The indefinable weird flapping thing

 It is October, the month of Halloween and fading light and the dying of the year. My favourite season, being the miserable sod that I am. I jest, of course: I’m only miserable 98% of the time. 

We are also entering the season of ghost stories, one of my obsessions. Here, then, is a short tale from the monk of Byland Abbey, written down in 1400:

“Concerning another ghost that followed William of Bradeforth and cried “ How, how, how,” thrice on three occasions. It happened that on the fourth night about midnight he went back to the New Place from the village of Ampleforth, and as he was returning by the road he heard a terrible voice shouting far behind him, and as it were on the hill side; and a little after it cried again in like manner but nearer, and the third time it screamed at the cross-roads ahead of him; and at last he saw a pale horse and his dog barked a little, but then hid itself in great fear between the legs of the said William. Whereupon he commanded the spirit in the name of the Lord and in virtue of the blood of Jesus Christ to depart and not to block his path. And when he heard this he withdrew like a revolving piece of canvas with four corners and kept on turning. So that it seems that he was a ghost that mightily desired to be conjured and to receive effective help.”

As usual in these Byland tales, the ghost is dispelled or tamed (conjured) by invoking Christ. I find this very creepy, reminiscent of MR James: the indefinable, weird, flapping thing stalking William down the road, making screaming noises. What the hell is it, exactly? What does it want? Like every good writer of ghost stories, the monk left plenty to the imagination.

Denying Christ

 #OTD in 1307, Philip the Fair had every Knight Templar in France arrested on charges of heresy. The specific charges ran thus: 

"...when professing, the brothers were required to deny Christ, to spit on the Cross, and to place three 'obscene kisses' on the lower spine, the navel and the mouth; they were obliged to indulge in carnal relations with other members of the order, if requested; and finally they wore a small belt which had been consecrated by touching a strange idol, which looked like a human head with a long beard." 

And so on. When I was researching Anglo-French relations in this period, it was interesting to discover that one of Philip's inquisitors was Jean de Varenne; a baron of Ponthieu who had previously done military service for France in Flanders, as a proxy for his immediate overlord Edward I, who was Count of Ponthieu as well as King of England. Complicated times, very.

Judgement of blood

#OTD in 1283 Prince Dafydd of Wales was executed at Shrewsbury. He was the first nobleman (but not the first man) to be hanged, drawn and quartered in the British Isles. It is often said that he was executed for ‘high treason’. That is incorrect, because such a penalty did not yet exist on the statute book. He was killed for several capital crimes, described by the annals of Dunstable. Quote:  

‘Because he was a traitor to the lord king, for whom he had done military service, he was drawn slowly by a horse to the place of his hanging. Because he had murdered Fulk Trigald and other English noblemen, he was disembowelled and his viscera burned. Because he had plotted the death of the king in several places in England, his body was divided and sent to the corners of England, to the terror of those inclined to doing evil. His head, however, is at the Tower of London, affixed to the highest stake, facing the sea.’ 

In the eyes of the king and his justices, Dafydd had committed crimes against God and man and deserved to suffer four or five different deaths. He was also excommunicate, which rendered him effectively soulless. To destroy his body, as was done at Shrewsbury, was to exterminate him utterly. In addition, an excommunicate could be killed in any way, without fear of censure.  

Dafydd spent much of his career in the service of Edward I, who granted him lands and a rich marriage. The king also funded the construction of Dafydd’s castle of Caergwrle (see pic) in the lordship of Hopedale. In return the Welshman served in Edward’s armies in England and Wales.  

He seems to have been driven by hatred and envy of his eldest brother, Llywelyn the Last. It is difficult to know where the guilt lay, since Llywelyn had equally difficult relationships with his three other siblings. Like most men of power, he was overbearing, and insisted upon absolute obedience. 

Whatever Dafydd’s motives, he could not command the same loyalty as Llywelyn. When he became prince, in early 1283, his countrymen quickly fell away from him. By June he was being hunted by teams of Welshmen in Edward’s service, including some of his own former retainers. He was finally cornered by Iorwerth Penwyn (white-head), a landholder of Gwynedd, while his eldest son was taken prisoner by Dafydd Fychan, a man of West Wales. Dafydd was handed over to the king, his former paymaster, who insisted on a judgement of blood. 

The siege of St Michael's Mount

#OTD in 1473 John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, descended on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. He was accompanied by his three brothers, Viscount Beaumont, and a force of some eighty men.  

After his escape from the Lancastrian defeat at Barnet, Oxford had fled to Scotland, and then to France. After receiving promises of support from King Louis, he took to piracy off the Isle of Thanet in Kent, and made several futile attempts to land in Essex, where he and his mother Elizabeth Howard were the greater landowners.  

