Flashes of sporadic violence against the English continued, but by bandits and outlets rather than any semblance of an organised military force. He began to offer the Welsh rebels pardons. Owain's son Marededd refused a pardon until , leading some historians to suspect that this was the year in which he died. One theory is that he ended his life as a the family chaplain on his daughter Alys' estate she shared with her husband, Sir Henry Scudamore, the sheriff of Herefordshire.
The rebellion had to a large extent ruined the fragile but comfortable coexistence the English and Welsh had arrived at. Chroniclers at the time reported that, Glyndwr had "brought all things to waste" and the English king "proclaimed havoc in Wales". There was extensive destruction of towns and villages, and agricultural land went to waste. It was at least a generation before most of the areas caught up in the revolt got back to working life.
There had been great loss of life, an economic blockade and a weakening of commerce. Politically, too, the Welsh were knocked back where they had been making progress. It would be years until the Welsh were allowed to become more prominent in society. But Glyndwr was not being forgotten in the misery.
In his play, Henry IV, Shakespeare portrays Owain Glyndwr as a wild, exotic, magical and spiritual man, playing up the romantic 'Celtic' traits. In the 19th century his life and legacy was beginning to be re-evaluated as the Welsh 'nation' began to find its voice once more. The discovery of his seal and letters were proof that he was a national leader of some importance - a learned head of a country with diplomatic ties as any other head of state might.
The nationalist movement has always held Owain Glyndwr in high regard, but he is now a figure of mass culture in Wales, with statues and monuments alongside pub and street names commemorating him. What are these? The battle of Bryn Glas terrified the south-eastern regions of Wales. The Grey Friars of Cardiff alone, he spared, although when they appealed for the return of the books and chalices that they had stored in the castle, he refused.
The friars should have kept them in their priory, he reasoned. When he captured the castle, he captured its contents also.
In August, three armies — one hundred thousand men — assembled at Chester , Shrewsbury and Hereford, plunging into the heart of Wales. Never within living memory had Wales seen such a storm.
Amid thunder and lightning, the heavy, black clouds lashed the English columns, swelling rivers, submerging fords, sweeping away bridges.
The royal tent was flattened one evening, the posts striking the king himself, who escaped uninjured solely because he happened to be wearing armour at the time. Within a few days, having scarcely seen a Welshman, the bedraggled columns gave up the quest and turned for home. As Shakespeare wrote:. Returning to his castle at Berkhamstead , Henry did have the consolation of learning that Hotspur had defeated the Scots through a combination of miraculous luck and brilliant tactics at Homildon Hill , and captured the Earl of Douglas, worth a fabulous ransom that Henry, conspicuously devoid of any Welsh prisoners worth ransoming, coveted.
His command, against all medieval custom, that all their Scottish prisoners be surrendered to him was, for Hotspur, the last straw. Things could hardly have looked rosier for Glyndwr. Mortimer, abandoned to his fate in the depths of Snowdonia , had already switched sides. Some of the English border counties had given up resisting, preferring to pay protection money to dissuade Glyndwr from further attacks. On the evening of July 20th, Hotspur arrived at the gates of Shrewsbury with fifteen thousand men, but there was no sign of the Welsh.
The message having failed to get through, Glyndwr, with ten thousand, was a hundred miles away in Carmarthen. Had the opposing armies been more closely matched, how different the history of the British Isles might have been. As it was, Hotspur was killed Henry of Monmouth was nearly killed with an arrow through his right cheek, causing such terrible scarring that, as Henry V, he was uniquely among British monarchs, painted in left profile , and his Scottish army cut to pieces.
The news spelled disaster for Glyndwr. Not only had the major part of his alliance been destroyed, but with it, his reputation for invincibility. No sorcerer after all, this Welshman, but thoroughly human, and beatable. He tried to recover some of his prestige by returning to what he was good at; raiding Herefordshire, penetrating as deep as Leominster , and extorting money to leave them alone.
Glyndwr now adopted the trappings of statehood, adopting Harlech as a royal residence, and organising a parliament at Machynlleth , which held a formal coronation. Notwithstanding the endless raids on the borders, Glyndwr had given up designs on England. He had already achieved as much as he was likely to. Henry was scarcely better off. Finding money to finance another expedition was out of the question.
Having secretly had duplicate keys made, Lady Despenser spirited the child to waiting horses, and was miles away before word even reached the king. Lady Despenser confessed to a plot to kill the king, in which she implicated her brother, the Duke of York, but the duke vehemently protested his innocence.
