Men of his own tongue

On 25 April 1283 the defenders of Castell y Bere in the heart of North Wales surrendered to the armies of Edward I. In exchange for handing over the castle, they received about two-thirds of a promised bribe of £80 in silver: the shortfall might have rankled, but they were probably just relieved to get away with life and limb.

Castell y Bere

The fall of Bere was an important step in the Edwardian conquest of Wales. Seen from other perspectives, it was one of the final acts in a very long-running drama. Among the royal commanders were Rhys ap Maredudd, lord of Ystrad Tywi in south Wales, and several of the sons of Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, lord of southern Powys. These men chose to fight for the King of England against the Prince of Wales because the latter, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, was their hereditary enemy.

The conflict between the lords of southern Powys (Powys Gwenwynwyn) and Prince Llywelyn's family went back over two hundred years. Their ancestor, Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, had once ruled Gwynedd and Powys in the mid-eleventh century, including the site of Castell y Bere inside Meirionydd. Bleddyn lost Gwynedd to the ancestors of Llywelyn, and a feud had rumbled on ever since. At times the lords of Powys joined with their ancestral foes against the English, but they were uneasy allies. Gruffudd had been Llywelyn's ally for a time, only to conspire with his brother Dafydd to murder the prince in his bed.

That plot had failed, but in December 1282 Llywelyn fell victim to another. The Chronicle of Peterborough Abbey claims that Gruffudd and his sons were present at the death, and it is difficult to believe they were not complicit in luring Llywelyn to his doom. After his death, the crown of Wales passed to his treacherous brother Dafydd, who continued to resist Edward's invasion. This meant that the former conspirators, Gruffudd and Dafydd, were now on opposite sides.

It seems Edward was well aware of the feuds between rival dynasties in Wales, and the value of symbolism. When Bere fell, the castle was handed over to one of Gruffudd's sons – ironically named Llywelyn – and a force of Powysian soldiers. The lions of Gwynedd were torn down from the battlements and replaced with the red lion rampant of Powys Gwenwynwyn:

The symbolic significance, and the irony, of his custody of the castle built by his grandfather's great enemy, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, in the heart of the land that had long ago been held by members of his dynasty, cannot have been lost on Llywelyn or his father. The revenge of the house of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn was complete. (David Stephenson)

In the spring and summer months of 1283 the war devolved into a man-hunt. After the loss of his castles, Dafydd and his remaining followers scattered and went on the run. The payroll for this campaign shows the men of Powys were heavily involved in hunting down the fugitive prince. For instance:

Item, payment to William de Felton and David ap Griffin ap Wenonwin, with 2 covered horses, for themselves and 140 foot-soldiers returning with them to Cymer from the parts of Powys, seeking David ap Griffin, for Saturday 22 May, for 1 day, 26s 6d.

And:

Item, to the same William and David ap Griff’ ap Wenonwin, with 2 covered horses, for themselves and 200 foot-soldiers going towards the parts of Powys, for Tuesday 18 May, the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday following, for 4 days, each day counted, £7 8s, to pursue David ap Griffin.

These payments indicate Dafydd was thought to be hiding somewhere in Powys, perhaps on the lands of one of his late brother's followers, Llywelyn Fychan of Bromfield. He was eventually caught on 22 June on the Bera mountain in Gwynedd, by 'men of his own tongue'; possibly men of Gwynedd, or perhaps of Powys and Ystrad Tywi.

The killing of Prince Llywelyn

In the final days of the war, on 28 June, Gruffudd and his Marcher ally Edmund Mortimer were ordered to clear all the passes under their control of trees. This was because one of Dafydd's sons, Llywelyn, was lurking with 'certain thieves' inside the woods; the last dregs of resistance. Gruffudd and Edmund's men soon flushed them out and delivered Llywelyn into royal custody. His fate was to spend the rest of his days as a prisoner at Bristol Castle with his younger brother, Owain.

A few years later Gruffudd died in his bed at Welshpool, aged about 65. He had been entirely successful:

It was thus, with the territorial extent of his lordship largely restored and in one region extended significantly beyond the territories that he had entered in 1242, with his principal rivals eliminated and his erstwhile persecutor, Prince Llywelyn, dead and his house all but destroyed, that Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn died in 1286. (David Stephenson)

Bruce and the king

On the anniversary of the death of Robert de Bruce, King of Scots, in 1329, I thought it would be interesting to look at his relationship with Edward I of England.