Oxford’s decision to seize the Mount was more intelligent than it may appear. He held land in Cornwall, and was of a Cornish line through his grandmother, Alice Sergeaux. The earl had hopes of stirring up a revolt against Edward IV. Warkworth’s Chronicle noted that Oxford ‘and his men came down into cuntre of Cornwale and hade riyhte good chere of the comons’. 

However, the occupation of a remote stronghold in Cornwall was of little use unless Oxford could attract major support in England. That is precisely what he hoped to do: his ally, George Duke of Clarence, was a regional power in the southwest. He also needed foreign aid, and his capture of the Mount may have been an attempt to persuade Louis that an invasion could be successful.   

Oxford’s plan was undone by poor timing and bad weather. His envoys (including his youngest brother, Richard) did not reach Paris until the following February, by which time the Mount was under siege. One French ship was sent to resupply the castle, but had to turn back in a storm. 

Edward IV was alive to the danger in the south-west. As early as 5 June 1473, he wrote to the Sheriff of Devon warning him of rumours that Oxford intended to land in that county. When he heard of Oxford’s capture of the Mount, Edward quickly appointed a number of Cornish knights and esquires to besiege the castle. The most senior were Sir John Arundell of Tenrice and Henry Bodrugan, a notoriously corrupt landowner.  

At first the siege went badly for the Yorkists. Arundell was killed in a skirmish on the sands, and was replaced by Bodrugan, who did very little. It was reported that he held friendly talks with Oxford, and levied extortionate taxes on the Cornish for the siege, which vanished into his very deep pockets.  

At last Edward took action. In December 1473 he issued a fresh commission, in which Bodrugan was joined by John Fortescue, an esquire of the body, and the Sheriff of Cornwall. The Mount was now blockaded, land and sea, by a force of four ships, three hundred soldiers and some artillery. There was bitter fighting, in which both sides suffered heavily, and Oxford himself wounded in the face by an arrow.   

The siege was ended by the public offer of a pardon to any man who would submit and swear fealty to King Edward. This excluded Oxford, his brothers George and Thomas, and Viscount Beaumont, who were only offered life and limb. They were promptly deserted by their men, who scrambled to take the pardon, and forced to surrender.  

The four were brought before Edward IV, who imprisoned Oxford at Hammes Castle in the Pale of Calais. The earl’s brothers appear to have been held in custody at the Yorkist court, although the youngest, Richard, remained at liberty in France. In late 1484 Oxford staged a dramatic escape, and joined Henry Tudor in time to lead the vanguard at Bosworth.  

John de Vere was as tough and ruthless as any other nobleman of the time, but had some attractive traits. He was remembered as a ‘good lord’ in Essex and East Anglia, and cared for his old friend, Beaumont, when the latter fell prey to mental illness. After Beaumont’s death, Oxford married his widow, Elizabeth Scrope.

The Terror of Gwynedd (4, and last)

On 19 June 1312 Piers Gaveston, Edward II’s notorious favourite, was taken onto Blacklow Hill in Warwickshire. There, watched from afar by Thomas of Lancaster and several others, he was butchered by two Welshmen. One ran him through with a sword, then the other cut off his head. 

Over a year later, October 1313, Edward pardoned all those who were implicated in Gaveston’s death. Apart from Lancaster himself, this included many of his followers. Amongst them was Madog ap Meilir, one of the subjects of this series of posts.

To recap: Madog was a landholder of the Powysian March, who had risen high in the service of Edward I and served as a military captain and tax officer. He was a retainer of Owain ap Gruffudd/de le Pole, lord of southern Powys. After Owain’s death in 1294, Madog switched to the household of his younger brother, Gwilym. In 1295 he served in the royal army that won the battle of Maes Moydog. 

After that he vanishes from the record until his appearance on the pardon roll in 1313. He is one of nine Welshmen (by my count) on the very long list of men whom Edward pardoned - very reluctantly, no doubt - for the slaughter of his favourite.

Thus, sometime between 1295 and 1312, Madog abandoned his long career as a Plantagenet loyalist and joined the political enemies of the new king, Edward II. He might even have been one of the two Welshmen who hacked Piers to death on Blacklow, although we cannot be certain. Even if not, he was definitely amongst Lancaster’s following.

Whatever his good points, Edward II had a disastrous habit of losing the support of his father’s old loyalists: Madog is just one of numerous examples. While the king was popular with some of the Welsh gentry, he was opposed by others. As for Madog himself, he does not appear again in the record, and probably died before the end of the reign. 

