Medieval Wales c.1050-1332: Centuries of Ambiguity

RETHINKING THE

HISTORY OF WALES

MEDIEVAL

WALES

c.1050–1332

RETHINKING THE HISTORY OF WALES SERIES

Series Editors:

Professor Paul O’Leary, Aberystwyth University

and Professor Huw Pryce, Bangor University

This series aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the history of Wales by introducing particular periods and themes in ways that challenge established interpretations. Whether by offering new perspectives on familiar landmarks in the historiographical landscape or by venturing into previously uncharted terrain, the volumes, each written by a specialist in the field, will provide concise and selective surveys that highlight areas of debate rather than attempting to achieve comprehensive coverage. The series will thus encourage an engagement with diverse understandings of the Welsh past and with its continuing – and sometimes contested – significance in the present day.

RETHINKING THE

HISTORY OF WALES

MEDIEVAL

WALES

c.1050–1332

CENTURIES OF AMBIGUITY

David Stephenson

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2019

© David Stephenson, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN     978-1-78683-386-0

eISBN   978-1-78683-388-4

The right of David Stephenson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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The cover design combines images from a Latin text of the Laws of Hywel Dda, MS Peniarth 28, fols 21r (dog) and 24v (horse). By permission, National Library of Wales.

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

For Jan

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

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ishould like to thank Huw Pryce both for the invitation to write this book, and also for the time and effort which he put in to comment, with typical perceptiveness, on a draft of it. I owe a great debt of gratitude to fellow historians of medieval Wales, past and present, for the stimulus which their works have provided. The extent of that debt will be apparent throughout this book. Conversations with Hugh Brodie, whose work promises to shed much light on this period, have proved consistently stimulating and enlightening. I am particularly grateful to Emma Cavell for allowing me to read important papers prior to their publication, and for her careful scrutiny of, and illuminating comments on, a draft of the book. Cath D’Alton has drawn the maps with her customary skill and forbearance. I am grateful to Llion Wigley and all his colleagues at the University of Wales Press for their guidance and support. Particular thanks are due to Elin Nesta Lewis for her careful and very helpful copy-editing. In the course of the volume’s preparation I have received notable help from Bethan Phillips and Dafydd Jones. The biennial Bangor Colloquia on medieval Wales and the meetings of the Welsh Chronicles Research Group have been important sources of ideas. Not for the first time I want to thank the members of the medieval history groups at Llanidloes, Newtown and Berriew. They have heard much of this book. Their good humour and their comments are invaluable. The Powysland Club remains a great source of learned companionship and of resources, not least in its splendid library. As always, my greatest thanks are due to my wife Jan, who has contributed to this book in so many ways: she has borne with remarkable tolerance my frequent disappearances into the medieval centuries and has offered crucial support when it has been most needed.

ABBREVIATIONS

MAPS

MAP 1: Uplands and principal rivers

MAP 2: Principal medieval political divisions: realms and lordships

MAP 3: Cistercian lands in Welsh polities

MAP 4: The regional ascendancy of Cadwallon ap Madog in the lands between Wye and Severn, 1175–9

MAP 5: The principality of Wales at the time of the Treaty of Montgomery, 1267

MAP 6: Edward I’s Wales

NOTES TO MAPS

Map 1

The predominantly upland nature of most of Wales, and the landscape marked by alternation between high ground and often deeply incised river valleys are at once clear. These phenomena were sometimes obstacles to communication and political control, and helped to promote distinct regional and even local identities and loyalties.

Map 3

Only the Cistercian lands which lay within territories subject to Welsh rulers for significant periods in the thirteenth century are shown here. The extent of the Cistercian territories, generally subject to wide immunities from exaction and service, is impressive. Areas devoid of Cistercian holdings sometimes suggest the continuing power and influence of traditional monasteria.

For a map of all Cistercian lands in Wales see David H. Williams, An Atlas of Cistercian Lands in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990), p. 91; for the large number of non-Cistercian religious houses in Wales see Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (eds), Abbeys and Priories of Medieval Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), map 1 (Benedictines and Cluniacs), map 2 (the solitary Premonstratensian house at Talley, as well as Cistercian houses), map 3 (Regular Canons and Knights Hospitaller).