What was Bruce’s attitude towards the would-be conqueror of Scotland? Bruce’s private opinion is a mystery, of course, but circumstances dictated his behaviour. There were many other factors at work. Bruce was not too proud - or too patriotic either - to make use of the English king when it suited him. Edward in turn appreciated Bruce’s value as an ally, and the shock of the latter’s final revolt may well have hastened the old king’s death.

To begin with, the Bruce faction were thoroughly on board with Edward’s Scottish project. They rode with the king when he invaded Scotland in 1296, which led to accusations of treachery from Scottish writers. As Walter Bower later put it:

"All the supporters of Bruce’s party were generally considered traitors to the king and kingdom…”

Just like anyone else, the Bruces were out for themselves. They supported Edward in the hope that he would depose John Balliol and put a Bruce on the Scottish throne: Bruce’s father, the sixth earl of Carrick. Balliol was duly dethroned and sent off to captivity in England, but Bruce senior’s tentative reminder met with a stern brush-off from the king:

“Have we nothing else to do than win kingdoms for you?”

Edward had no reason to fear the earl: he had always obeyed the king, and served him faithfully in Wales and Ireland. Bruce junior was made of sterner stuff, even if he took a while to show it. When Andrew Moray and William Wallace raised their standard in 1297, Bruce and other nobles threw in their lot with the ‘rebels’. In July they promptly threw in the towel before Edward’s captains, only to be shown up by Moray and Wallace’s stunning victory at Stirling Bridge in September.

The news of Stirling Bridge inspired Bruce to go back into revolt. When Edward came north again in 1298 - ‘a great black storm of rage’- as one writer put it - Bruce remained a Scottish loyalist. After his victory at Falkirk, Edward turned west and rushed over to Ayr to try and catch Bruce in his stronghold. He found his quarry long gone, vanished into the hills, and the town and castle in flames.

Bruce’s eyes were firmly fixed on the empty throne. He knew that Wallace would not survive as Guardian much longer, and that the rival Comyn faction was planning to take over. Bruce could not allow that to happen, but ended up sharing power with his chief rival, John ‘the red’ Comyn of Badenoch. This uneasy alliance ended in a fight, in which Comyn is said to have seized Bruce warmly by the throat. More bad news arrived from France, where John Balliol was now in papal custody. For a few awful months it looked as though Balliol might return to Scotland at the head of a French army.

This was an equally horrifying prospect for Edward, which meant he and Bruce now had shared interests. In early 1302 Bruce turned himself in at Lochmaben and surrendered to the king’s keeper of Galloway, John de St John. For the next four years he was Edward’s man, at least on the surface. We can only speculate, but it would seem that Bruce meant to use Edward to crush the opposition in Scotland, before breaking loose to claim the throne. Therefore his aim was to achieve a free and independent Scotland, but only with himself as king.

This, at any rate, is what happened. In 1304, when Edward launched his final all-out effort at conquest, Bruce played a key role. He was with the Irish when they landed on the western seaboard, and supplied the king with artillery for the siege of Stirling. Edward seems to have regarded Bruce as his best boy at this point, and sent him a letter applauding his efforts:

“For if you complete that there which you have begun, we shall hold the war ended by your deed, and all the land of Scotland gained. So we pray you again, as much as we can, that whereas the robe is well made, you will be pleased to make the hood.”

Contemporary MS illustration of Edward I

Bruce’s long-term goal was in sight. Edward was an old man in poor health, albeit with an irritating tendency to rally. Even as English war-machines pounded the walls of Stirling, Bruce was arranging his future. On 11 June he met secretly with the Bishop of St Andrews at the abbey of Cambuskenneth, where they finalised a treaty of mutual aid. The treaty did not state as much, but the implication is that Scotland’s most senior churchman had agreed to support Bruce’s bid for the throne.

Yet the time was not ripe. Edward was not ready to keel over just yet, and in February 1305 Bruce attended parliament at Westminster to advise on the Ordinance for Scotland’s new government. This was a surprisingly conciliatory effort on Edward’s part to include the Scottish magnates in his administration: Bruce, now thirty years old and in the prime of life, was rewarded with the revenues of the earldom of Mar.

No amount of gifts and compromise would conceal the hard fact that Edward was once again overlord - ‘Lord Paramount’ - of Scotland, and that he called the shots. Bruce bided his time, perhaps encouraged by the increasing frailty of England’s king. Of more concern was the growing power and influence of the Comyns in Scotland. Since he gave up the guardianship, the Comyns had come to dominate affairs north of the border, which presented Bruce with another problem. Edward had defeated John Comyn, or at least persuaded him to submit, but (most annoyingly) allowed the man to live. Indeed, the Comyns had flourished since: most of the Scottish delegates to London, chosen at Perth or Scone in May 1305, were of their faction.

