgan, as well as much of Gwent, while others encroached on the lands between Wye and Severn, and in the early decades of the twelfth century Norman control was established in Ceredigion and even more securely in Dyfed.13 There would be further developments: thus Ceredigion would be recovered from the Normans in the mid-1130s, lost again in 1158 and finally regained in 1165, and the Norman hold on eastern Gwynedd was ended in 1167.14 By the mid-twelfth century a division of Wales had begun to appear which would be long-lasting, between a pura Wallia marked by native polities in the north and west, and the March (regions of Norman, or what was increasingly described as English, lordship) in the east and the south.

The development of the March was perhaps the single most significant element in the history of Wales in this period. There may be a sort of pre-history of the March in the Anglo-Saxon period, but it first emerges as a named region, a March of Wales, in the late eleventh century in the Domesday Book. But the Marcha de Wali[i]s found there apparently comprised only a small tract of territory lying both east and west of Offa’s Dyke on the Welsh/Herefordshire border. It did not constitute a separate lordship, or even part of a single lordship, as part of it was held by Osbern fitz Richard and part by Ralph de Mortimer. Here nine hides lay waste in marcha de Wales, and here eleven manors were said to exist in marcha de Walis.15 It is entirely possible that other areas were considered to lie in such a marchland, but the Domesday clerks did not trouble to make the point. Thereafter explicit references to the March are few, until we encounter the Pipe Rolls, the records of the audit of the accounts of English county government. Apart from some stray early survivals, a copy of a fragment of a roll of 1124, and the original roll from 1130, the Pipe Rolls run with very few gaps from 1155 onwards throughout the medieval period and beyond.

In the mid-1160s references in the Pipe Rolls to Marchia Wallie suddenly become quite frequent: and it is clear that this at first refers to the Shropshire/Powys borderland.16 Subsequent references imply that by the 1180s the March of Wales was thought by some in the English administration to embrace areas much further south than Shropshire. Thus Hywel ab Iorwerth, lord of Caerleon, was paid 20 marks to maintain himself in the king’s service in the March of Wales in 1183–4. This development clearly relates to the Welsh offensive of that year in Glamorgan and its eastern neighbour Gwynllŵg.17 In terms of the thinking of the English royal administration it begins to appear as though the twelfth-century concept of the March of Wales was closely associated with military tension or crisis.

As we advance through the thirteenth century we begin a new period in the evolution of the March. Whether because of a changing mentality, or because of a growing richness in our primary sources, or a combination of both, we begin to see the March, when it is explicitly so designated, less in terms of military geography and more in terms of the articulation of lordship. The lords are mainly though not entirely Norman or, as we increasingly have to call them once again, English. The population of the marcher lordships is partially English, particularly in the towns developed by the lords, but principally Welsh. The lords characteristically claimed and exercised wide-ranging rights or liberties, amounting to quasi-regal powers.18 These liberties may have existed since the earliest days of Norman encroachment into Wales, but it is in the thirteenth century that they are clearly expressed – often in the face of English governmental attempts to limit or to challenge them.

By the final quarter of the thirteenth century the March was moving ever further into lands previously regarded as purely Welsh polities. It was thus possible for the lord of southern Powys, Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, the great enemy of Prince Llywelyn of Wales, to declare forthrightly that he, Gruffudd, was the king’s baron of the March, even – and particularly – in respect of his claim to the cantref of Arwystli in the very heart of Wales.19 In response to the prince’s contention that Arwystli could not be said to have marcher status, as the March signified a zone adjacent to ‘pure’ Welsh territory, Gruffudd could respond that barons of the March held a great number of territories that were not simply on the Anglo-Welsh borderland but were in what he described as ‘the remote parts of Wales’.20

By the 1280s this view of the March and its extent was given royal endorsement when Edward I created as marcher lordships, and gave out as rewards to several of his greater barons, territories that had formerly been secure parts of the principality of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. So were formed the marcher lordships of Denbigh, Dyffryn Clwyd, Bromfield and Yale and Chirkland in the north, Cedewain and Ceri in mid Wales, and Iscennen and Cantref Bychan in the south, many of them regions that had hardly been regarded previously as part of the March. In the post-Conquest era the March rapidly came to denote any Welsh territory that lay outside the direct principality lands of north and west Wales, and the county of Flintshire; its one-time military nature as a zone of containment of, and confrontation with, Welsh polities had clearly become largely redundant.

THE AGE OF THE PRINCES

Within the shrinking confines of pura Wallia political development is often depicted by reference to a series of great rulers from the second quarter of the twelfth century onwards. The rulers who have received most attention from modern historians have been those drawn from the dynasty of Gwynedd: Gruffudd ap Cynan (d.1137), his son Owain ap Gruffudd, known as Owain Gwynedd (d.1170), Owain’s grandson Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (d.1240), and his grandson in turn, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d.1282).21 Memb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Genealogical tables
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An outline survey of Welsh political history, c.1050–1332
• Chapter 2: The Age of the Princes: shifting political cultures and structures
• Chapter 3: The other Wales: the March
• Chapter 4: The limits to princely power
• Chapter 5: New ascendancies
• Envoi
• Notes
• Select bibliography