It might seem strange – it is certainly ironic – that the earliest surviving evidence of preparation for Edward’s coronation is a polite letter from Llywelyn ap Gruffudd acknowledging receipt of his invitation. Given the differences between the two men in the not-too-distant past, one might well wonder why the Welshman was even included on the guest list. The full story of their relationship, however, has yet to be told.1
We parted company with Llywelyn in 1263 at a moment of great triumph. In September that year the self-proclaimed prince had finally captured the royal castles at Dyserth and Deganwy, thereby achieving an objective that had occupied him since the start of his war against the English some seven years earlier. Henry III had spent thousands of pounds on these new fortresses, intending that they should secure his grip on the Four Cantrefs, his ‘new conquest in Wales’. But, thanks to the comprehensive destruction wrought by Llywelyn that autumn, all that remains today of these once mighty buildings is a few scattered rocks. After their fall, the prince’s power in Wales was entirely uncontested.2
Edward might have avenged these assaults had it not been for Simon de Montfort. As it was, that same summer saw Montfort supersede Llywelyn as Edward’s principal bête noire. Not that Llywelyn was forgotten or forgiven in the course of the struggle that followed. During the next two years the prince compounded his crimes by lending material support to Montfort, though he had the good sense not to turn up for the fatal encounter at Evesham.3
It was in the months immediately after the civil war that the long-standing quarrel was officially patched up. Edward, as part of his prepara tions for crusade, became a signatory to the peace his father agreed with Llywelyn in 1267. This provided the occasion for what was apparently their first meeting, and it evidently marked the beginning of some sort of personal understanding. Two years later, after they had met for a second time, Llywelyn wrote to Henry III that he had been ‘delighted’ by Edward’s visit. Similarly, once Edward had departed for the East, the king could write to Llywelyn and describe his son as ‘the friend of the prince’. Relations, therefore, were cordial. There was nothing insincere or implausible about Edward’s wish to have Llywelyn attend his coronation.4
And yet, in the event, the Welsh leader chose not to come. To understand why – and why his absence was significant – we need to travel back to 1267, and the peace that was made between England and Wales.
By the summer of 1267 it had become clear to even the most insensible Englishmen that peace with Wales was no longer an option but a necessity. Henry III, for example, had once hoped to reverse Llywelyn’s conquests, and for this reason had long refused to grant the prince anything more than a series of temporary truces. Four years of civil discord in England, however, had forced him to reconsider his position. With his subjects bitterly divided and his treasury completely drained, the king realised that he had no option but to recognise the reality of Llywelyn’s power. In August 1267 he took his court, including both his sons, to the Welsh border, and began for the first time to negotiate in earnest.
The outcome, the so-called Treaty of Montgomery, handed to Llywelyn almost all the prizes he had sought since the start of his career. The Four Cantrefs of Perfeddwlad, his first and most significant conquest, were officially surrendered; so too was Edward’s castle and lordship of Builth, snatched in the summer of 1260. These and other territorial gains, however, constituted only one part of the package: equally momentous was the English king’s acceptance of Llywelyn’s supremacy throughout Wales as a whole. The homages of other Welsh lords, which Henry had once claimed as his own, were now ceded to Llywelyn, making him truly the master of his country.
Lastly, in accordance with his pre-eminent status, Llywelyn was afforded recognition of the title he had selected for himself back in 1258. In the words of the Treaty of Montgomery itself, drawn up by delegates on 25 September, ‘the king, wishing to magnify the person of Llywelyn,’ granted that ‘Llywelyn and his heirs shall be, and shall be called, princes of Wales’. This was indeed the glittering jewel in the Welsh leader’s new crown, for such recognition had never been afforded to any of his predecessors, not even his namesake grandfather, Llywelyn the Great.
When, therefore, the peace process at Montgomery was concluded four days later, it represented a climax not merely for Llywelyn but for his dynasty as a whole. He and Henry came face to face, probably at the ancient ford across the River Severn where their ancestors had been accustomed to meet in times past, in order that the newly minted prince could perform his homage. Llywelyn knelt before the king of England with pleasure. This act of subservience promised to cement his achievement, and thus marked the greatest moment to date in his astonishingly successful career.5
The problem was that a lasting peace between England and Wales required more than the restoration of cordial relations between Henry and Llywelyn, or, for that matter, between the prince and the king’s eldest son. It also depended on a similar degree of civility being maintained between Llywelyn and his immediate neighbours, and this was an altogether more ambitious aspiration. The Marcher lordships that fringed the heartlands of native Wales were, almost by their very nature, opposed to the preservation of such stability; in general, their owners were inclined by temperament and tradition to expand their power at Welsh expense. In 1267 the chances of peace in this turbulent arena looked even more remote than usual, for all the recent expansion had been achieved by Llywelyn. During the course of his struggle with the English Crown, the prince had carried war into the March and occupied large swathes of territory. The drafters of the Treaty of Montgomery had done their best to address the disputes that had arisen as a result; it was agreed in general terms that Llywelyn would restore all the Marcher lands he had taken. There were, however, certain named exceptions that the prince was permitted to retain, much to the chagrin of their former owners. Worse still, there were ominous silences in the treaty, which suggest that some disputes had been too contentious even to consider for inclusion. The lords of these areas were not about to take their losses to Llywelyn lying down.6
The most glaring omission from the new peace was any mention of the argument already brewing between the prince and Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester. Gilbert, as we have seen, was an irascible young man, enormously powerful and determined in defence of his rights. After the recent civil war in England, his sense of self-importance must have been running more than usually high – he was, after all, the only figure of consequence to have fought on the winning side at both Lewes and Evesham. He was, therefore, unlikely to disregard what he saw as an unwarranted intrusion into his lands in south Wales by Llywelyn: at the beginning of 1267, the prince had pushed into Gilbert’s lordship of Glamorgan. In April the following year, therefore, the earl responded in kind, moving his men into the disputed region and commencing the construction of a new castle.7
The fear that this escalating row would upset the fragile peace was what brought Edward back to Montgomery in the summer of 1269 for his second meeting with Llywelyn. It is further proof of the amicable turn their relationship had taken in the wake of the treaty that Edward actually favoured the prince in his arbitration, accepting his right to hold some of Gilbert’s territory. The earl, when he learned of this, was furious – it became one of his chief grievances in the subsequent row with Edward that threatened to derail their planned crusade, and dictated one of the key provisions in their subsequent peace agreement. Gilbert agreed that he would follow Edward east, but only on condition that Henry III intervened in Wales and sorted out the earl’s quarrel with Llywelyn.8
