The exercise of power

The post mortem inquisition entry from 1278 for Maredudd ap Gruffydd, a lord of south Wales. This serves as an example of the predatory politics of the era, and the crude exercise of power.

 The inquisition, conducted by the bailiff of Abergavenny, records that Maredudd held lands in Monmouth and elsewhere in the south. In 1271, while the future King Edward was in the Holy Land, Maredudd was driven from his manors of Edeligion and Llebenydd in Caerleon by Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester. He managed to retain the commote of Hirfryn, which was inherited by his son, Morgan, after Maredudd’s death in 1278.

Morgan initially gave his allegiance to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales. Llywelyn commanded Morgan to travel into Snowdonia to swear homage and fealty before the prince. The oath of fealty was essentially an appeal to God, whereby a man called down on himself divine punishment if he behaved falsely to his lord. It usually consisted of something like:

"I promise on my faith that I will in the future be faithful to the lord, never cause him harm and will observe my homage to him completely against all persons in good faith and without deceit."

Once Morgan had sworn the oath, Llywelyn ejected his vassal from Hirfryn and left him with nothing. Llywelyn probably did this to regain a foothold in Cantref Bychan in south Wales after his territorial losses there in 1278. Deprived of his inheritance, Morgan had to rebuild his patrimony by entering royal service.

Loyaulté me Lie

The cost of loyalty: how the Plantagenets retained the duchy of Gascony after the loss of the Angevin empire:

“Yet no regime could afford to alienate its supporters, and it was unwise to take too many castles and tolls into royal or ducal possession. By 1294 five-sixths of the castles within the duchy of Aquitaine were held by the nobility: thus, of 130 fortresses in the Agenais, only six were in ducal hands. The price of loyalty was high. A small ducal domain - Edward I held only twenty castles in Aquitaine in the 1290s - ensured the survival of his regime and the Plantagenets consciously and purposefully alienated most of their Gascon assets, with the important exception of the wine customs collected at Bordeaux. The principal beneficiaries of these grants were the middling and lesser nobility.”

- Malcom Vale, The Origins of the Hundred Years War.

The benefit of this policy of decentralisation was shown in 1294, when the French invaded Gascony. Of the 112 Gascon nobles summoned to arms by Edward I, about 90 responded. Most of those who defected to Philip IV were concentrated in the Agenais on the northeast frontier of the duchy. Edward had only acquired the Agenais a few years earlier, so these men had in effect reverted to their ‘natural lord’, the king of France. 

Pictured are the castles of La Réole and the Château de Foix, which lay inside the old duchy of Gascony, also called Guyenne or Aquitaine.

Château de Foix

La Réole

King Arthur and King Edward

The tournament at Hem-Monacu in France in 1278 had a strong Arthurian theme: the participants dressed as up as the Knights of the Round Table, and scenes from the legend were played out between jousts. From the outset, the herald proclaimed that the tournament was held in honour of Queen Guinevere, represented by a supposedly allegorical figure called the ‘dame de Courtoisie’. The dame was played by the sister of Aubert de Longueval, one of the organisers.

The dame was also the central figure of the tornoi, and held court on a scaffold raised above the arena. Before the jousts began, she gave an explanatory prologue to the crowd. During interludes between combats, she would explain her plans for the rest of the day’s proceedings. Some of her exposition, recorded by the poet Sarassin, reveals much about contemporary attitudes towards Edward I and English knights.

At the start of the tornoi, the dame urges that King Arthur and his knights should be invited to compete: “...en le Haute Bretainge, De coi li Graaus nous ensegne, Que le rois Artus en fu sires.”

A version of the Trojan conquest of Britain was then recited, followed by Merlin’s construction of Stonehenge. Finally the Knights of the Round Table are invoked:

“La [en Angleterrej trueve on les bons jousteours, Les durs, les roides et les fors. Lancelos... Et Gavains... Et cil de la Table Reonde, Qui furent li millor du monde, La sont chevalier de valour, La sont mout de bon jousteour, La sont li chevalier hardi. Cix qui en est sires et rois ... preus et largues et courtois, ... le... roi Edouwart.”

(There [in England] you'll find good fighters, hard men, tough and strong. Lancelot and Gawain and the men of the Round Table, who were the best in the world. There are knights of reputation, there are many good jousters, there are brave knights. ... and him who is their lord and king, the valiant, generous and benevolent

Edward I

king Edward.')

In this verse, King Edward has been fused with the legendary King Arthur and in fact displaced him: it is now Edward, not Arthur, who leads Lancelot and Gawain and the men of the Round Table. This would have been music to Edward’s ears, not least because it came from a French trouvére rather than his own English minstrels. It would have been sheer wormwood for the Capetian king, Philip III, who had to endure a number of unflattering comparisons between himself and cousin Edward, usually from the troubadours of Aragon and southern France.

 (Thanks to Rich Price for the translation.)

Castles in Wales

The importance of castle-building in the nascent Welsh state of the 1200s:

“As the major politics of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries began to be characterized by the building of stone castles, whose significance was administrative and political as much as military, we find castle staff, castellans and castle clerks. Such castles were relatively numerous in Gwynedd, appearing throughout that land, as at Dolbadarn, Dolwyddelan, Castell y Bere, Degannwy, Ewloe, Dinas Emrys, Carndochan and Criccieth, but were also built or developed by the rulers of Gwynedd or their allies in locations beyond the heartlands of the Llywelyns, as at Dinas Bran above the Dee, Dolforwyn in Cedewain, Bryn Amlwg at the point where Ceri, Maelieneydd and Clun lordships met, and Rhyd y Briw (Sennybridge). In other territories, less amenable to Venedotian control, regional lords maintained important castles at Pool (Powis Castle), the caput of southern Powys and Llandovery, Dinefwr and Dryslwyn in Ystrad Tywi. The very look of the land in pura Wallia was changing: castles, courts and towns had a greater appearance of permanence; governance was making its mark”. -

D Stephenson

Pictured are Dolwyddelan, Castell Dinas Bran and Ewloe.