Map 5

a.  Ceri, in the southern part of the shaded area, was divided between lands held directly by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and those held by members of the local native dynasty: see D. Stephenson, ‘The lordship of Ceri in the thirteenth century’, Mont. Colls., 95 (2007), 23–31, at 26.

b.  The lordship of Elfael Is Mynydd (southern Elfael) was held directly by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, while Elfael Uwch Mynydd (northern Elfael) was held by members of the local native dynasty. Elfael was not explicitly included in the lands of the principality in the Treaty of Montgomery, but it was in Llywelyn’s hands.

c.  The lordship of Maredudd ap Rhys, excluded from the principality in 1267, but acquired by Llywelyn in 1270.

GENEALOGICAL TABLES

NOTES TO GENEALOGICAL TABLES

Tables 1–3 are simplified depictions of the ramifications of the three major royal houses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and are included principally to help to identify members of princely or lordly dynasties discussed in the text. Tables 1 and 3 illustrate the tendency to fragmentation which characterized many Welsh polities, table 4 presents a selective genealogy of the family of Ednyfed Fychan, whose careers symbolize the rise of the administrative elite in both pura Wallia and the March in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The family also illustrates the capacity of elite families to adapt to, and to contribute to, political change.

Table 1

A succinct account of the dynasty of Deheubarth is given in AWR, pp. 7–14.

¹  Progenitor of lords of part of Ceredigion.

²  Progenitor of the dynasty of Ystrad Tywi.

³  Progenitor of lords of part of Ceredigion.

⁴  Lords who survived the war of 1282–3, but were taken as prisoners, and experienced periods of captivity, and in some cases periods of employment in royal armies beyond Wales.

⁵  Dispossessed of Hirfryn by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1270; subsequently involved (possibly as an agent provocateur) in support for Dafydd ap Gruffudd, 1283, the Glamorgan rising of 1294–5 and Sir Thomas Turberville’s plot of 1295; emerged as a prominent supporter of the Crown, 1297–1316. Knighted in 1306 (at the Feast of the Swans).

⁶  Survived the war of 1282–3 unscathed, probably because he was a minor. He held lands in Ceredigion: half of the commote of Is Coed, half of the commote of Gwynionydd and a Gwestfa (estate or estates, probably in Mebwynion).

Table 2

A succinct account of the dynasty of Gwynedd is given in AWR, pp. 21–34.

¹  Effectively co-ruler of Gwynedd with Owain, 1157–70.

²  Exiled in England from c.1197.

³  Progenitor of a lineage which periodically exercised rule in Meirionnydd.

⁴  Exercised lordship in Llŷn, c.1147–55

⁵  Owain Lawgoch was active in French service in the 1360s and 1370s; planned invasions of Wales where he claimed the principality. He was assassinated on the orders of the English government, 1378.

⁶  Rebel leader, claiming to be prince of Wales, in 1294–5; surrendered to Edward I, and subsequently held in honourable confinement in the Tower of London; his son Maredudd was an esquire to Edward II.

Table 3

A succinct account of the dynasty of Powys is given in AWR, pp. 37–45.

¹  Progenitor of the dynasty of southern Powys – the principality of Powys in the early thirteenth century, and the barony of Powys in the late thirteenth century and the fourteenth centuries.

²  Ancestor of the lords of Kinnerley and Sutton Maddock, Shropshire.

³  Progenitor of the dynasty of northern Powys (Bromfield).

⁴  Progenitor of the lords of Mechain.

⁵  Progenitor of the lords/barons of Edeirnion, many of whom (not shown in this chart) held important offices, as in the cases of Gruffudd ap Dafydd of Hendwr who was sheriff of Merioneth in 1300, and rhaglaw of Penllyn and Ardudwy for life by 1304, or Madog ap Gruffudd of Hendwr who claimed successfully the office of penteulu in Powys in 1322.

⁶  Married Catrin, sister of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales; their daughter Angharad was the mother of Madog ap Llywelyn, prominent in the lordship of Bromfield and Yale until his death in 1331.

⁷  Progenitor of the lords of Mawddwy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

⁸  Ancestor of Owain Glyn Dŵr.

⁹  Sheriff of Merioneth, 1330–1.

