Principality of Wales

An hour at Bryn Derwin

formationDrafted from Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (1912)

Gwynedd, like most Welsh kingdoms, had no settled rule of undivided succession, and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd shared his own inheritance with two brothers, Owain and Dafydd. A quarrel over how the kingdom should be partitioned - probably provoked by demands made on Dafydd's own behalf - came to a head in the summer of 1255, and rather than let the dispute fester, the three brothers agreed to settle it by arms.

Llywelyn met their combined forces at Bryn Derwin, in the mountain pass between Arfon and Eifionydd. The battle did not last long. In the space of a single hour he broke both armies and took Owain and Dafydd prisoner, ending the partition question as decisively as any treaty could have.

Sole lord of Anglesey and Snowdonia

The victory gave Llywelyn what no division of Gwynedd ever could have: full and undivided authority over Anglesey and Snowdonia, the heartland of native Welsh power, held without a rival claim from within his own family for the rest of his life. It was, in the account of the source itself, a lordship "only wrested from him with life itself" - the foundation on which everything Llywelyn achieved afterward, from the wider conquest of Powys and the south to the recognition an English king would eventually be forced to grant him, was built.

Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (1912) · Beep boop beep · CC BY-SA 4.0

The ford of Montgomery

peakDrafted from Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (1912)

Bryn Derwin gave Llywelyn the standing to act as leader of Wales as a whole, and over the following decade he used it. English weakness during the baronial wars against Henry III gave him room to extend his own authority across Powys and much of the south, and even the collapse of Simon de Montfort's cause - Llywelyn's own occasional ally - did him no lasting harm. He had, by that point, built a power that could stand on its own regardless of who held the upper hand in England, and it became clear to the English government that no ordinary settlement would satisfy a prince who had won so much on his own account.

Eleven years of intermittent war ended, in the autumn of 1267, in formal negotiation at Shrewsbury. Henry III and the papal legate Ottobuono spent a month working out terms, and on the 25th of September they agreed to conditions that met Llywelyn's own demands in full. Four days later the prince himself crossed to Rhyd Chwima, the ford of Montgomery, and there did homage and swore fealty to Henry - not as a defeated rebel accepting terms, but as a ruler whose claims the treaty recognized essentially whole.

Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (1912) · Frederick Calvert · Public domain

A title no Welsh ruler had held from an English crown

The Treaty of Montgomery gave Llywelyn what Lloyd's own account calls a remarkable triumph: formal recognition, by charter, as Prince of Wales - a title no native Welsh ruler had previously extracted from an English king, rather than merely claimed for himself. Ottobuono, delighted at the reconciliation, described Llywelyn as a "great and puissant member of the English realm" in the document recording the settlement's own terms. It was the high point of everything Llywelyn had built since Bryn Derwin: a principality whose existence, and whose prince's own title, the crown that had spent generations trying to subdue Wales now formally acknowledged.

Royal Collection · Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (1912) · Thomas Wriothesley · Public domain

A soldier who did not know him

endDrafted from Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (1912)

The peace of Montgomery did not outlast the decade that followed it. War with Edward I - harder and more determined than any English king before him had brought to Wales - broke out again in the early 1280s, and by the autumn of 1282 Llywelyn found himself facing the whole weight of a king determined to finish what earlier reigns had left undone. Edward moved on North Wales in person, undertook the conquest of Anglesey with the help of the Cinque Ports fleet, and set about shutting Llywelyn and his brother Dafydd up in their own mountain stronghold of Eryri - a strategy slow to complete but hard to answer, for all that Welsh resistance won real successes against it along the way.

To break the pressure building on Gwynedd, Llywelyn resolved to carry the war south himself, hoping to raise a diversion in a region where resistance had begun to flag. In November he appeared in the highlands of Builth, winning over the local Welsh tenants easily enough, but the royal castle there - freshly rebuilt and held by John Giffard's Shropshire levies - proved a harder target. It was in the course of that siege that the last native Prince of Wales met his end.

Struck down by a lance

He did not die at the head of his army in open battle. Hastening back from some private errand to rejoin the troops holding the north bank of the river Irfon against an English attack, Llywelyn found himself separated from his own men in an unregarded corner of the field. Stephen Frankton, an English soldier who had no idea who he was fighting, struck him down with a lance; it was only afterward, when the body was recovered, that anyone realized whom Frankton had killed. The date was the 11th of December, 1282.

Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (1912) · Andrew Hill · CC BY-SA 2.0

His head was cut off, sent to Edward, displayed before the English army in Anglesey, and forwarded on to London for the crowd there to see. His body, once certain ecclesiastical objections had been satisfied, was buried at the abbey of Cwm Hir, where no trace of the grave now survives. His wife Eleanor had already died in childbirth that June; their only child, an infant daughter named Gwenllian, fell into English hands and spent the whole of her life afterward as a nun at Sempringham, with no heir of her own to carry the line forward. Wales could continue fighting without Llywelyn for a few months more, under Dafydd's own leadership, but as the source itself records, only Llywelyn had been able to give life to the cause at all - and with him gone, it had no one left who could.