Gilbert never set sail. On 13 October 1270, just a few weeks after Edward’s departure, Llywelyn invaded Glamorgan and destroyed the earl’s new castle. From that point on, their dispute became a matter of pure force, and the earl proved that he could deliver an enormous punch. In 1271 he was back in possession of his lordship, and work on his castle was resumed. The scale of his effort can still be appreciated today, for the fortress he fashioned – Caerphilly – remains one of the mightiest examples of medieval architecture, and was at that time the single greatest castle in the British Isles (its concentric design predated Edward’s similar work at the Tower of London by several years). Llywelyn swore he would destroy it, but in the end his resources proved unequal to the task. By 1273, Caerphilly was almost completed, and it was clear that Gilbert had won their struggle.9
From that point on Llywelyn’s problems began to multiply. The failure of his speculative expansion into Glamorgan and the earl of Gloucester’s success in resisting it, encouraged other Marcher lords to start trying their luck in the hope of reversing the prince’s earlier gains, even those ones supposedly guaranteed to him by the Treaty of Montgomery. Humphrey de Bohun, for example, heir to the earldom of Hereford, began in 1273 to reassert with force his ancestral claim to Brecon, operating in conjunction with several of his Marcher neighbours. This was a clear violation of the treaty’s terms but, following the death of Henry III, Llywelyn found it almost impossible to ensure that those terms were properly enforced. It was not so much that royal government was weaker after the old king’s departure – Henry had hardly been much more effective while he was alive; rather the problem lay in the inherent bias of the regency regime. There were good reasons behind Edward’s decision to include his old friend Roger Mortimer on his team of caretaker-governors; Montfort’s killer was a strong man to have holding the reins of power. Yet Mortimer, as the most pugnacious Marcher lord of all, was unlikely to lend a sympathetic ear to any complaints from Llywelyn, his long-time enemy. Nor, more surprisingly, were his fellow regents, not even the normally judicious Robert Burnell. Their conniving collective mindset in the case of Humphrey de Bohun’s illegal intervention in Brecon is strikingly revealed in a surviving letter. Having inspected the Treaty of Montgomery, Burnell discovered that, alas, ‘the land of Brecon’ had indeed been ceded to the prince of Wales; but, as he went on to explain to Mortimer, nothing was written about who should hold the castles in the region. It was, therefore, ‘very expedient to defend them, and to give effective assistance for their defence’. Unsurprisingly, Llywelyn took the view that his right to Brecon comprehended the possession of the fortifications within it, and continued with his efforts to expel Bohun and his allies. The regents responded by adopting a morally superior tone, declaring themselves shocked that the prince ‘had presumed to besiege and occupy the castles’, and tut-tutting that his behaviour led to ‘the very great disturbance of the peace’.10
Thus the antagonisms between Llywelyn and the Marchers, exacerbated by the attitude of the regents, continued to mount. The summer of 1273 saw what amounted to an arms race between the prince and Roger Mortimer, with both men rushing to build or repair castles in the vicinity of Montgomery. When the regents, writing in the king’s name, ordered the prince to cease construction of his new castle at Dolforwyn, his response was brilliantly contemptuous. ‘We received letters in your majesty’s name,’ he began, ‘but we are sure that they did not have your consent.’ Nevertheless, for all his mocking, his letter to the absent Edward contains one sentiment that was undoubtedly sincere. ‘If you were present in your kingdom, as we hope, such an order would not have been sent.’ Llywelyn knew that the best chance for détente between England and Wales was Edward’s swift return.11
Why, then, did he pointedly snub the king by failing to attend his coronation? The answer must be in part that Anglo-Welsh relations had deteriorated to such an extent by August 1274 that the prince would not have felt safe travelling to the ceremony. There was, however, another reason for his decision to stay away that day. Llywelyn had an additional difficulty, bigger even than his dispute with the Marchers, a problem so fundamental that it can be summed up in a single word: Wales.
Today Wales is celebrated for its untamed natural beauty. Forests, fast-flowing rivers and mountains: all are marketed to tourists in search of splendid scenery and adventure. In the Middle Ages the landscape excited much the same kind of response. Llywelyn’s great-great-grandfather, Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd, was given to writing poetry in praise of his homeland. ‘I love its beaches and its mountains,’ he declared, ‘its water meadows and its valleys,’ before going on to enumerate a few more of his favourite things: its soldiers, its horses, and, of course, ‘its lovely women’.12
No doubt his great-great-grandson enjoyed listening to such songs at his court and shared the sentiments they expressed. However, for a man who wanted to build a strong, united state, the Welsh landscape was an enormous hindrance. A more prosaic and analytical twelfth-century writer summed up the problem precisely. ‘Because of its high mountains, deep valleys and extensive forests,’ wrote Gerald of Wales, ‘not to mention its rivers and marches, Wales is not of easy access.’ Such natural obstacles frustrated travel and communication, rendering government slow and laborious. The Welsh landscape, in short, promoted division rather than unity.13
A more serious problem for the rulers of Wales, which flowed from the landscape, was the state of the Welsh economy. Mountains and forests might move men to poetry, but they are not terribly productive in financial terms. Llywelyn, in a letter written at the very end of his career, candidly admitted as much, contrasting the ‘fertile and abundant land in England’ with ‘the barren and uncultivated land due to him by hereditary right’. Of course, upland to a certain height could be used for pasturage, and this was an important mainstay of the Welsh economy, but in many other respects Wales was severely underdeveloped. There were, for instance, almost no towns worthy of note. The amount of coin in circulation was extremely limited, and what little currency there was came from England. Matters were starting to improve somewhat in Llywelyn’s day, thanks in part to the attempts that he and his immediate ancestors had made to foster and encourage trade. Change, however, was exceedingly slow in coming, and the returns were meagre in the extreme. To take one particularly telling example, it has been calculated that Llywelyn’s total customs revenue was around £17 a year – hardly a lordly sum, never mind a princely one, but above all a figure that pales into utter insignificance when compared with the annual £10,000 that Edward collected in England.14
The comparative poverty of Wales would not have been such a problem for Llywelyn had he not set such a high value on being a prince. Unfortunately, the Treaty of Montgomery had come at a hefty premium. Since the 1250s Llywelyn’s desire to have his title recognised by Henry III had led him to offer the king larger and larger sums of money. When his status was finally admitted in 1267, the price of acknowledgement was fixed at 25,000 marks (£16,667). Llywelyn agreed that, after an initial down payment of 5,000 marks, he would pay off the remainder at a rate of 3,000 marks (£2,000) a year. This was, to say the least, a plan predicated on an extremely optimistic assessment of his spending power. A generous modern estimate of his income suggests that it might have peaked in the 1260s at around £6,000 a year. At the very least, therefore, the prince had agreed to forego a third of his annual revenue, possible more, and this at a time when he was having to find extra money to defend a much-enlarged border, building and garrisoning castles like Dolforwyn.15