Lady Despenser appealed for a champion to defend her honour. A minor courtier of little reputation threw down his gauntlet before the portly and obviously unfit duke. Instead, the king threw the lot of them into the Tower. Perhaps surprisingly, he soon forgave all of them, except the locksmith who made the duplicate keys. His hands were chopped off. At the start of , Glyndwr ruled unchallenged over a desert of cinders, except for a few hard-pressed castles.
The people who manned his armies were probably supportive on the whole, but those who had failed to loot suffered very real hardships: their homes and farms destroyed, their crops and livestock gone, all means of providing social welfare — the alms, the hospitals, the schools — devastated with the abbeys.
It was the year it all went wrong. It would never recover. In the nineteenth century, it was still possible to trace the lines of the streets through the turf. Today, Grosmont is a village of a few hundred. The seventeen-year-old to the throne responded by despatching a massive force from Hereford that surprised the Welsh and slaughtered of them. Glyndwr himself rushed to intercept the fleeing Welsh and try to reverse the defeat by attacking Usk Castle.
Reinforced and strengthened, it held. As the realisation dawned that the castle would not be reduced that day, the Welsh fell back into the surrounding woodland; perhaps to give up and retreat; perhaps to build siege machines for a renewed assault.
The defenders burst forth , laying into the disorganised Welsh and pursuing them until bodies scattered the ground for miles beyond the castle. It was becoming clear that Owain Glyndwr was not one to free Wales, but a glorified bandit; one who had been remarkably successful, and wrecked the country and the livelihoods of the people in the process.
After five years of guerrilla warfare, it was becoming clear to all that pitched battles would be necessary to force Henry IV to relinquish his hold, and, with occasional exceptions such as Bryn Glas, Glyndwr did not have the resources to win those.
Glyndwr persisted in the belief that French help could yet turn the tide. One hundred and forty ships set sail from Brest, landing as many as five thousand cavalry, men-at-arms, crossbowmen and archers in Tenby , although lack of water had meant that many of the horses died en route. They started with an assault on Haverfordwest , although failing to capture the castle, so proceeded successfully against Carmarthen Castle , but the French had been promised booty, and found slim pickings in an already plundered land.
Faced with their discontent and the threat of their simply packing up and going home, Glyndwr marched his ten thousand Welsh and five thousand French into England again, laying waste to the renegades of Glamorgan on the way. At Great Witley, ten miles from Worcester, in August , the quest for Welsh independence ground to a halt.
Between them lay a mile-wide valley ideal for a battle, but Henry was determined to prove a point to the French, the Scots, and above all to the Welsh. For eight days, the two sides stood in full battle array, ready for a showdown that never happened.
He must have realised the game was over when he turned his people around, and trudged home. Certainly, his French did, and promptly quit, empty-handed. Henry tried to capitalise on his success with yet another expedition to relieve Coity Castle , near Bridgend. Same old story: the heavens opened and the Welsh vanished until Henry turned back, and then his column was mercilessly harried; but this served to emphasise that hit-and-run attacks on the rear and the baggage was the best that Glyndwr could achieve.
His reputation, even among his own people, was as ruined as his country. He tried to brazen out the crisis, playing up his role as a crowned Prince of Wales. For thirty years, there had been two popes, the Church of England aligning itself with the pope in Rome. Probably never especially devout, Glyndwr offered the allegiance of the Church in Wales to the pope in Avignon, in hope of reviving French support. None the less, another letter to the French king achieved little. Anglesey, always a tower of support for Glyndwr, was captured by troops released from service in Ireland.
A thousand men in Flintshire appeared before the justiciar and submitted to a communal fine. Not that this saved them when an English expedition passed through two years later. In England, having the whip hand was building a movement to dowse the rebellion conclusively; only this time, having confidence of success. Hundreds of knights and archers applied to join, with cannons and great stores of munitions. The Forest of Dean and the woods along the Severn were chopped down for siege engines.
Now Owen was on course for not only the throne of Wales, but for that of England too! Owen continued to fight the English but after the battle at Woodbury Hill near Worcester in he retreated back to Wales.
In Wales, Owen issued the Pennal Manifesto on the future of the Welsh Church which was supported by most of the churchmen. It appears that not all of the churchmen were loyal to the end though.
Prior to the battle of Pwll Melyn in , legend has it that a friar had preached with great spirit that all who fell in the fighting would sup that night in heaven! Despite the substantial rewards being offered, Owen was never captured or betrayed and his place of hiding remains a mystery to this day. Like the legend of King Arthur, Welsh legend has it that when Wales is threatened again, he will rise in order to lead the defense of Wales.
The year saw the th anniversary of of the rising and was commemorated throughout Wales. There are two men whose names were a clarion call to all Scots.
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