The poisoned treaty

 #OTD in 1267 the Treaty of Montgomery was ratified between Henry III and Prince Llywelyn the Last of Wales. The treaty was Llywelyn’s greatest achievement: he became the first and only ‘native’ Prince of Wales/Princeps Wallie to be formally recognised by a King of England. However, contrary to popular belief, it did not make him the ruler of an independent state. 

There are sixteen clauses to the treaty. The key clause is number 13. Quote: 

 “For the principality, lands, homages and concessions the same prince and his successors are bound to perform and do to the lord king and his successors the fealty, homage and accustomed and due service that he or his ancestors were accustomed and bound to do and perform to the kings of England.” 

Thus, Llywelyn bound himself and his heirs as perpetual vassals of the English crown. The key advantage, from his perspective, was that in future all the other Welsh rulers would do homage and fealty to him, rather than the King of England. Llywelyn in turn did homage to the king, his overlord. 

Furthermore, Llywelyn agreed to pay a mortgage of 25,000 marks (about £18,000) for his title, to be paid in annual instalments. In the event, he could not meet this or his other financial obligations. His administration was unpopular and oppressive, and a string of military defeats ended in his death, in December 1282, assassinated by his Mortimer cousins. Six months later Gwynedd was conquered by the armies of Edward I.

The terror of Gwynedd (3)

 The battle of Maes Moydog was fought in Powys, North Wales, in March 1295. In some ways it was similar to the battle of Falkirk, fought three years later. An Anglo-Welsh army used missile troops to defeat an army of Welsh spearmen, after the latter had repulsed a cavalry charge. 

The Welsh army was led by Prince Madog ap Llywelyn, a great-great-grandson of Owain Gwynedd (died 1170), the first Welsh ruler to adopt the title Princeps Wallie/Walenses, or overlord of the Welsh. After taking Edward I’s castles of Caernarfon, Denbigh, Ruthin and Hawarden, Madog marched down into Powys. Quote: 

 “Know that the army of Montgomery went to Oswestry to take a prey. And then the prince [Madog] came down to Powis with all the elite Welshmen.” - chronicle of Hagnaby The phrase “to take a prey” is a biblical expression from Ezekiel Chapter XXXVIII, 11-13: “Verse 12: To take a spoil and to take a prey; to turn thy hand upon desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.” 

The army of Montgomery was led by the Earl of Warwick. Just like Wallace at Falkirk, the location of Madog’s army was revealed to him by spies. This crucial local intelligence enabled Warwick to steal a march on the Welsh prince and attack his army on the morning of 5th March. There, on a flat open field, Madog was routed with the loss of six hundred men. 

Now, amongst Warwick’s army were our friends, Madog ap Meilyr and Madog ap Eynon. As local men, with an intimate knowledge of the district, they would have had local informants able to track Prince Madog’s forces and report on his movements to the earl. More than anyone, they were response for the prince’s defeat. 

While the battle raged, Madog’s baggage train was attacked by another detachment of the king’s men, who came from ‘Thessewait’. This is a garbled English spelling of Y Tair Swydd, a district of the Lower Severn Valley centred on Welshpool. It was noticed as a source of Powysian soldiers: during the previous war of 1282-3 over seven hundred had been raised from Y Tair Swydd alone. These men were Welsh. 

The battle of Maes Moydog is usually defined as a straight England v Wales affair. Once again, at the risk of making myself tedious, that is simply not true. To judge from their actions, the men of Powys saw Madog’s invasion as just that: a continuation of the ancient wars of Gwynedd and Powys. They had rejected his predecessor, Llywelyn the Last, and they weren’t having him either.

Sources: The Montgomeryshire Collections/Casgliadau Malden, Volume 106; the battle of Maes Moydog by Dr Peter Barton

Heirs to the Princes: The Welsh Ministerial Elite by David Stephenson

Edward I (Yale Monarchs) by Michael Prestwich

Welsh Soldiers in the Later Middle Ages by Adam Chapman

Medieval Powys: Kingdom, Principality & Lordships by David Stephenson

The terror of Gwynedd (2)

 To continue the tale of the two Madogs. In 1287, five years after the killing of Llywelyn the Last, Rhys ap Maredudd went into revolt. He was a direct descendent of ‘The Lord Rhys’, one of the most famous rulers of medieval Wales, but his motives were complicated. Rhys had fought for Edward I in the wars against Llywelyn, and his eventual revolt was driven more by personal rivalry with the Justiciar of South Wales, Robert Tibetot. 