Llywelyn, in short, had mortgaged his principality at a rate that was impossibly high. As early as 1270 he was having difficulty keeping up with repayments, and the following year he stopped paying altogether. By the time Edward returned he was three years in arrears. Of course, the prince himself would never admit that this descent into debt was caused by his insurmountable financial difficulties. Instead, he chose to maintain that non-payment was a political decision – retaliation for the English government’s failure to address his grievances. ‘The money is ready to be paid to your attorneys,’ he wrote to the regents in February 1274, ‘provided that … you compel the earl of Gloucester, Humphrey de Bohun and the other Marchers to restore to us the lands they have unjustly occupied.’ But this was bluff and bluster. Later complaints about his oppressive rule show that Llywelyn was relying on increasingly extortionate methods to raise money; the notion that he was sitting on a big pile of treasure in 1274 is ludicrous. The reality was that by this date he had bled his principality dry and could not afford to have his grievances settled. What he needed was renegotiation with England, and this explains the provocative stance he took against its new king.16
For the same financial reasons, Edward, when he finally returned to England, was prepared to be extremely patient with Llywelyn. His crusading debts were so great that he was willing to overlook the prince’s snub if it meant getting his hands on the outstanding cash. As early as December 1272 the regents had stressed in their letters to Llywelyn that their master was in urgent need of the annual payment because he was ‘bound to diverse creditors in a great sum of money’. Edward’s own attitude is revealed in a letter he sent in the spring after his return to the sheriff of Shropshire, who was charged with bringing an end to the ongoing hostilities in the March. When the king stressed that ‘he did not want Llywelyn to have any reason for complaining about the settlement made’, and urged the sheriff to ‘act with circumspection’ to ensure that the prince was satisfied, the logic was clear enough: if Llywelyn had no reason to complain, he would have no excuse not to pay up.17
Despite the fact that the two men evidently viewed the annual render for Montgomery in very different terms, it was not impossible that a compromise solution might have been found. Edward was not averse in principle to negotiation over repayments (certain English magnates, for example, were pushed at the start of the reign to acknowledge their debts to the Crown, but also granted reasonable terms to pay them off). In the autumn of 1274, just a few months after the coronation, Edward and Llywelyn were scheduled to meet at Shrewsbury. Had they done so, perhaps a similar amicable arrangement might have been devised, and the good relations that had obtained a few years earlier might have been rekindled. In the event, however, this meeting never took place; a few days before they were due to meet Edward fell ill and was unable to attend. Then, just a few days later, Llywelyn discovered that his difficulties ran far deeper than he had ever dared to imagine.18
The prince was, in general, under no illusion about his diminishing popularity within Wales, especially in certain quarters. Earlier in 1274 he had uncovered a plot against him led by Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, lord of Powys, a man who had long resisted the expansion of Gwynedd and resented having to kowtow to Llywelyn. Gruffudd had paid for this disloyalty – the prince had obliged him to surrender some of his lands, as well as his son, as guarantees of future good behaviour – but, all told, Llywelyn’s retribution had been mild, suggesting that he had not at the time realised the full extent of the conspiracy against him. Only in November, following a full confession from Gruffudd’s son, did he understand the true enormity of the plotters’ intentions. Their plan, it emerged, was not just independence for Powys, but death for the prince himself. And their leader was not Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn. It was Llywelyn’s own brother, Dafydd.19
Dafydd ap Gruffudd, the youngest of Llywelyn’s four brothers, has a poor reputation among modern historians of Wales, and not without reason: when it came to treachery, Dafydd had all the makings of a serial offender. Over a decade beforehand, he had abandoned Llywelyn’s war with England and defected to support Edward; earlier still, in the course of the original struggle for supremacy in Gwynedd, he had opposed Llywelyn by siding with their eldest brother, Owain. And yet, in the wake of both these unsuccessful adventures, Dafydd had not merely been forgiven, but rewarded into the bargain. In 1256 Llywelyn granted him lands in the newly conquered Four Cantrefs, and in 1267, following their second reconciliation, these lands were restored.20 Given Dafydd’s unreliable record, such lenient treatment might seem like evidence of indulgence or even naivety on the prince’s part, and there may have been an element of both in his attempts to deal with Dafydd. The basic fact was, however, that Llywelyn was struggling against the Welsh custom of partibility – that ancient obstacle to unity as impassable as the mountains and forests. Dafydd was Llywelyn’s younger brother, and in Wales even younger brothers expected a share of the ancestral estate. By granting him lands elsewhere in Wales, the prince seems to have hoped that he might persuade Dafydd to drop his demand for a portion of Gwynedd. Now, in 1274, he realised that this strategy had failed. Dafydd still regarded himself as hard done by, and could clearly count on the support of other disaffected Welshmen, like Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, to help him prosecute his claim.
The immediate problem for Llywelyn in 1274 was not the discovery of his younger brother’s latest treachery but its wider effects. As soon as their plot had been exposed, Dafydd and Gruffudd fled across the border into England, and this led to an immediate deterioration in Anglo-Welsh relations.21 The prince demanded that the conspirators be handed over at once, claiming that their reception was contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Montgomery. In actual fact it was not: Llywelyn had promised not to receive English fugitives, but all that the English had promised in return was not to furnish his enemies with material support. In any case, the legal merits of the prince’s complaint hardly mattered. Edward must have reasoned that in Dafydd and Gruffudd he had acquired a useful bargaining chip, which might be used to counter Llywelyn’s assertion that he was deliberately withholding his treaty payments. More to the point was the fact that, as it stood in the winter of 1274–75, the king had no formal obligation to the prince whatsoever, for Llywelyn had yet to appear before Edward and perform his homage.22
It was on this issue that Llywelyn made his biggest blunder. As we have seen, he had no objection in principal to acknowledging the English Crown’s superior lordship. At the ford of Montgomery in 1267 he had been only too happy to kneel before Henry III and become his man. Homage in this context was hardly a recent innovation; Llywelyn’s predecessors, and other Welsh lords, had been doing the same for generations. As Matthew Paris had once rhetorically demanded, ‘who does not know that the prince of Wales is a petty vassal of the king of England?’23
Since Henry’s death, however, Llywelyn had begun to link the question of his vassal status, like the question of his financial contributions, to the resolution of his grievances. For this reason he had not even performed the basic first step of swearing fealty, or fidelity, to Edward in his absence. When, early in 1273, the regents had sent ambassadors to the border expressly for this purpose, the prince had failed to appear before them.