Table 4

For the family of Ednyfed Fychan in the thirteenth century see Stephenson, Political Power, pp. 102–6, and appendix II. For the subsequent history of one branch of the family see Glyn Roberts, Aspects of Welsh History: Selected papers of the late Glyn Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1969), chapter VI. For important analysis see A. D. Carr, The Gentry of North Wales in the Later Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017), 30ff.

¹  Distain to Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and to Dafydd ap Llywelyn. Married Gwenllian, daughter of the Lord Rhys.

²  Carried out diplomatic missions for Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and Dafydd ap Llywelyn, 1221–41; held as a hostage (for Dafydd), 1241–5; latterly engaged in attracting Dafydd’s men to the king.

³  Served Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and Dafydd ap Llywelyn; acted as an envoy, and as rhaglaw of Dinorben.

⁴  Distain to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd.

⁵  Demanded by Henry III as a hostage for Dafydd ap Llywelyn, 1241; served Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and was rhaglaw of Dinorben in the 1260s, but by 1269 had to provide sureties for his fidelity to the prince.

⁶  Distain to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd.

⁷  Distain to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd.

⁸  Bishop of St Asaph, 1240–7.

⁹  Prominent as an official of Edward I after 1277; served as royal bailiff in Gwynedd Is Conwy and as a member of judicial commissions; opposed Edward I in the war of 1282–3; presented a statement of grievances to Archbishop Peckham in 1282; died against the king’s peace in 1283.

¹⁰  Hostage for his father in England until 1263; received lands from Prince Llywelyn at a later date.

¹¹  Died leading forces against Llywelyn ap Gruffudd at Menai.

¹²  Married to Margaret Lestrange; an opponent of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in the later 1270s and 1280s; imprisoned by Llywelyn by 1277, released under the terms of the Treaty of Aberconwy.

¹³  Prior of the Dominican friary of Bangor; in the war of 1277 he arranged for three of his kinsmen, including his brother Rhys (see n. 12) to leave Prince Llywelyn and do homage to Edward I. He was engaged in making extents of Anglesey for Edward I, 1283.

¹⁴  Probably served Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, 1274–8; distain to Madog ap Llywelyn, 1294 × 95; one of the deputation to Edward I from north Wales, 1296; swore fealty to Edward of Caernarfon in 1301; rhaglaw of Dindaethwy, 1302–3; benefactor to the Dominican friary, Bangor.

¹⁵  A member of the entourage of Madog ap Llywelyn, 1294 × 95.

¹⁶  The mainstay of royal governance in north Wales in the reign of Edward II.

¹⁷  One of deputation of four men from north Wales to Edward I in 1296 expressing concerns at the king’s suspicions of the community. Led Welsh troops, for example in Edward II’s Scottish expedition of 1316.

¹⁸  The mainstay of royal governance in the southern principality in the reign of Edward II and much of that of Edward III.

INTRODUCTION

This investigation of the development of Wales in the high Middle Ages adopts some perspectives which are perhaps unorthodox and at times controversial. The period from the mid-eleventh century until 1282 is usually discussed in terms of the growth of the power of native rulers, from Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d.1064) to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d.1282) and the development of a native polity of Wales, a process pictured as brutally cut short by the conquests of Edward I of England. That discussion tends to be centred on the rulers of Gwynedd, and their rise to be princes of a wider Welsh polity, though the similarly ambitious and successful Lord Rhys of Deheubarth is also accorded much attention.¹ The half-century which followed the war of 1282–3 is usually depicted as a period in which a conquered Welsh population suffered at the hands of ruthless English royal government and from the tyranny of the English marcher lords.

Both of these approaches contain significant elements of truth, but it would be wrong to assume that they represent anything like a comprehensive portrayal of the multifaceted political dynamics of Wales during these centuries. It is certainly the case that the growth of the power of the most prominent Welsh rulers, the developing sophistication of the governance which they exercised, and the increasing extent of the territories which they controlled, all left clear traces in the surviving sources. Similarly, the momentous nature of the Edwardian conquest of the 1270s and 1280s is a central feature of the history of Wales. But all of those phenomena were complex, and were accompanied and often opposed by other, less well-understood, forces.