The king was in Gascony, and had little to do with quelling the revolt. That task fell to the regent, Edmund of Cornwall, who raised an army of 11,000 men, drawn from parts of Wales and the Marches. One of those called up to serve was Owain ap Gruffudd (de la Pole), the so-called ‘Terror of London’, who recruited a thousand men from his own lands in Powys to fight Rhys. 

 Among them were our friends, Madog ap Meilyr and Madog ap Eynon. They served as constables of infantry at the siege of Dryslwyn Castle in Ystrad Tywi, where Rhys and his followers were holed up. Their status is reflected in the wage rolls, which show they each rode an armoured war-horse and commanded units of a hundred infantry. 

After the revolt was crushed, the two Madogs continued to prosper in post-Conquest Wales. By 1292 they were working as chief tax officers in the lands of Cyfeiliog and Mawddy in Powys, both part of the lordship of de la Pole. Madog ap Eynon also made himself busy as a sub-taxor and juror of Caereinion, Llannerchudol, Ceri and Cedewain, again within Powys. 

A note on their lord, Owain. He was hailed as ‘the terror of London’ by his court bard, Llywelyn Fardd III, in a work composed c.1294. In the same poem, Llywelyn praised his master for ‘slaying the Brynaich’, an ancient term for the English i.e. the men of Bernicia, a long-extinct northern kingdom. This seems to be one of the last examples of poetry composed in the Age of the Princes in Wales, which gave way to the slightly different poetic tradition of the gentry. It hardly needs saying, but the tale of Edward I slaughtering the bards of Wales is just that, a fairy tale cooked up in the 18th century. Whatever one makes of Longshanks, he had better things to do than chase poets around the hillsides. 

By this stage the theme of slaughtering the English had become a trope in Welsh bardic poetry, and didn’t necessarily reflect current events. Apart from fighting for King Edward, Owain also served as the king’s shield-bearer and standard bearer, and rode behind him on parade. So far as we know, he never fought an Englishman in his life. 

To be continued…

The terror of Gwynedd

Leaping back to Wales, because I have just received a new journal and want to chatter on about it. Dr David Stephenson’s excellent new book, Heirs to the Princes, contains a handy breakdown of those Welshmen who held office after the Edwardian Conquest: the new aristocracy or ‘Welsh ministerial elite’, as Stephenson calls them. 

To an extent the ‘conquest of Wales’ is an illusion: what Edward I actually did was conquer Gwynedd and its dependencies, not the entire country. Even then, after a major revolt in 1294-5, he was obliged to compromise with the Welsh gentry i.e. the people who mattered. To understand the course of events in Wales, we have to dig deep into the source materials and study individuals. Two of those who caught my eye were Madog ap Eynon and Madog ap Meilyr. 

The two Madogs were gentry of the Powysian March: Madog ap Eynon and his brothers held tenements and land in Llanerchudol and Castle Caerenion, while Madog ap Meilyr held tenements near Welshpool. They were both closely associated with Owain ap Gruffudd, a powerful lord of southern Powys, hailed by his court bards as ‘the terror of London’. 

He also might be described as the terror of Gwynedd. Owain and his family, the royal house of Mathrafal, were bitterly opposed to the rulers of Gwynedd, who wished to impose their power on the whole of Wales. This dynastic feud went back several centuries. Madog ap Meilyr first appears in a witness list dated December 1276 (third pic). Here, Madog is one of some twenty Welshmen listed as sureties for the fidelity to Prince Llywelyn the Last of a named individual. This is a man with the interesting name of ‘Gruffudd ap Budyr ihossan’, which translates as ‘Gruffudd son of Budyr of the dirty hose’. In other words, Budyr was known for having dirty trousers. 

The document may sound dull, but it is crucial to our understanding. It is one of at least sixty examples, in which Llywelyn the Last forced his subjects to act as surety for Welshmen whom he suspected of disloyalty. These strongly imply that Llywelyn was struggling to control many of the Welsh outside Gwynedd, who had no desire to submit to a prince they regarded as an outsider. Moreover, a very oppressive one. 

To be continued…

The sun of Scotland

1258. The Comyn alliance with Llywelyn lasted just three months, before the Welsh prince made peace with Henry III. It came to nothing because the Comyn faction soon lost control of events in Scotland.

Outside of their own affinity, there was little support for the Comyns. Earl Walter, the head of the family, was strong enough to retain power for a short while, but he couldn’t hold the King of Scots hostage forever. So much is clear from the treaty with Llywelyn, which said the Comyns would do their best to bring ‘the lord our king’ into the alliance with the Welsh.