Edward, to his credit, did not attach too much importance to this initial dereliction of duty on Llywelyn’s part, just as he chose to ignore the prince’s failure to attend his coronation. His desire to see good relations restored – and payment made – meant that he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to sort the matter out. In 1274, until prevented by illness, he had been ready to travel to the border to meet Llywelyn; the following year he was ready to do so again. In the summer of 1275 the king and his court made their way north to Chester, where Llywelyn had been told to come and render his due obedience.24
The prince did not appear. As he explained in a letter, he considered that it was unsafe for him to travel into England, where his enemies were being sheltered. There was evidently some sincerity in this: Llywelyn was hovering close to the border as he wrote, seemingly in the hope that Edward would go the extra mile and come to meet him there.25
As far as the king was concerned, however, he had gone quite far enough. The suggestion that his court was an unsafe place was insulting, for it implied that his word was not to be trusted. Much more offensive was the challenge to his authority. Llywelyn’s homage was not a conditional thing about which they might debate indefinitely; it was a non-negotiable necessity, already long overdue. Yet it looks very much as if the prince now began to suggest precisely the opposite, giving out that his homage would be forthcoming only once Edward had remedied all his grievances in the March.26
Such insubordination was not to be tolerated. Edward was not about to make his father’s mistake of allowing the authority of the Crown to be disrespected in this way. After waiting in vain at Chester for more than a week, the king finally gave up and began his journey south – ‘in a rage’, as one Welsh chronicler noted. He felt he had gone out of his way to oblige Llywelyn, and that for his efforts he had been gratuitously insulted, even to the point of humiliation. ‘In order to receive his homage and fealty,’ he later wrote to the pope, ‘we so demeaned our royal dignity as to travel to the confines of his land.’27
Chester clearly marks a turning point in relations between Edward and Llywelyn. From that point on it is difficult to see how their personal relationship could have been repaired. Before he left the city in September, the king bluntly instructed the prince to present himself at Westminster the following month. Llywelyn, of course, did not appear – his dignity too was now at stake.28
And yet, despite his well-attested rage, Edward took no retributive action. The Treaty of Montgomery had taken a long time to negotiate, and Llywelyn still owed a great deal of money for it. Pride prevented the king from making any more friendly overtures to the prince, but in late November he was still writing to his officials in the March, urging them to see that there was no fighting in the region, and stating categorically that he wanted the peace ‘to be well maintained’. It took a final, astoundingly provocative act on Llywelyn’s part to make him change his mind.29
At some stage in 1275 – the precise date is sadly unknown – the prince of Wales decided to get married. From an abstract, dynastic point of view, this might have been regarded as a sensible decision. Llywelyn, although now in his early fifties, was still a bachelor, and had no sons, legitimate or otherwise, to succeed him. His heir was the treacherous Dafydd, and it may have been his younger brother’s defection that belatedly spurred the prince in the direction of matrimony.
From the point of view of Anglo-Welsh relations, however, Llywelyn’s marriage was the last nail in his coffin, for his intended bride was Eleanor de Montfort, daughter of the late Earl Simon. This match may have been contemplated a decade earlier, when Montfort was in power and in alliance with the prince; its resurrection in 1275 was certainly guaranteed to stir up trouble. At best a tit-for-tat response to Edward’s sheltering of the Welsh fugitives, it may have been much more – an attempt to stoke the ashes of the recent English civil war, in the hope of sparking the conflict back into life. When, at the very end of 1275, Eleanor set out in secret from her home in France, the ship that carried her across the Channel had the arms and banner of the Montforts hidden beneath its boards. They were found there by the king’s agents, who captured the vessel and its passenger on the high seas.30
The scale of Edward’s anger on discovering Llywelyn’s intentions is not hard to imagine. The Montforts may seem like a spent force in retrospect, but in the 1270s this was not nearly so apparent; at that time memories of the divisive war were still vivid, and its re-ignition was precisely what the authorities in England feared. More importantly, the mere mention of the name of Montfort must have touched the rawest of nerves as far as the king himself was concerned. Apart from his own humiliating experiences at the hands of Earl Simon, Edward also had to consider the unforgivable murder of his cousin, Henry of Almain, by Montfort’s sons. His reaction to the foiled marriage speaks for itself. Eleanor de Montfort was kept in close captivity at Windsor for the next three years; her clerical brother and escort, Amaury, was cast into prison at Corfe, where he waited twice as long for the royal wrath to cool. Most significant, however, was the king’s retaliation against the disappointed bridegroom. All efforts to preserve the peace with Llywelyn were now abandoned. From the start of 1276 the Marchers were encouraged to renew their attacks, and Welsh fugitives were finally granted material aid. A cold war between England and Wales was begun.31
A full-blown war was on the agenda. Edward also marked the new year by sending a final summons to Llywelyn to come to Westminster in April and perform his homage. If the prince did not appear, he was warned, the king would consider the matter in parliament – the clear implication being that parliament would provide a verdict that would legitimise military action. Llywelyn, of course, did not come. He had made his decision to defy Edward at Chester the previous summer based on the erroneous assumption that the king was already bent on war. When Edward’s ultimatum arrived it merely confirmed in the prince’s mind what he had suspected all along.32
Llywelyn, for his part, professed not to want war. On the very day that Edward had left Chester in anger, the prince had written to the pope, asking him to intervene lest new discord should arise between England and Wales, ‘which God forbid’. In a similar spirit, he approached the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwardby, in the weeks between receiving the king’s final summons and its April deadline. Their correspondence during the summer shows Llywelyn struggling to maintain the peace in spite of the attacks being launched into Wales by the Marcher lords. ‘We have strictly ordered all our vassals and other men to commit no trespasses in the lands of the king or in any part of the March,’ he told the archbishop in June, and other evidence proves that this was indeed the case. Such efforts indicate that the prince’s wish for peace was far from insincere.33
And yet, at the same time, Llywelyn was determined to take a stand. While his letters to the archbishop stressed his restraint, those he sent to the king simply complained of his sufferings at the hands of the Marchers and demanded justice.34 For all the prince’s earnest declarations in favour of peace, one cannot dispel the feeling that a strong part of him relished the prospect of a straight fight. In contrast to his fruitless diplomatic efforts in recent years, Llywelyn’s earlier military career had been one of unbroken success. His brothers, his rivals, the English – all had been roundly defeated as a result of his celebrated prowess. The royal host that had marched into Wales some two decades earlier had failed to dislodge him. The man who now threatened him had done so many times in the past, and on each occasion he had failed. His earlier victories gave the prince his confidence. If he did not want a war, it is equally plain that he did not fear it either.
And so war was declared. In spite of the prince’s non-appearance at Easter, Edward stayed his hand in the course of the summer of 1276, perhaps at the bidding of the archbishop, who clearly still believed at that stage that a peaceful outcome was possible. By the autumn, however, the king could wait no more. On 12 November, as that autumn’s parliament drew to a close, Edward consulted with the great men of his realm, and the decision was taken. The prince of Wales was pronounced ‘a rebel and a disturber of the peace’. The king and his men would go against him.35
Even then war was not utterly inevitable. There could be no invasion of Wales during the winter: Edward’s verdict indicated that his army would not assemble until midsummer the following year. It is not impossible that this long delay was deliberately contrived, a final concession to an archbishop still endeavouring to find a peaceful solution. Either way, by passing sentence so late in the season, the king effectively gave the condemned man one last chance to escape his punishment.
The prince, certainly, was not slow in coming forward with last-minute proposals for peace. In some respects these were outrageously generous. At the start of 1277 he offered to pay 11,000 marks (£7,333) for Edward’s grace – this to be in addition to the money he still owed for the Treaty of Montgomery. But Llywelyn’s letters of supplication still came laced with demands: he wanted the treaty confirmed; he wanted its terms upheld; he wanted his wife released. It all amounted to the same thing: the prince wanted to submit on his own terms, and this the king would never accept. As the hour of reckoning approached, the unmistakable spirit of defiance remained. Early in the new year the archbishop of Canterbury finally abandoned his efforts after his envoys were turned away from Llywelyn’s court; on 10 February, as a result, the prince was excommunicated. Only in his last letter to Edward, dated 21 February, did Llywelyn come close to adopting the unconditional tone that the king required.