Longsword IV is on the way...

The hooded men are coming...

Henry III is dead. The new king, Edward I, is thousands of miles away in the Holy Land. In his absence, former plan to shatter the fragile peace and plunge England into another civil war. Robert Ferrers, the outlawed Earl of Derby and Edward’s bitter enemy, raises the standard of revolt. He gathers an army of barons and outlaws and secretly dreams of seizing the crown itself. The men of Ferrers, led by captains known as the Hooded Men, threaten to overun the Midlands and northern counties.

Hugh Longsword arrives home in disgrace after his failure to protect Edward from an assassin’s blade. He is given one chance to redeem himself and sent to investigate disturbances in northern England. The scale of the conspiracy soon becomes apparent as Hugh encounters enemies old and new: Sir John d’Eyvill, the outlaws of Sherwood, and a mysterious knight who calls himself the King of the North Wind.

Longsword IV: The Hooded Men is the latest historical adventure novel by David Pilling, author of Reiver, Soldier of Fortune, The Half-Hanged Man, Caesar’s Sword and many more novels and short stories.

History posts

I'm going to try and post on here more often, besides periodic updates of new book releases and reviews etc. I run several history groups and pages on Facebook, including a page focused on the reign of King Edward I of England, and as of today will begin to share content on here. I hope you enjoy - please feel free to leave any comments or queries!

One of my interests is the history of medieval Wales, in particular the Welsh princes of the thirteenth century. Here is today's post on shifting loyalties...

The above is a bond dated 7 November 1271, whereby Meurig ap Llywelyn had to provide sureties of 100 marks to Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to secure the release of a hostage, taken by the prince as a guarantee of Meurig’s loyalty. This bond was sealed at Llywelyn’s castle of Rhyd y Briw inside Brecon. On the same day and at the same castle, Einion Sais had to put his seal to a similar agreement, whereby he used the same sureties for the sum of 200 marks for his provision of a hostage for his future fidelity to the prince.

Meurig and Einion were both landholders in Brecon. Of the two, Einion was probably the more powerful and held a castle at Penpont in the Usk valley. They both appear on the list of troop-leaders under the command of Hywel ap Meurig in 1277, in which they and Einion ap Madog served as mounted constables in the army of the Middle March. The loyalty of all these men to the Prince of Wales, suspect in 1271, was non-existent by 1277.

Thus the first cracks in Llywelyn’s principality occurred in the Middle March (Brecon, Radnor and adjacent areas) among the native lords and freemen. Whatever Llywelyn had to offer these men was rejected. This was their choice, not something forced upon them by Edward I or the great Marcher lords: Hywel was in sole command of the all-Welsh army that drove Llywelyn from the marchlands in 1277 and invaded southern Gwynedd. To cast them as victims or puppets is to rob them of ‘agency’, to use a current buzzword.

All of which casts another perspective on Llywelyn’s demise in 1282:

“It was surely no coincidence that the lands which Einion ap Madog acquired, in a deed that was witnessed or sealed by many of those men, can be identified as, in all probability, the very territory in the lordship of Builth to which Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was lured to his death in December 1282. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Einion ap Madog and some of his associates were deeply involved in the circumstances of the prince’s death. In this last case opposition to the imposition of princely rule seems likely to have had ultimately fatal consequences for the prince himself”. -

Dr David Stephenson

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The audio version of LEADER OF BATTLES (IV): DRYSTAN is now available, narrated by Paul Jenkins. This tells the story of the doomed lovers, Drystan and Esyllt, as darkness falls over Free Britannia and Artorius, the High King.

“Britannia, 491 AD. Twelve years have passed since the British victory at Mount Badon. For the first time since the departure of the legions, Britannia is at peace. The Saxons are quiet in the east, towns and villages once again flourish, and Artorius reigns supreme as High King.

Yet the hard-won peace is fragile. Trouble flares in the north, inside the Kingdom of Rheged, where civil war threatens to break out over territory and the hand of a royal princess. Artorius once again rides out at the head of his famous Companions to restore order, but the war only exposes tension among his followers. The long peace has bred resentment, and a new generation of warriors grow to manhood who care little for the past.

While Artorius struggles to maintain order in Rheged, a new and far more deadly enemy rises in the far south-west. Drystan of Kernow, bastard son of King Marcus, slays a famous pirate in single combat. Having earned a glorious reputation, he is sent to Hibernia to fetch back a young bride for his father. The bride is Esyllt, daughter of King Niall. Drystan falls in love with the girl and abducts her, threatening to start a new war that will tear Britannia all to pieces.

Artorius is forced to move swiftly to save his kingdom. The ageing warlord soon discovers that no man is invincible, and suffers defeat, betrayal and personal loss in his fight against Drystan. Meanwhile, as the British kingdoms falter, the shadow in the east continues to gather strength.

Book Four of the Leader of Battles series follows the tale of Drystan and Esyllt, better-known as the doomed lovers Tristan and Isolde. This version sets their romance against the harsh, unforgiving backdrop of post-Roman Britannia, where treachery is rife, and darkness closes over the head of the High King.”

Leader of Battles IV (Drystan) on Audible