Llywelyn ap Gruffydd

As early as the 1180s, Henry II was being advised how to defeat the native Welsh by the Anglo-Norman-Welshman, Gerald of Wales, author of two great books on Welsh affairs. Gerald advised that in their mountain fastnesses, above all in Snowdonia, the Welsh were impregnable. As with the Vietnamese of the 1960s or the Afghans of the early twenty-first century, no amount of head-on confrontation would bring the Welsh to decisive engagement. Threatened by the shock and awe of an English expeditionary force, they would merely retreat to the hills, avoid pitched battle, emerging to raid and pillage once more when the threat had passed. What was needed, Gerald suggested, was a chain of castles and centres of Englishry running along the Welsh coastline, to contain Welsh access to their Irish sea-borne trade and to confine the rebellious Welsh to the uplands from which few resources for future rebellion could be obtained. The problem here was that the means for such an undertaking were lacking to Henry II’s successors. Both King John, after 1215, and Henry III, in the 1250s and 60s, had been forced to stand mutely by as the Welsh capitalized upon English political weakness to extend their authority, raiding the Welsh Marches and burning castles. The princes of Gwynedd – Llywelyn ap Iorweth (d.1240) and his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (d.1282) – without any settled capital ‘city’ but ruling from the enclave of Garth Celyn overlooking the Menai straights, between Bangor and Conway, had exploited English political turmoil to obtain recognition of their special status as rulers over the native Welsh, entitled to the homage of the other Welsh princes and to a degree of legal autonomy from England and its kings.

It was this situation which Edward I now sought to reverse. In the summer of 1277, an English army, more than 15,000 strong, advanced from Chester along the north Welsh coast. Ships transported further troops to Anglesey to harvest the grain and hence deprive Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of the means with which to wage further war. The outcome was a negotiated settlement in which Llywelyn abandoned various gains he had made in the 1260s and was forced to promise a war indemnity of £50,000, a figure which in itself suggests a booming Welsh economy, based upon Irish sea-born trade. At this rate, Edward’s wars could be made almost to pay for themselves.

Open hostilities with the Welsh erupted again in 1282, when Llywelyn’s disgruntled younger brother, Dafydd, believing himself to have been insufficiently rewarded for his part in Edward’s success of 1277, broke with the English and on Palm Sunday attacked Hawarden Castle in Flintshire (future residence of a very different sort of English statesman and a far more assiduous observer of the Sabbath, W.E. Gladstone). Once again, a concerted land and sea force, including levies from Edward’s dominions in Gascony, and the construction of a great pontoon bridge between Anglesey and the mainland, forced the Welsh into surrender. This time, however, Llywelyn himself was lured into an ambush at Irfon Bridge, near Builth Wells, and killed. Dafydd’s resistance continued for a further six months until he too was betrayed, handed over to the English and, at Shrewsbury in September 1283, hanged, disembowelled for his breach of the Sabbath at Hawarden and his body then cut into quarters to mark his treason. The heads of both Llywelyn and Dafydd were exhibited on spikes outside the Tower of London. Llywelyn and Dafydd’s children were imprisoned and, in the case of the daughters, forced into English nunneries where the last of them died half a century later.

In less than a year, the last effectively independent Welsh princes had been removed from the scene. Only fifteen years separated the official ‘English’ recognition of Wales as an independent principality in 1267 and the brutal suppression of that independence in 1282. So feeble was the image of these Welsh princes conveyed to posterity that, in the 1890s, when it was proposed to raise a monument to Llywelyn at Irfon Bridge, so little money was subscribed in Wales that a neighbouring English squire, an Eton-educated disciple of Sigmund Freud, was obliged to step in to supply the funds.

The extinction of Llywelyn’s family did not in itself bring an end to Welsh resistance. Despite (or rather, precisely because of) the building of that chain of castles which Gerald of Wales had proposed, stretching from Harlech to Conway and from Caernarvon to Beaumaris in Anglesey, despite the wholesale importation of English settlers to a series of new towns, at Flint, Rhuddlan and elsewhere, and despite the division of Wales itself, including Snowdonia, into a series of administrative units modelled on the English shires where major felonies were now to be tried according to English rather than native Welsh law, the Welsh themselves rose in rebellion in 1287 and even more seriously in 1294. This second uprising required the efforts of nearly 30,000 men and subsidies of more than £50,000 to suppress.