‘We swear before God,’ he wrote, ‘that we love and esteem your illustrious person more truly, more faithfully and more intimately than those who incite your spirit to indignation against us.’
‘We will be of greater value to you,’ he concluded, ‘than those who, by your war, now attempt to gain their own profit and advantage rather than your honour.’36
But by then it was too late. War was already upon him.
Even as Llywelyn was drafting his last proposals for peace, his adversary was advancing towards him with hostile intent. Edward may not have intended to lead an army in person until the summer, but he had plenty of other resources that he could marshal in the meantime. In January he moved west to Worcester in order to supervise their deployment.37
Chief among these resources was his own household. Since he had become king, Edward’s domestic establishment had grown to somewhere in the region of 600 people. The increase in size was a precondition of his new role. Medieval monarchs were no different from modern heads of state in needing extensive entourages to magnify their importance. As a consequence, the household was dressed to impress: one of the ways we are able to gauge its size is through surviving records that reveal the twice-annual distribution of robes to its (mostly male) members. Wherever Edward went, this splendid retinue went too, trotting after him on horseback and trundling along in carts. And in their wake followed others – merchants, players, beggars, prostitutes – all drawn by the household’s unrivalled ability to disgorge money. As it made its ceaseless way around the country, it resembled nothing so much as a small army on the move.38
The resemblance was far from coincidental. While many household men – cooks, carters, clerks, grooms, doctors, tailors, huntsmen – had non-military roles, those individuals who really stood out, arrayed in the finest clothes and seated on the noblest horses, were the household knights, and their primary purpose was violence. A personal bodyguard for the king in times of peace, they were also effectively a standing army, an elite unit that formed the core of any force when the king went to war. The same was true of their lesser counterparts, the esquires and sergeants of the household, whose day-to-day tasks might be more menial, but whose fundamental function was also to fight. Together, both groups proved that the household, for all its elaborate routines and courtly veneer, was a direct descendant of the warrior band of an earlier era. Numbers tended to fluctuate, but on average the king employed around fifty knights and around two to three times as many esquires and sergeants. This meant that in general a quarter to a third of the royal household were experienced military men who could be deployed at short notice. In the immediate circumstances of January 1277, it meant that Edward was able to detach from his side some forty knights and seventy esquires to begin operations on the ground for the coming war in Wales.39
The size of Edward’s household, and the proportion of warriors within it, were neither new nor unusual: Henry III had at times maintained an entourage of similar size and composition. Fighting may have been the ultimate raison d’être of a household knight, but they were versatile creatures, well suited to other functions – a special intervention in some distant part of the realm, a delicate diplomatic mission overseas. All kings had use of such men. If, however, there was a difference between the households of Henry III and his son, it surely lay in their sense of purpose and in the reputation they had already earned. Edward’s knights shared a strong esprit de corps, forged from their common experience in arms. Many of them had served Edward since his youth. They had fought together in tournaments, campaigned together in war, travelled together to the Holy Land and back. Strong bonds of love and loyalty bound them to each other and to the man they now served as their king.
What was true of the household was equally true of Edward’s newly appointed captains of war. A cursory glance at their names reveals that the king’s other great resource was his long-established friendship with a wide circle of formidable warriors. Roger Mortimer, assigned to command the royal forces in the middle March, was a choice so obvious as to require no further explanation. Based at Montgomery, his role was essentially to continue his existing private war with Llywelyn, albeit in Edward’s name and with the Crown’s financial backing. Supporting him in the same region were other men with equally distinguished records of service. Roger Clifford, for example, was both Mortimer’s neighbour and one of the king’s oldest associates – his entrée had been occasioned by Llywelyn’s first war over two decades before, and he had celebrated his fiftieth birthday with Edward on crusade. Otto de Grandson and John de Vescy, also appointed to the middle March, were likewise veteran crusaders, as was Payn de Chaworth, the young man whom Edward had assigned to command his forces in the south, and who had been harassing Llywelyn from his castle at Kidwelly since the spring of the previous year. William de Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, was only marginally less qualified for his role as commander of the northern forces. A man much the same age as Edward, Beauchamp had evidently commended himself through his support for the royalists during the civil war, and by his recent services in negotiating with Llywelyn on the king’s behalf. In fact, of all the men placed in positions of trust in Wales, only Henry de Lacy, the twenty-seven-year-old earl of Lincoln, appears to have lacked any prior experience. The fact that he had grown up in the household of Edward’s mother no doubt explains the earl’s closeness to the king, and hence his appointment as one of Mortimer’s lieutenants.40
Lacy apart, Edward’s commanders were thus well rehearsed for the roles the king wanted them to play. To a large extent his declaration of war on Llywelyn simply meant that the old firm established in the 1260s was back in business. These were men whom Edward could trust to start the conflict on his behalf. At the end of January 1277, after taking counsel with his friends for a final time, the king left the border and left them to it.41
Assaults began at once on all fronts. In the south Payn de Chaworth advanced from the royal castle at Carmarthen into the same region where, twenty years earlier, Edward’s forces had been completely obliterated by Welsh attack. In the north, meanwhile, the earl of Warwick, operating in tandem with Dafydd ap Gruffudd, pushed out from his base at Chester and into Powys, where he encountered stiff resistance at Castell Dinas Brân. The fiercest fighting, however, seems to have occurred in the middle March, where Llywelyn concentrated his resources in the hope of opposing the onset of Roger Mortimer from Montgomery. Mortimer’s objective was the prince’s newly completed castle at Dolforwyn, and Llywelyn was determined that he should not achieve it.42
While his friends and the troops of his household began to drive into the principality of Wales, Edward was attending to the preparations for his own advent in the summer. These were, in the first instance, spiritual. Even as Mortimer and company were hacking their way into hostile territory and raining down arrows on Dolforwyn, the king was touring the quiet countryside of East Anglia in order to pray before the shrines and relics at Walsingham, Bromholm and St Faiths. His thoughts, though, were rarely far from matters military. During the same month of pilgrimage, for example, Edward ordered no fewer than 200,000 crossbow bolts from the chief centre of their manufacture, St Briavel’s Castle in the Forest of Dean. At the same time, royal agents were active in France, buying up warhorses for the king’s use, and carts were being requisitioned from abbeys and priories in order to transport his tents from London to Wales. Henry III had failed in his fight against Llywelyn by rushing into north Wales unprepared. Here, as elsewhere, Edward was determined not to make his father’s mistakes.43
By May the king had returned to Westminster and a parliament buzzing with the news of his lieutenants’ success. Payn de Chaworth had won over south Wales using a combination of force and negotiation: in a letter to Edward he indicated that the Welsh lords of his region would soon be heading towards England, ready to acknowledge the king as their new master. In like manner the earl of Warwick and his Welsh allies had recovered all of Powys – Dinas Brân had been abandoned by 10 May – and its former lord, the conspirator Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, was back in possession. Perhaps the most symbolic victory had been won in the middle March, where Roger Mortimer and his companions had taken Dolforwyn at the start of April after a siege that had lasted only a week (signs of the castle’s bombardment are still apparent from its surviving masonry). By the middle of May, when Mortimer wrote to Edward, it was essentially to report the total collapse of Llywelyn’s power in the March. It was a sure sign of how much had been achieved that several of the king’s commanders – Chaworth, Clifford and Vescy – were able to leave their posts in order to attend parliament in person. In the space of a few short months almost all of Llywelyn’s earlier conquests had been reversed. In southern and central Wales the prince’s vassals, tired of his extortionate rule, had deserted in droves and were preparing to fight against him. For the English it remained only to tackle Gwynedd, and the prince himself. Now that the summer was approaching, the time for that task was at hand. And, thanks to his careful preparations, Edward was now ready.44
On 3 July the king arrived in Worcester to meet the force with which he intended to reduce Llywelyn to submission. Six months earlier, the same city had seen him deploy the crack troops of his household. Now it was host to all the remaining cavalry he had the ability to command. Which is to say, in response to Edward’s earlier orders, the great men of his kingdom had turned out in all their power and splendour.