This was no good at all. Bruce had to change tack, and the result was the famous meeting at a church in Dumfries on 10 February 1306. Here, John Comyn and his uncle were done to death by Bruce and his followers in an almost certainly pre-meditated double homicide. After the bloody deed was done, Bruce went into open revolt.

The news of the crime, when it reached Edward, was almost too shocking to believe. At first Edward had no idea who was responsible. When he found out, according to John Barbour, the king temporarily lost his reason:

“And when King Edward was told how the Bruce, who was so bold, had ended the life of the Comyn, and then had made himself King, he nearly went out of his mind.”

The rest is well-known. Edward spent the remaining months of his life attempting to catch ‘King Hobbe’ (as he termed Bruce) from a sickbed. At first Bruce suffered a string of defeats, but emerged from hiding in the spring of 1307 to harry Edward’s forces. The dying king executed every male Bruce he could lay his hands on, and shut up the women in solitary confinement, but his chief quarry always remained beyond reach. In the end Edward was striking at a mirror of himself:

“A crowned warrior, careless of men’s lives, who meant to have his way at any price.”

The mirror finally crack’d for Edward on 7 July 1307, at a bleak outpost in the Cumbrian marshes. King Hobbe still had a long war ahead of him, with no guarantee of success, but the first hurdle was overcome.

 

Mercy and ferocity

The future Edward I of England had an unpromising start to his career. He was surprisingly malleable, torn between loyalty to his father, Henry III, and the rebel barons led by Simon de Montfort. At one point he was suspected of conspiring to depose the king, and his habit of oath-breaking was satirised in a Montfortian ballad, The Song of Lewes:

“He is a lion by his pride and ferocity; by his inconstantly and changeableness he is a pard, not holding steadily his word or his promise, and excusing himself with fair words.”

The nadir of the young Edward’s fortunes came at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, when his undisciplined pursuit of the Londoners lost the battle for his father. He spent a year in humiliating captivity, which gave Edward much time to ponder his mistakes. In the summer of 1265 he broke free and staged a dramatic coup that ended in the bloody slaughter of Evesham. The massacre of Earl Simon and his followers saddled Edward with fresh problems, as he was now the target of a blood-feud.

When the revolt of the Disinherited broke out, Edward was among the first to seize forfeit land and money. He wasn’t quite as rapacious as his colleague Earl Gilbert de Clare, the ‘red dog’ of Gloucester, but certainly grabbed his share. Among other lands, Edward seized the manor of Luton, once in the possession of Henry de Montfort. Henry had been cut in half by a broadsword at Evesham, and Edward wept at his funeral. He managed to wipe away his tears before taking possession of Luton just four days later.

Over the winter months of 1265, Edward came to realise two things. First, the sheer folly of the policy of disinheritance, which left half the landed class of England destitute and with no option except to fight. Second, the pressing need to reconstruct his reputation in the public eye. A prince who was perceived as faithless, one who waged war on his own people, was never going to enjoy popular support.

The first sign of his changed attitude was at Axholme in Lincolnshire, where Edward laid siege to a nest of rebel barons holed up in the dreary fens. When they eventually surrendered, he spared their lives on condition they stood trial at London. Predictably, every one of the barons broke their oath and went back into rebellion.

Edward showed the same clemency in further military operations. After he stormed the rebel-held town of Winchelsea, he spared the townsfolk on condition they abandoned their lives of piracy. As a result of his mercy, ‘great tranquillity was spread over that sea’. Nor was there any question of disinheritance. Instead the barons of the port towns were permitted to have their lands, houses and chattels, as well as ancient liberties guaranteed by the king and his predecessors.

A few months later Edward defeated the outlaw knight, Adam Gurdon, and let him live: this clemency was not extended to Adam’s peasant followers, who were hanged on the trees of Alton forest. In 1267 Edward raced north to crush the revolt of John de Vescy in Northumbria, and spared the ringleaders after he stormed their base at Alnwick Castle. John had carried the severed foot of Simon de Montfort back to Alnwick and kept it inside a silver shoe; it was said to have magic healing properties, but proved unable to repel swords and arrows.  