This implies the Comyns were unable to control Alexander III. Three months after the treaty, they lost control of the great seal of Scotland, and were obliged to release Alexander’s wife Queen Margaret from custody. At about the same time Alexander resumed his correspondence with Margaret’s father, Henry III.

Margaret was also Edward I’s sister. If either of her sons by Alexander had lived, the next King of Scots would have been Edward’s nephew. As it was the two princes, David and Alexander, both predeceased their father. David died in 1281, aged eight, and Alexander in 1284, aged twenty.

According to the Chronicle of Lanercost, Alexander had the gift of prophecy on his deathbed. He spoke thus:

“On the morrow at sunrise shall set the sun of Scotland. My uncle of England shall fight three battles. Twice he will conquer. In the third he will be overthrown.”

This would seem to be written in hindsight, and refer to Edward I’s wars in Britain. He defeated the Montfortians in England, conquered Wales, but ultimately failed to conquer Scotland. Or it might refer exclusively to the Scottish war.

Scots and Welsh

Right, we shall have another look at Scotland. I broke off last time in the mid-13th century, when the Comyn faction were nearing the height of their power. A lot of people still seem to dismiss the Comyns as traitors or whatever, and don’t quite appreciate how important they were. 

Let’s go from 1257. In this year Earl Walter, head of the Comyn family, made his bid for power by kidnapping Alexander III, the young King of Scots, at Kinross. This enabled the Comyns to regain control of the government and kick out their rivals, headed by Alan Durward. For the past two years, Walter had been trying to leverage the support of the King of England, Henry III, to achieve his aims. Henry was willing, but his own position in England was crumbling away. By 1257 he was in dire straits: Henry was preoccupied with his disastrous attempt to conquer Sicily, the baronial reform movement in England, the illness of his queen and the rise of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in Wales. 

These issues probably compelled Walter to make his move. Seeing that Henry was a busted flush, he promptly ditched the king and made a new alliance with Llywelyn, who had started to call himself Princeps Wallie; Prince/Overlord of Wales. In 1258 the Comyns took the extraordinary step of allying with Llywelyn and his supporters, which must have put Henry’s nose seriously out of joint. 

 Interestingly, it was Llywelyn who took the initiative in seeking alliance. The agreement didn’t last very long, but it captures the shifting balance of power at this point in time. In short: Comyns and Llywelyn up, Durward and Henry down. 

Attached is a pic of the first part of the agreement. As you can see, the second name on the Welsh witness list is Dafydd, Llywelyn’s notorious brother. At this point he was back onside with Llywelyn, and doing pretty well out of it. That wouldn’t last either.

The Rajputs of Rajasthan

We’ve had a lot of Wales in the past few days. For a change of pace, and to stop people getting bored, let’s look at events in a completely different part of the world. India!

In the 1820s a certain Colonel James Tod, the first British official to visit Rajasthan (a state in northwest India) wrote a history of the region called the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. According to John Keay, Tod wrote a glorious narrative of the rajputs, the local sovereign chiefs and princes, which was fit to rival the Western legends of Camelot. 

This went down especially well in Britain, because Tod made the ‘Rajpoot states’ sound very similar to the Anglo-Normans. For instance, they had the same feudal structure, based on a martial system with vassalage and land grants dependent on military service and the supply of fighting men. 

However, Tod condemned the rajputs for their complete inability to unite against a common foe. Quote:

“The closest attention to their history proves beyond contradiction that they were never capable of uniting, even for their own preservation: a breath, a scurrilous stanza of a bard, has severed their closest confederacies. No national head exists among them…and each chief being master of his own house and followers, they are individually too weak to cause us [the British] any harm.”

As if to contradict himself, Tod then pointed out that the rajputs had bravely resisted Muslim aggression, and listed a string of patriotic heroes of Rajasthan. The first of these was Pirthi-raj, properly known as Prithviraj III of the Chahamana (Chauhan) dynasty, who ruled an extensive kingdom in northern Rajasthan and the eastern Punjab from 1177. I know nothing whatever of this interesting fellow, so we shall have a closer look at him next.

Note: I also know absolutely bugger-all about the medieval history of India, and am getting all my information from John Keay’s book and online sources. If I get things wrong, which I surely will, blame them.

Glory, glory

 If we move outside North Wales, the shifts of power in the post-Conquest period become more evident. This was all about power, of course.

In the south and west, Edward I had destroyed most of the princes or ‘tywysog’. The survivors, after 1283, were Rhys ap Maredudd and Llywelyn ab Owain. Rhys had done extremely well by supporting the king in previous wars, at the expense of everyone else. Llywelyn survived because he was underage, and not important enough to be done away with.