Ever since the Norman Conquest (and very likely well before) all those in England who held their lands directly from the king had been obliged to provide him with military service when he demanded it. The men assembled in Worcester in the summer of 1277 were there because Edward, on the same day that he had declared Llywelyn ‘a rebel and disturber of the peace’, had simultaneously summoned ‘all who held of the king “in chief”, and owed him service … to be at Worcester … with horses and arms’.45
Had Edward relied solely on obligation, his cavalry host would have been a small one. Naturally, the number of warriors each landowner was expected to provide varied according to the number of estates he or she held, but, thanks to a fairly recent adjustment, the numbers themselves were very low. In earlier centuries the burden of military service had been heavy indeed: at the time of the Conquest, two hundred years before, the king’s greatest tenants had been expected to furnish him with dozens of knights when required. It was during the reign of Henry III that these long-established obligations had been drastically reduced, probably in deference to the rising costs of knightly arms and armour. As a consequence, many men were obliged to serve only in their own person, or perhaps with one other companion. Even the very greatest individuals – the earls – had knightly quotas that for the most part could be expressed in single figures.46
Luckily for Edward, however, his great men shared his own attitude in their need to have magnificent entourages. An earl might be required to provide only half a dozen horsemen when the king called him to war, but his stature and sense of self-worth demanded that he be surrounded by many times that number. Most of Edward’s earls typically rode to war with at least thirty knights and esquires in tow, and in some instances twice that number. Other great landowners also brought contingents well in excess of their nominal quotas. The king’s total cavalry forces, therefore, tended to be far more impressive than the minimal force to which he was theoretically entitled. In the summer of 1277 they totalled somewhere in the region of 1,000 mounted men.47
Not all of these men turned up at Worcester. Edward’s plan for invading Gwynedd was a two-pronged assault: one force would drive northwards from Carmarthen, while another would push west from Chester. In other words, the operation would be launched from the bases established during the preliminary campaign, and it therefore made sense for those cavalrymen already under the commands of the earl of Warwick (at Chester) and Payn de Chaworth (at Carmarthen) to remain at their posts. Both men, however, were about to be superseded. When the troops mustered at Worcester divided, those who rode south joined an army that was now captained by Edmund, earl of Lancaster, Edward’s younger brother. Thanks to the king’s earlier generosity, Edmund was the biggest landowner in south Wales, and Carmarthen was his lordship: it was only fitting that the responsibility, and the honour, of leading the southern army should be given to him.48
Important though it was, Edmund’s role was essentially a supporting one. His army was allocated only a fraction of the forces that came to Worcester, bringing his total cavalry to somewhere in the region of 200 men. The great majority of the assembled host – including all the other earls and their militarised households, rode north to Chester, where (together with Warwick’s contingent) they formed a company of horse in excess of 800 strong. They were to be the main strike force that would bring down Llywelyn. And their captain was, of course, the king himself.49
Edward arrived in Chester on 15 July. The old Roman city was already humming with activity, and swollen to many times its normal size by thousands of other outsiders. The coming of the king and his cavalry appears to have coincided neatly with the arrival of a fleet of eighteen ships from the Cinque Ports. They, their crews and their captains, like the army they were there to support, had also turned up as a matter of ancient obligation. Other ships, some local, some from as far afield as Gascony, were soon hired by royal agents, bringing the total number of vessels squeezed along the quayside to thirty-five. In the city itself, some 700 or so sailors jostled for space with the 800 or more cavalrymen and an even greater number of horses.50
Both the seamen and the horsemen together, however, were outnumbered by the foot soldiers, who at the time of Edward’s arrival accounted for almost 3,000 additional souls. Theirs was an altogether more mixed company. Some of them, like the sailors, were evidently men of prior experience. The 270 individuals who came carrying crossbows, for example, clearly constituted an elite group by virtue of owning one of the deadliest weapons of their age (and, presumably, the knowledge of how to use it). For the most part, though, the infantry were a ragbag, whose skill and equipment varied from the merely adequate to the virtually non-existent. Unlike the other elements in Edward’s army, there was no formal obligation for foot soldiers to turn up and fight in his wars. The humblest freeman was required by law to furnish himself with a helmet, spear and gambeson (a padded tunic), but seemingly only for reasons of local defence. Obligation, if anything, operated in the opposite direction in the infantry’s case, for those who turned out expected the king to pay them the respectable wage of two pence a day (or four pence in the case of the crossbowmen).51
The unknown factor is how much coercion and compulsion were involved when the sheriff or other royal officers rode into a village looking for raw recruits. Sometimes the compulsion may have been economic; for the poor and unskilled, the king’s money must have been hard to refuse. Others, by contrast, may have been conscripted by their communities in order to meet the king’s demand. What seems more certain is that the quality of foot soldiers raised by such methods was generally pretty lamentable. The best may have been practised bowmen, but many – probably the majority – may have turned out armed only with swords and knives. Whatever the case, exceedingly few of the 3,000 men who trudged to Chester in the summer of 1277 can have mustered the same level of enthusiasm as the knights who had ridden there alongside the king.52
Chester was therefore busy – yet apparently not busy enough. We lack good eyewitness reporting, and are reliant on the detailed but dry financial records kept by the king’s ministers. But, from these, it seems that the initial groundwork carried out by the earl of Warwick and his deputies was deemed insufficient by the king and his advisers on their arrival. Take, for example, the fundamental question of food. Some preparations, it is plain, must have been made in order to feed the thousands of men and animals already in Chester by the middle of July. Edward’s local officials in Cheshire had been seizing corn in his name as early as January, and in February the king himself had ordered his ministers in Ireland to ship 1,600 quarters of cereal to Chester by midsummer at the latest. It is striking, however, that on 17 July, just two days after Edward’s arrival, fresh stocks of grain were ordered from nine English counties. ‘Other misfortunes can in time be alleviated: fodder and grain supply have no remedy in a crisis except storage in advance.’ So wrote the Roman general Vegetius in his manual De re militari, which Edward owned and had therefore almost certainly read. Of course, the book offered no advice as to how much food should be stockpiled. That was a lesson that could be learned only from experience, and experience told Edward that, at the start of his campaign in the summer of 1277, he did not have nearly enough.53
The same may well have been true of the men he was hoping to feed. Three thousand foot soldiers was not the making of a great army of invasion. Again, we have to guard against the limitations of our sources. It may be that the king intended from the outset that his infantry should accumulate gradually, increasing in number as his advance gathered momentum. If, however, this was indeed the case, it is difficult to see why he should have mustered all his cavalry at the beginning of July or have had all his ships assembled in the middle of the same month. The aristocracy and the Cinque Ports were both bound to assist Edward, but their obligations were not indefinite. Cavalry service was compulsory for only forty days, while the Portsmen were required to turn out for only two weeks. The king might appeal to both to serve for longer, either in return for payment, or simply as a favour, but his appeal might well fall on deaf ears.54
