Owain Glyndwr

Owain ap Gruffudd, known to history as Owain Glyndwr, was born around 1359 into the Welsh landed aristocracy. His father, Gruffudd Fychan II, held the lordship of Glyndyfrdwy in the Dee valley, and through both parents Owain descended from the royal houses of Powys and Deheubarth, two of the ancient Welsh kingdoms ^[1]. That double descent mattered enormously later: it gave him a plausible hereditary claim to leadership of the Welsh at a time when the native princely lines were thought extinguished.

His father died while Owain was still a boy, and the young heir appears to have been fostered into the household of Sir David Hanmer, a prominent judge of the King's Bench who served the English crown ^[2]. The arrangement placed Owain inside the Anglo-Welsh legal establishment rather than outside it. He is generally believed to have studied law at the Inns of Court in London, an education that shaped the careful, document-minded rebel he became ^[1].

Around 1383 he married Margaret Hanmer, his guardian's daughter, and settled into the life of a prosperous border squire. His two estates, Glyndyfrdwy and Sycharth, gave him a comfortable income, and the bard Iolo Goch left a famous poetic description of Sycharth as a generous, well-stocked household with a moated hall, orchards, and a resident poet's welcome ^[3]. Nothing in these years suggested the war to come. Who was Owain Glyndwr before 1400? By every visible measure, a loyal and rather successful subject of the English king.

Glyndwr's early career included military service under the English crown. He served in Richard II's Scottish campaign of 1385, where chroniclers and later Welsh poetry recorded him fighting conspicuously, reputedly wearing a scarlet flamingo feather in his helmet, and he may also have served at sea under Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel ^[2]. Such service was the normal route by which Welsh gentry demonstrated loyalty and earned advancement.

The turn came from a local quarrel. In the late 1390s Glyndwr fell into a land dispute with his neighbour Reginald Grey, Lord of Ruthin, a favourite of the new king Henry IV, who had deposed Richard II in 1399. Glyndwr's attempts to obtain redress failed, and later Welsh tradition held that Parliament dismissed the complaint with open contempt for the Welsh ^[1]. Grey is also said to have delayed delivering a royal summons to military service, allowing Glyndwr to be branded a traitor.

Whatever the exact mixture of grievance and opportunity, the response was extraordinary. On 16 September 1400, at Glyndyfrdwy, a small assembly of kinsmen and supporters proclaimed Owain Prince of Wales, a title the English crown reserved for the king's heir ^[4]. Within days his men had burned Ruthin and attacked other English boroughs in northeast Wales. Henry IV marched an army across north Wales in October, achieved little, and withdrew. The revolt did not die with the campaigning season. Instead it spread, fed by decades of Welsh resentment at discriminatory laws, heavy taxation, and exclusion from office in their own country ^[5].

The rebellion grew from raids into a national war. In 1401 Glyndwr's cousins seized Conwy Castle by stratagem, and Owain himself won a victory at Mynydd Hyddgen in the Cambrian mountains, defeating a larger force sent against him ^[1]. Parliament answered with the Penal Laws of 1401 and 1402, which barred Welshmen from public office, from buying land in the English boroughs of Wales, and from various legal rights. The legislation was meant to strangle the revolt; instead it confirmed Welsh grievances and drove waverers into Glyndwr's camp ^[5].

The year 1402 brought his greatest battlefield successes. In April his men captured his old enemy Reginald Grey, who was later ransomed for the enormous sum of 10,000 marks. In June, at the Battle of Bryn Glas near Pilleth in mid Wales, Glyndwr's forces destroyed an English army and captured its commander, Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle of the young Earl of March who held a strong claim to the English throne ^[4]. When Henry IV declined to ransom Mortimer, the prisoner changed sides, married Glyndwr's daughter Catrin, and declared for the rebellion.

By 1403 the revolt covered most of Wales. Glyndwr campaigned through the Tywi valley in the south while his allies the Percys rose against Henry IV in England; the Percy defeat at Shrewsbury that July removed one ally but did not check the Welsh advance ^[1]. In 1404 Glyndwr captured the great castles of Harlech and Aberystwyth, giving him fortresses, a court, and something like a functioning state. He summoned a parliament at Machynlleth, where tradition holds he was formally crowned Prince of Wales before envoys from France, Castile, and Scotland, and he concluded a formal treaty of alliance with Charles VI of France ^[4].

Glyndwr was more than a guerrilla captain. The documents issued in his name reveal a coherent political programme for an independent Wales. In February 1405 he sealed the Tripartite Indenture with Edmund Mortimer and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, an agreement to divide England and Wales among the three, with Glyndwr's share extending well beyond the traditional Welsh border to the rivers Severn and Mersey ^[1].

The fullest statement of his aims came in the Pennal Letter of March 1406, sent to Charles VI of France from a synod at Pennal near Machynlleth. In it Glyndwr offered to transfer Welsh allegiance to the Avignon pope in return for recognition of an independent Welsh church under an archbishop of St Davids, freed from Canterbury, and for the establishment of two universities in Wales, one in the north and one in the south ^[6]. The letter survives in the French national archives and remains the clearest window into his vision of a sovereign Welsh nation with its own institutions.