This policy had the desired effect. Edward’s reputation soared among English chroniclers. In place of the devious ‘Leopard’ of earlier years, he was now ‘a gallant knight who should be king hereafter’; the king’s ‘renowned first-born son’; one ‘whose mercy is always inestimable and universal’.

Edward arguably took mercy too far. He pardoned a dangerous pirate, Henry Pethun, and an outlaw named Walter Devyas. These men showed their gratitude by immediately reverting to lives of crime. Henry Pethun vanished on the high seas, never to be seen again, but Walter was finally caught on the Scottish border and beheaded for his many arsons, robberies and murders.

All of this is virtually unrecognisable from the Longshanks of popular imagination: the ruthless tyrant who brutally executed William Wallace and harried the Welsh and the Scots without mercy. The truth is that the gallant knight and the brutal conqueror existed in the same man. Much of the success of Edward’s reign was due to the calculated mercy he showed after Evesham. Men who had surrendered to him, such as Adam Gurdon and John de Vescy, served him loyally in the Welsh and Scottish wars. The king’s peculiar mixture of ferocity and mercifulness was expressed in The Song of Caerlaverock, composed in 1300:

“For none experience his bite

Who are not envenomed by it.

But he is soon revised

With sweet good-naturedness

If they seek his friendship

And wish to come to his peace”.

 

 

To the woods and fields

The death of Simon de Montfort and most of his captains at Evesham in 1265 left their supporters in England scattered and divided. When the war of the Disinherited blew up the following year, the rebels had to adopt new tactics.

Many of the Disinherited abandoned their castles and took to what we would call guerilla warfare - ‘to the woods and fields’, as one chronicler put it. In this respect their strategy was very similar to that of the Scots in the Wars of Independence. Both deliberately avoided battle and operated from hideouts in wild country: the forest of Selkirk in the case of the Scots, the meres and fens of Ely and Axholme in the case of the Disinherited.

Unable to face the superior forces of Henry III in open battle, the Disinherited switched to hit-and-run tactics and hitting royalist supply lines. This kind of strategy was nothing new, and indeed central to medieval warfare. As Robert Wace, a twelfth century Norman poet, expressed it:

“Go through this country with fire,

destroying houses and towns,

take all booty and food,

pigs and sheep and cattle.

Let Normans find no food

Nor any thing on which to live.”

The rebel bands in the midlands lurked along the Great North Road, the main artery of trade and commerce linking north and south. From their base at Axholme, they rode out to plunder royalist merchants moving up and down the highway. One of their particular targets was Peter Beraud, one of the Lord Edward’s Italian creditors. They even attacked foreign dignitaries. In the summer of 1267, Alexander the Steward of Scotland was waylaid inside Sherwood Forest and held prisoner until his ransom was paid.

Many of these exploits have a distinctly Robin Hood flavour, which may be no coincidence. Later chroniclers such as Walter Bower placed the famous outlaw hero among the Disinherited in 1266, though he also made clear his disapproval:

“In that year also the disinherited English barons and those loyal to the king clashed fiercely, amongst them Roger de Mortimer, occupied the Welsh Marches and John de Eyvill occupied the Isle of Ely; Robert Hood was an outlaw among the woodland briars and thorns. Between them they inflicted a vast amount of slaughter on the common folk, cities and merchants”.

Another rebel tactic was to attack the Jewish communities in England. This was a way of wiping out their debts while also destroying a useful source of credit for the crown. The poor Jews themselves were left defenceless against the onslaught of savage fighting men.

In 1266 a band of Disinherited swooped down upon the Jewish quarter in Lincoln. They razed the synagogue, destroyed charters and deeds and butchered scores of innocents:

“That they have taken Lincoln, the Jews now

They take and destroy, breaking open the coffers;

Charters and deeds and whatever is injurious

To the Christians they have taken,

Treading them under foot,

Among the lanes, and woman and child,

They have put to the sword a hundred and sixty”.

Such ruthless tactics enabled the Disinherited to sustain a war of attrition for several years. They were up against some able opponents. Henry III himself, not renowned as one of England’s warrior-kings, could soldier when he really put his mind to it: witness his victory at Northampton in 1264, for instance. His heir the Lord Edward was an energetic and supremely confident military leader, while other royalist captains such as Henry of Almaine, Earl Warenne and Roger Leyburn were all formidable.

Outnumbered and out-resourced, the Disinherited had to find new leaders, and quickly. Their search for the next Simon de Montfort will be the subject of another post.