Rhys was a shrewd man, but in 1287 he miscalculated and went into revolt. If he hoped to drive out the English and set himself up as a new Princeps Wallie, then he was living in cloud-cuckoo land. Most of his followers abandoned him, or even joined the massive royal army sent to crush the revolt.

One of those who turned against Rhys was a certain Goronwy Goch (the Red). Goronwy was of distinguished ancestry, which meant everything in medieval Wales: in Welsh pedigrees he was known as Arglwydd Llangathen—lord (dominus) of Llangathen, where he had his residence. He had been a senior figure at Rhys’s court, where he served as constable of the great castle of Dryslwyn. 

When his master turned against the king, Goronwy promptly enlisted in the king’s army. We should not judge him: he had only copied the example of Rhys, a collaborator who profited from the downfall of his neighbours and kinsmen. The royal household accounts show Goronwy served as a sergeant, riding an armoured warhorse and receiving the high wage of 12d (pence) a day: the average infantryman got 1 or 2d. He was present at the siege of Dryslwyn, where the castle walls were battered down by royal artillery. Rhys escaped the debacle, but was eventually captured and hanged at York.

Goronwy continued to ride high. He was made steward of Cantref Mawr in Ystrad Tywi, served as a tax officer in Dryslwyn lordship and gobbled up the profits of local estates and mills. He was very much a member of the rising ‘ministerial elite’ in Wales, who formed the nucleus of the gentry class. These ruthless men would clamber over the wreckage of the medieval principality, booting aside the past and clawing their way to supremacy in Wales and England. They are a Welsh success story, if arguably not a very glorious one.

Glory, glory. What does it mean, anyway? To my cynical middle-aged eyes, it seems to be shorthand for lost wars and futile causes, usually ending on a bloodstained scaffold. The hells with that.

Heirs to the Princes (2)

Following on from yesterday, and the latest study on post-conquest Wales. This is a huge subject, full of details and nuance, which can be difficult to convey on social media. I have chosen to start with the aftermath of the major Welsh revolt of 1294-5, which threatened to unravel Edward I’s conquest. This ties in with some of my own research from a few years ago. 

David Stephenson has now established there were five major risings in Wales in 1294-5: not four, as traditionally supposed. They were led by Madog ap Llywelyn in north Wales; Maelgwn ap Rhys in Ceredigion; Morgan ap Maredudd in Glamorgan; Meurig ap Dafydd in Abergavenny, and Cynan ap Maredudd in Brecon and adjacent lordships. 

Edward’s response to these men was notably less savage than the previous revolt in 1282-3, when he had Dafydd ap Gruffudd brutally executed at Shrewsbury. Madog and Maelgwn were imprisoned, Morgan was pardoned, while Meurig appears to have been recruited into the army in Flanders. Only Cynan was executed, after he tried to fool the king by pretending to have leprosy. 

On 24 December 1296 Edward sent a letter to John de Havering, his officer in North Wales. He informed Havering that the men of Snowdon and Anglesey had reported a rumour to the king, in which certain things ‘had been suggested’ whereby the king ought to hold them suspect. In response, Edward assured the North Welsh that he had every confidence in their loyalty. He then ordered Havering to deal with those spreading rumours: 

“…the king orders John to so chastise any liars as shall be found henceforth in his bailiwick that the punishment shall strike terror into others saying the like things.” 

That was not all. Edward was engaged upon a ‘charm offensive’, as Stephenson puts it, aimed at winning over the Welsh. His letter to Havering was followed by a subsequent order, on 3 December, in which the king assured certain Welshmen that he held them in no suspicion, but regarded them as his ‘faithful and devoted servants’. 

These men were the abbot of Aberconwy, Thomas Danvers, Tudur ap Goronwy, and Hywel ap Cynwrig. Edward’s willingness to pardon Tudur in particular was remarkable, given the Welshman’s role in the recent revolt. We shall look at that next. 

Note: Apologies if these Wales posts are a bit long-winded, but the devil really is in the detail. Besides, there is enough glib rubbish on the internet. We’re supposed to get history out of books, not AI and memes and Chatgpt.

Heirs to the Princes (1)

This volume just arrived. David Stephenson is (imo) the best current historian of medieval Wales, especially the period of the Edwardian conquest and its aftermath.

David argues for a complete re-assessment of this era, from the later years of Edward I up to the Black Death. After 1295 a 'new order' of aristocratic leadership emerged in Wales, which worked in co-operation with the English crown up until the mid-14th century. At that point the relationship started to break down, culminating in the revolt of Owain Glyndwr. 