A French expeditionary force of some 2,500 men landed at Milford Haven in August 1405 and campaigned with the Welsh through south Wales, reportedly advancing to within a few miles of Worcester before both armies withdrew without a decisive battle ^[4]. It was the high tide of the revolt. That same year, however, Glyndwr suffered serious defeats at Grosmont and Pwll Melyn, where his brother Tudur was killed and his son Gruffudd captured. Among Owain Glyndwr achievements, historians usually rank the Machynlleth parliament, the French alliance, and the Pennal programme alongside his battlefield victories, because together they turned a rising into a claim of statehood ^[5].

Glyndwr's marriage to Margaret Hanmer was long and, so far as the record shows, stable. The couple had a large family: sources generally credit them with six sons, including Gruffudd and Maredudd, and several daughters, among them Catrin, who married Edmund Mortimer, and Alys, who married Sir John Scudamore of Herefordshire ^[2]. Owain also acknowledged illegitimate children, which was unremarkable among the nobility of his era.

The war consumed the family. When Harlech Castle fell to the future Henry V in 1409, Margaret, two of her daughters, and several grandchildren were taken prisoner and confined in the Tower of London. Catrin and her young children died in custody by 1413 and were buried at St Swithin's church in London; Margaret's own fate is not clearly recorded ^[1]. Edmund Mortimer had already died during the siege of Harlech. Of the sons, most died in the war or disappear from the record, leaving Maredudd as the last known survivor of the direct line.

Contemporaries on both sides acknowledged Glyndwr's education and courtliness. The poets who enjoyed his patronage at Sycharth before the war portray a generous host and a household of order and plenty, while English writers, and later Shakespeare in Henry IV Part 1, transformed him into a figure of wild Celtic magic who could "call spirits from the vasty deep" ^[3]. The historical man, trained in law and fluent in the political language of his day, was considerably more practical than the legend.

From 1406 the tide ran against the rebellion. Henry IV's son, the future Henry V, applied a patient strategy of economic blockade, garrisoned castles, and rolling reconquest rather than grand punitive marches. Anglesey and much of the south submitted, and pardons drew war-weary communities back to the crown's peace ^[5]. The fall of Aberystwyth in 1408 and Harlech in early 1409 stripped Glyndwr of his last fortresses and his court, and with Harlech went his family.

Glyndwr fought on as a guerrilla leader in the uplands. A raid into Shropshire in 1410 ended in disaster, with several of his senior captains, including Rhys Ddu and Philip Scudamore, captured and executed ^[1]. His last recorded military act came in 1412, when his men captured the Welsh royalist Dafydd Gam in Brecknockshire and released him for ransom. After that, the record falls almost silent.

What is striking is what did not happen. Despite large rewards, no one betrayed him. Henry V, seeking reconciliation as he prepared for war in France, offered Glyndwr a pardon in 1415 and repeated the offer through his son Maredudd in 1416; neither was taken up, and Maredudd finally accepted a pardon for himself only in 1421 ^[4]. A note by the chronicler Adam of Usk states that Owain died in 1415 and was buried secretly by his followers. Most historians place his death around 1415 or 1416, possibly at the Herefordshire home of his daughter Alys Scudamore at Monnington or at Kentchurch, but no grave has ever been identified ^[1].

The revolt's immediate legacy was harsh. Wales emerged burned and impoverished, and the penal statutes against the Welsh remained formally in force into the Tudor period. Yet the memory of the rising proved indestructible. Because Glyndwr was never captured and his grave never found, Welsh tradition absorbed him into the older prophetic literature as a redeemer who sleeps and will return, a mab darogan, the son of prophecy ^[5].

His modern reputation grew with Welsh national feeling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Campaigners for Welsh institutions pointed out that his Pennal programme had demanded a Welsh university and an independent Welsh church centuries before either existed; the University of Wales was founded in 1893 and the Church in Wales disestablished in 1920 ^[6]. The historian R. R. Davies, whose 1995 study remains the standard academic account, presented the revolt as a genuinely national movement that briefly created the institutions of a Welsh state ^[5].

Today Glyndwr's name is everywhere in Wales. September 16, the anniversary of his proclamation in 1400, is marked as Owain Glyndwr Day; his banner of four lions rampant is a familiar national emblem; and a statue by Alan Sowerby portraying him in battle stands in the square at Corwen, near his old estate of Glyndyfrdwy ^[7]. A parliament house in Machynlleth, on the traditional site of his 1404 assembly, operates as the Owain Glyndwr Centre. In a BBC-linked poll of Welsh heroes conducted in 2003 he ranked among the top figures in the nation's history ^[7]. Among Owain Glyndwr facts, the simplest may be the most telling: six centuries after his disappearance, the last native Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales remains the first name in the story Wales tells about itself.