The clock, in short, was ticking. Within a matter of a few more weeks, the men Edward had with him would be obliged to offer him nothing, and might well decide to return home. Despite the fact, therefore, that his resources might have been considerably less than he had hoped, the king had to make a swift start. A week after their arrival in Chester, he and his army left the city and crossed the border into Wales.55
There was no Welsh army with Llywelyn at its head advancing to meet them. The events of the spring, and the fall of Dolforwyn in particular, had shown beyond any doubt that the prince’s resources were no match for those of the king of England. Even at the height of his power, Llywelyn was able to deploy only 300 mounted men, and they were unlikely to have been equipped to the same high standard as Edward’s knights, with their great warhorses, heavy armour, mail shirts, swords and lances. When it came to warfare, the economic and industrial gulf between England and Wales was all too apparent. Llywelyn had no fleet to speak of and no money to hire one. He could not afford to bring crossbowmen from Gascony, nor to furnish them with an almost unlimited supply of ammunition. His resources were those of a primitive and underdeveloped society, set against those of a thirteenth-century superpower. Direct confrontation was out of the question.56
But the prince did not need to meet the English army head on to see it defeated. Geography could do that for him. Wales, it bears repeating, was ‘not of easy access’. The same physical obstacles that limited Llywelyn’s dreams of expansion – marsh, forest and mountain – also served, in the final analysis, to protect the core of his power. What nature had made difficult, moreover, man might make doubly so. During the previous English invasion of 1257 Llywelyn had gone to great lengths to obstruct his enemy’s advance. Holes had been dug in the middle of fords to render them impassable; meadows had been ploughed up; bridges had been broken. The prince, so it was said, had even destroyed the mills of his homeland rather than see them used to grind corn to feed an English army.57
No doubt similar preparations were made in 1277. But, whatever else he might have done, the fact was that Llywelyn had already ensured that this new invasion would face far greater difficulties than its precursor. The destruction of the castles at Dyserth and Deganwy meant that Edward had no secure bases at which to aim his army. Everything west of Chester was hostile terrain that afforded neither shelter nor safe haven. In this environment, unforgiving and inhospitable, even the greatest armies might become entangled or bogged down, and once that had happened the eerie silence might suddenly be broken by the noise of a surprise attack. The Welsh might have lacked the latest military hardware, but they themselves were famously fierce and fearsome. Dressed in leather, armed with bows, arrows and spears, they would sweep down on their enemies, catching them unawares and wreaking havoc, before retreating with equal swiftness into the woods and hills. Such guerrilla tactics had served them well against would-be invaders for centuries. They were precisely the tactics by which a small nation might defeat a superpower.58
Edward was determined to avoid such a fate. Well aware of the challenges presented by the terrain he wished to traverse, he had already devised a strategy by which it would be tamed. The essential feature of his plan was new and better castles. Since early June royal agents had been busy recruiting hundreds of masons, carpenters, diggers and woodsmen, and this separate army of workers now marched with the main host as it advanced from Chester to the edge of hostile territory. Their first stop was a spur of rock on the estuary of the River Dee, which they christened ‘the Flint’. Work began immediately on the castle that has borne that name ever since.59
Protection was the first priority. More than half the 1,850 or so men engaged in the initial stages of construction were diggers, who laboured to create huge ditches around the site, ‘for the security of the king and his company’. Speed was also of the essence. Almost all of the initial building work was carried out in timber; carpenters outnumbered masons by more than two to one.60
Once again, however, speed was not all it might have been. Despite the impressively large workforce, it is clear that not enough building materials had been gathered in advance. At the end of July, by which point Edward had already been at Flint for over a week, trees were still being felled in the forests of Cheshire for use at the castle. The king was therefore obliged to retrace his steps in the direction of Chester in order to hasten the shipment of further supplies. The fact that his journey was a short one only served to emphasise how little had been achieved thus far. One month on from the muster, one week since beginning his assault, and Edward had advanced all of twelve miles.61
In the south things were moving faster. Edmund of Lancaster and his army had set out from their base at Carmarthen at some point after 10 July, and in the space of the fortnight that followed had driven more than fifty miles through the valleys of the Welsh interior. By 25 July they had reached Aberystwyth, their intended goal on the western coast. Their progress was, of course, considerably easier than that of their allies at Chester. The landscape of south Wales was no more forgiving in physical terms, but politically it had already been surrendered. Those Welsh lords who had not sought the king’s peace earlier in the year now fled north at the advent of his younger brother, leaving their lands to be conquered, and seeking sanctuary in Snowdonia with Llywelyn. Consequently there was little for Edmund to do by the end of July except consolidate his gains. At the start of August, another new royal castle was founded at Aberystwyth. Men and materials were shipped around the coast from Bristol to facilitate its speedy construction.62
Meanwhile, back in the north, a similar naval exercise was under way. Great quantities of timber were being sent from Chester to Flint, some of it on large rafts constructed specially for the purpose. At the castle site itself, diggers were encouraged to work harder by the payment of bonuses ‘by the king’s gift’. For those in charge the sense of urgency was doubtless compounded by the fact that the sailors of the Cinque Ports now had to be paid as well, their period of obligatory service having already expired.63
Yet if the man who was ultimately in charge was concerned about the rising costs and the lapse of time, he did an excellent job of disguising it. Edward was naturally anxious that the business in Wales be expedited as quickly as possible – that much is proved by his itinerary during the first half of August, which shows him touring those areas (the Wirral and the Mersey estuary) where requisitioning was most intense. His movements at this time, however, also reveal a characteristic assuredness; a calm confidence that enabled him, at a moment when his resources already seemed stretched, to extend them further still, and in a rather different direction.64
Until this point, the king had still done little to further his youthful vow to build a great Cistercian abbey. The site he had sponsored before departing on crusade, Darnhall, had proved unsuitable, and the project had been left to languish. Now, on the eve of another great military adventure, Edward clearly felt that it ought to be revived. In the middle of the first fortnight of August, therefore, he abandoned his logistical concerns and travelled to the eastern edge of the lordship of Cheshire. On 8 August the court was stopped near Northwich, and it was probably on the following day, a Sunday, that they came to the empty place on the banks of the River Weaver where the king’s new abbey was to be founded.