It is my intention in this book not only to set out the more generally accepted narratives and analyses of Wales in these centuries, but to advance alternative constructions of the shifting patterns of Welsh social and political development. Many of those alternative constructions have already been glimpsed and pondered by some of the leading historians of the past half-century, such as R. R. Davies, J. Beverley Smith and A. D. Carr.² Of great significance in this process was Glyn Roberts, a scholar prominent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Professor of Welsh history at Bangor from 1949 until his death in 1962, Roberts focused on medieval history only in the later years of his life, and the work which he produced in that period consisted mainly of very detailed, often groundbreaking, accounts of some of the leading northern Welsh families of the Middle Ages, together with a handful of much briefer studies of wider importance.³ These last, which included essays derived from radio broadcasts in the late 1950s and a crucial paper on the period 1282–1485, unfinished at the time of his death, established that there was evidence that opposition to the efforts of hegemonic Welsh rulers was widespread within Wales, and that the post-Conquest decades were marked by the prominence, not only in the Crown territories but also in the March, of Welsh magnates characterized by both wealth and power.

In reviewing the book of collected essays by Roberts which was produced in 1969, Rees Davies noted that Roberts had ‘begun an important re-orientation in our approach to the study of post-Conquest Wales’, and emphasized that ‘the full measure of that re-orientation, as of so much in these later essays, yet remains to be worked out’.⁴ As noted above, much work was subsequently done in which the influence of Glyn Roberts was apparent. But the importance of his perceptions will not be fully realized until the attitudes and actions of regional Welsh rulers and magnates in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have been fully explored, and detailed studies such as that by Ralph Griffiths of the officials of the southern principality after 1277 and that of A. D. Carr on the development of the gentry of north Wales have been broadened to trace the development, in the pre-Edwardian period and in the post-Conquest decades, of Welsh administrative and military elites both in the March and in the Crown lands.⁵

The contribution offered in this book is founded in significant measure on the work of the major figures noticed above, on the numerous important studies that have appeared since the start of the present century and on my own recent work on the rulers and communities – lay and ecclesiastical – of medieval Powys and the March.⁶ It is hoped that it may prove a step towards a sustained treatment of Welsh history in the central medieval period which breaks free from the fixation with princes, particularly princes of Gwynedd, at the expense of other Welsh rulers, magnates and communities, and from a reading of Welsh history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which is dominated by notions of progress towards a principality of Wales as a process of liberation and unification, and from a perception of the post-1282 period as one marked primarily, and often virtually exclusively, by colonial repression and subjugation.

In my own case, the influence of Glyn Roberts goes beyond his published work. Though he died several years before I began research on medieval Welsh history, I have gained an insight into his thinking by a somewhat unusual route. My copy of J. E. Lloyd’s seminal History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest was formerly owned by Roberts, and contains a small number of marginal notes and marks made by him. Though far from explicit, these marks are a significant guide to things that Roberts thought were significant or worth further consideration. A good example is provided by Lloyd’s reference, almost in passing, to the fact that in the 1240s Henry III held significant territory in northern Ceredigion ‘which he administered through a Welsh bailiff, one Gwilym ap Gwrwared of Cemais’.⁷ Roberts had heavily underscored Gwilym ap Gwrwared’s name. That name does not appear in the index to Roberts’s selected essays, but the fact that his attention had been drawn to it is interesting. Gwilym ap Gwrwared’s family was of great moment in the story of medieval Welsh poetry, for he was descended from poets, and was the ancestor of Dafydd ap Gwilym.⁸ But his real importance in social and political terms was that he exemplified the emergence in the thirteenth century of a class of Welsh administrators and landholders who became eminent through service to the marcher lords and the Crown. His career is examined more thoroughly below, along with those of many more like him.⁹

Like all historical works, therefore, this one has its intellectual antecedents. Each of the scholars whose names are mentioned above has provided stimulus and inspiration. Nevertheless this book seeks to break free of some of the assumptions and approaches that have dominated work on medieval Wales. One of the characteristics of the historiography of medieval Wales is the tendency for the subject to be dominated by relatively few great figures – most of whom have been noticed in the preceding pages. It is true that we have come a long way from the situation described in 1972 by Ian Jack, who reported the comment of a university lecturer that ‘he had perforce to treat the thirteenth century as a dialogue between himself and Sir John Lloyd’.¹⁰ Even so, the influence of the great practitioners, while it