This is a very detailed argument, drawing on close analysis of the record evidence. There are this who will simply refuse to accept it - I know from experience how difficult it can be to have reasonable discussions about Edward I and Wales, and to persuade people to consider new perspectives. That's fine, but I'm not here to offend anyone or get into arguments. If what follows makes you angry, then ignore me. Nobody has to agree with anything, obviously.

To start with, David quotes a passage by his old tutor, the late RR Davies:

"The difference between English and Welsh in fourteenth-century Wales was in part - and we need not mince our words here - that between conqueror and conquered, between a foreign government and commercial elite and an unprivileged native society; between settlers and natives. It was a contrast which permeated many aspects of Welsh life of the period - those of office-holding in church and state, of the redistribution of land in favour of a settler caste, of urban privileges and marketing prohibitions".

This might, in a nutshell, be taken as a fair reflection of the popular understanding of post-Conquest Wales (minus some of the more extreme language). But how true is it, really? We shall find out...

Rebellion against Henry III (1)

To go right back to the beginning (or 2019, when I wrote my book).The Second Barons’ War in England began in 1259 and officially ended in 1267, although violence and political unrest continued into the reign of Edward I. At a stretch, you could even argue that his reign was an interregnum, after which it all erupted again under Edward II. 

Broadly speaking, the war was triggered by protests against the rule of Henry III. These included the king’s financial extravagance, his reliance on hated foreigners, military blunders in Wales and corrupted administration. Then there was the Sicily business, whereby Henry planned to invade Sicily and plant his second son, Edmund, on the throne. 

 Some recent historians (well, one) have argued that the Sicily venture was in fact a misunderstood stroke of genius on Henry’s part. All I can say in response is that none of his barons thought so, especially since he wanted them to pay for it. Coming on top of everything else, this was the last straw. After years of bitter arguing, political tensions began to slide into violence. 

The first serious outbreak occurred in northern England, as shown by surviving court records and sheriff’s accounts. In 1260 Peter Percy, Sheriff of Yorkshire, claimed expenses for the wages of knights and crossbowmen in pursuing Sir John d’Eyville, Adam Newmarket and Richard Foliot and their company over five days in November. Meanwhile two more northerners, Robert de Ros and Alexander Kirketon, were arrested for committing acts of violence near Pontefract. 

For some years I corresponded with Oscar de Vill (sadly no longer with us) a descendant of Sir John via a cadet branch of the family in Warwickshire. Oscar kindly provided me with a great deal of his research on the d’Eyvill family and their long history as rebels and outlaws in this period. They should be better-known, really, as the real drivers of rebellion in the north for almost fifty years.

Battle Song!

 My review of Battle Song by Ian Ross, part one of a new trilogy set during the Montfortian era in England. 

I usually wince a bit when reading novels or watching screen dramas set in this period; the events and people are all very complicated, but tend to be painted in very broad strokes. Happily, Ian has too much skill and respect for the subject to deal in cliché. 

"Battle Song is the first book of a barnstorming new trilogy by Ian Ross, an author who has previously focused on Constantine the Great and the later Roman Empire. In this he has switched to the equally bloody and complex complex world of 13th century England, a time of great upheaval, seismic political reforms and murderous civil strife. 

 The trilogy follows the story of Adam de Norton, a (fictional) young squire in the service of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, who dreams of knighthood and recovering his late father’s lands. After the death of his father in Wales, Adam’s inheritance was snatched away by strangers, leaving him without any great name, fortune or ancestral estate. His personal misfortune plays out against the wider canvas of the year 1261; after several years of bitter wrangling, it seems Henry III has curbed the power of his rebellious barons, led by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Yet the respite is only temporary, and storm-clouds are poised to engulf the kingdom. 

After a fatal hunting accident, Adam is transferred to the service of Sir Robert de Dunstanville, a ruthless knight with a bad reputation, who needs a squire to accompany him on the tournament circuit in France. Ross particularly excels in describing the bloody chaos of tourneys in this era, very different from the more decorous jousts of the later period. Tourneys were pitched battles, essentially, which often degenerated into free-for-alls and spilled over into the crowd. The idea was to capture knights for ransom, but crippling wounds or even death were commonplace. Adam witnesses the brutish violence and strategy at first, and saves the life of a certain Edward Longshanks, who scarcely needs any introduction. This episode is based on the reality of Edward’s painful early experiences on the French tourney circuit, where he was gravely wounded on several occasions. 

