Owen Glyn Dwr

Owen Glyn Dwr, distantly descended from the ancient princes of Deheubath, more closely allied to such English marcher families as Lestrange and Hanmer, and himself previously attached to the household of the fitzAlan earls of Arundel, declared himself ‘prince of Wales’, gathering together a small band of supporters and crackpots, complete with his own bard, a man named Crach Ffinant, ‘the prophet’. The initial spur to his rebellion appears to have been rivalry with a local English lord. Deeper tensions underpinned its success, including longstanding Welsh resentment of the English monopolization of offices and the professions. What might have seemed a small gang of malcontents very soon swelled into a full-scale army, capable of sacking English border towns and declaring, with echoes of the 1290s, its determination to ensure ‘the obliteration of the English language’. As in the 1290s, when the English king and his army appeared to defy the rebels, Owen and his men merely vanished ‘into the woods’. English armies, as had been revealed in the reign of Edward I, in the short term were no match for native guerrilla resistance. By 1401, the Glyn Dwr revolt had spread across Wales. Welsh students at Oxford and Cambridge were said to be abandoning their studies, and Welsh labourers leaving English employment in order to swell the rebel ranks. Glyn Dwr himself laid siege to Carmarthen where his new standard, a golden dragon on a white field, was unfurled.

In the longer term, like previous Welsh risings, this was a doomed venture. The English control of the coastline, even despite such temporary setbacks as the Welsh seizure of Cardiff, Aberystwyth and Harlech, ensured that pressure could always be brought to bear. Unlike the Scots at Stirling Bridge or later at Bannockburn, Glyn Dwr’s men never risked pitched battle with an English army, lacking either the desperation or the resources to inflict a defeat upon Henry IV that might have tipped the balance from rebellion into a full-scale revolt in the name of Welsh independence. Glyn Dwr himself could hardly claim the titles or bloodlines of a Robert de Bruce. Even as early as 1405, his fortunes were on the turn, although he continued to summon ‘parliaments’, to issue documents under his own princely seal dated according to the years of his reign, and for a further ten years, until his ultimate disappearance into legend after 1415 (the exact year of his death and its circumstances have never been securely established), to pose as a thorn in the flesh of English imperialism. As in Ireland, where from the 1360s the Statute of Kilkenny had enshrined earlier moves towards apartheid, forbidding English settlers to intermarry with the native Irish, to use the Irish language, or to have recourse to Irish law, one effect of Welsh intransigence was an even more draconian discrimination by the English against the Welsh. Meanwhile, the costs and the diversions of the campaign of Glyn Dwr, and the repeated failure to capture Glyn Dwr himself, mocked all claims by Henry IV to have brought peace or prosperity to the English people.

Furthermore, Glyn Dwr proved adept at concerting his efforts with those of the Scots, the French, the Irish, and most dangerously of all with Henry IV’s domestic critics. In 1405, a French force some two and a half thousand strong landed at Milford Haven combining with the Welsh in raids into Worcestershire. The Welsh were still raiding into Merioneth in 1415, the year of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt. The Welsh revolt caused annual losses estimated as high as £8,500 to the King’s Welsh estate, leave alone the costs of sending armies against Glyn Dwr in each year after 1401. By 1401, indeed, there were so many demands being made on the King’s treasury that there was not even enough money to pay the messengers delivering them.