From here on, Adam is increasingly drawn into the battle for power in England, as well as his own private entanglements. This is not merely a story of battles and men at war, although that would be no bad thing: Adam gets romantically involved with Robert’s niece, Joanne de Quincy, adding emotional depth to the tale. The story gradually builds in scope and intensity, as Adam finds himself embroiled in full-scale battles and sieges, including an epic set-piece at Rochester and the showdown at Lewes, where Simon defeated the royalists and took Henry and Edward prisoner. Ross is a master at describing the grim reality of war, up close and personal, the sweat and cramp and terror of being trapped in contending battle-lines, or the hellish danger of scaling castle walls under a storm of rocks and missiles. 

While none of the conflicts are resolved (it is only the first book, after all), this reader was left keen to discover how things play out—even though I am well aware of the period, and the fate of the historical characters. These are all very well-drawn, especially Simon and Edward, whom Ross presents (quite properly) as formidable, alluring and yet repellent at the same time, as engaging as they are untrustworthy. The subtlety of these depictions, with the author refusing to paint with primary colours, is another tick in the novel’s favour. It is all too easy to portray controversial figures as simplistic heroes and villains, but Ross has too much skill, as well as passion and respect for the subject, to stoop to crude caricature."

Basculus Balistarius

Most of my posts are on kings and things, but occasionally the records provide us with a glimpse of men lower down the social scale. Let’s have a look at an ordinary soldier, a crossbowman of Gascony named Ernald Basculus de la Ripe de Oléron (yes, really). He usually appears as ‘Basculus the Crossbowman’. 

As his extravagant name suggests, Basculus was from the Isle of Oléron, off the coast of Gascony. As such he did military service for the Plantagenet king-dukes, wherever they chose to send him. Bascules first appears in 1289, at a place called Petra Nigra (now Peyranère) a height of about 1500 metres on the border between Aragon and Gascony: it still marks the line between France and Spain today. His job was to help guard a temporary lodge or fortress built on this snowy pass, where Edward I came to meet a group of high-status hostages, returned by the King of Aragon. Among other tasks, Basculus supervised the mending of the road for the king’s journey. 

Our crossbowman next crops up in 1294, serving against the Welsh in Gwynedd, where he received wages on 19 September. In 1298 he was in Scotland, where he fought at the battle of Falkirk mounted on a black rouncy, a cheaper form of warhorse to the expensive beasts ridden by the nobles. His horse was lost in the fighting, for which he was paid decent compensation of £10. 

Basculus next turns up in 1301, when his luck ran out. On 28 July 1301 he was captured by the Scots at Peebles, while the main English army under Edward I marched towards Glasgow. Perhaps he was taken in a skirmish. 

Although he was not a knight, Basculus must have been considered worth ransoming. He was back in service by August 1303, when he bought a horse for the king at Dunblane. On 12 March 1304 he was entrusted with a much more delicate task. The entry reads: 

"12 March: 5.0d to Basculus the crossbowman, for money paid by him to five harpers meeting the king on the roads above Sabulum between Dovayn and Sanford, 6 March, of the king’s gift." 

Basculus was awarded 5 shillings, by the king's gift, as recompense for money paid by him to five harpers who met King Edward on the road somewhere near 'Sabulum' in Scotland. 

This was part of Edward's propaganda drive in 1304, when he paid Scottish musicians to walk beside his horse as he rode through Scotland, singing songs “as they did in the time of King Alexander”. The idea was to promote him as the natural successor to Alexander III, who had fallen off a cliff back in 1286. That whole John Balliol project was quietly shelved. 

As the entry suggests, Basculus was now a trusted servant, and part of the king‘s household. In the payroll for this year he is described as Basculus Balistarius, sergeant to the king, in pay for the whole of the leap year of 366 days: 264 days with a valued horse at a rate of 12d per day, and 102 days without one at 8d per day. Good money, when one considers the average wage was 2d for an infantryman. 

After that I lose sight of Basculus. By now he had been in service for at least fifteen years, with a lot of travel and hard campaigning. Perhaps he was killed, or died of dysentery, or was pensioned off. He may well appear in a later entry or two, but I have yet to spot him.

No no, yes yes

#OTD in 1422 Henry V died of dysentery in France, aged just 35, leaving the infant Henry VI to enjoy a long and glorious reign (hmm). Immortalised as England's golden boy by Shakespeare, Henry is regarded as one of the great English warrior-kings. 

Which means, of course, that he also comes in for a torrid storm of criticism: no no, he was really a vicious sod with a horrid scar on his face who trashed France and left an impossible legacy. No no, yes yes, hee hee, ho ho. 

Whatever. The real Henry was clearly a competent soldier and administrator, though it is doubtful he would have imposed a permanent conquest of France. If he had lived another 20-30 years, I suspect England would have held onto Aquitaine and parts of northern France, and there would have been no Wars of the Roses.