The occasion was deliberately grand and participatory as well as solemn. Surrounded by an assembly of his greatest subjects, Edward himself laid the first stone on the spot where the high altar was to be built. Eleanor laid the second and third – for herself, and for their son, Alfonso. Other stones were then placed by a long line of nobles, including the earls of Gloucester, Cornwall, Surrey and Warwick. The king’s friend and chancellor, Robert Burnell, celebrated mass, emphasising that the event was above all a pious act, intended to bring God’s blessing on their enterprise in Wales. At the same time it was a bold statement of Edward’s own power. His new abbey was laid out to be the largest of its kind in Britain, bigger than its sister house at Fountains in Yorkshire, an equal for his father’s house at Westminster. He named it Vale Royal, intending (so its historian later asserted) ‘that no monastery should be more royal in liberties, wealth, and honour’.65
Back at Flint, work progressed apace in anticipation of the king’s imminent return. The timber shipped from Chester was being raised, and the workforce was still increasing in number. The same day, 9 August, that Edward was at Vale Royal, a further 300 diggers arrived from Lincolnshire at the castle site. They were brought under armed escort, ‘lest they should flee on the road’, as well they might, given the hazardous nature of their assignment. For the next stage of his advance the king had to pass through the interior of the Four Cantrefs, and what one English chronicler called ‘a forest of such denseness that the royal army could by no means penetrate without danger’. Edward, of course, had no intention of taking any such risks. In advance of his arrival, the workmen, guarded by the men with crossbows and supervised by certain household knights, were charged with the task of cutting back the enveloping trees. In this way, as the same chronicler explained, ‘the king opened out for himself a very broad road’, and he may have had little scope for exaggeration. When, some years later, Edward introduced similar road-widening measures in England, for similar reasons (‘so that there may be no ditch, underwood or bushes where one could hide with evil intent’), he required clearance and levelling ‘within two hundred feet of the road on either side’. This conjures the arresting image of the king’s workforce in Wales (assuming similar standards were applied) cutting and burning a path some 400 feet wide – around four times the width of a three-lane motorway.66
By the time, therefore, that Edward returned to Flint on 18 August, almost everything was ready. Infantry were at last starting to rise to respectable levels. The new road must have been well advanced. The king and his army were finally ready to embark on their major offensive. Only one question remained.
To what end were they about to march? Did they go to conquer Gwynedd or merely to punish its disobedient prince? One man, above all, who wanted clarification on this issue was Dafydd ap Gruffudd. Llywelyn’s treacherous younger brother had at first been pleased to have Edward’s support in his lifelong struggle for a share of his patrimony, but latterly he had begun to appreciate its inherent disadvantages. The English military and political establishment, once up in arms, acquired a momentum and an agenda of its own. If there was land to be conquered, the king and his greatest subjects would inevitably want their share. According to the earl of Warwick, who wrote to Edward on the matter, Dafydd was becoming dangerously disaffected, already irked by what he perceived as the diminution of his rights to payment and booty.
The king took heed, and sought to reassure Dafydd by issuing a formal statement of his intentions. According to this document, their aim was indeed the outright conquest of Gwynedd and, by implication, the deposition of Llywelyn. In future, north-west Wales would be shared. Dafydd would, at last, receive his portion, as would his other brother, Owain. But, as the document also made plain, the matter would not end there. Edward, not unnaturally, intended to keep a large slice of whatever was conquered for himself, and he further expected that both Dafydd and Owain would attend his parliaments at Westminster, ‘just like our other earls and barons’. Whether Dafydd was satisfied with this proposal is a moot point. Another is whether Edward was entirely in earnest. His promise to Dafydd was only a piece of parchment that sketched out a future yet to be realised. Its date of issue – 23 August – suggests a temporary expedient for appeasing an unstable ally at a crucial moment in the campaign. That same day, Edward and his army set out.67
If there was hard fighting it took place in the course of the week that followed. English chronicle accounts are sparse, and tend to give the impression of an easy progress. One speaks of the king advancing along his newly cut road ‘in triumph’, but concedes that it had to be occupied ‘by strong attacks’. On the first day out from Flint, the army moved some fifteen miles to Rhuddlan, a settlement on the River Clwyd, two miles downstream from the cathedral town of St Asaph. The bishop there, no friend of Llywelyn, was nevertheless appalled by the onslaught of Edward’s war machine, and complained to the archbishop of Canterbury about the destruction of church property, sacrilege and rape carried out by English soldiers. Royal records, though more voluminous, are more difficult to interpret with certainty. From them we can see the king’s stay at Rhuddlan was short, lasting no more than a few days. While there he began to raise another new castle, preferring a site by the side of the Clwyd to the hilltop position his father had favoured at nearby Dyserth. Edward’s overriding objective, however, was sustaining the forward momentum of his forces. For all those who stopped to secure this second camp, many more must have poured across the river to continue the advance and the clearance of a path to the west. By this stage, Edward had soldiers to spare. At Rhuddlan the infantry swelled to more than 15,000 men.68
When Edward and his army reappear, it is the end of August, by which time they have reached Deganwy, the lofty hill on the eastern side of the River Conwy, where Henry III’s castle stood in ruins. Suddenly, everything does not seem so sanguine. No new building works are begun, though perhaps none were ever intended. More striking is the sharp drop in the number of infantry: numbers have fallen by half, from 15,000 to just under 7,500. This might be interpreted in several ways. The first, and by far the most favourable, is the traditional explanation that the missing men were dismissed, and that the reduction was therefore a conscious decision on the king’s part, by which he hoped to render his army more manageable. Another, arguably more plausible scenario is that these troops left of their own accord. From what we know of Edward’s later campaigns, desertion among the rank and file was rife, and easily the most common cause of attrition. The third possibility is perhaps less significant but nevertheless impossible wholly to discount: some of these soldiers must have been killed in the course of the advance.69
Dismissal, desertion, death: whatever the cause, the fighting strength of the king’s army was substantially diminished, and at the critical moment of his campaign. It had been here at Deganwy, twenty years before even to the very day, that Edward had stood with his father and contemplated the conquest of Gwynedd, only to have Henry decide that the task was beyond them, and order a retreat. Would Edward now be forced to do the same? Even the most charitable estimation of his predicament – dismissal – would suggest that he was running out of the wherewithal to pay or feed his infantry forces. His cavalry, meanwhile, had already served well beyond their obligatory forty days. According to one chronicler, the king had to dismiss some of their number, presumably because he could not afford to retain them. Faced with such circumstances, the king may well have stared at the mountains of Snowdonia and concluded that they were slipping beyond his reach.70
There was a possible solution to Edward’s problem, however, provided that he acted fast. To the north-west of Gwynedd lay the island of Anglesey, a large area of lowland that might be occupied with comparative ease. The challenge of access remained, but the obstacle now became an expanse of water. Could sufficient numbers of troops be sent across the strip of sea that separated the island from the mainland? Henry III had considered this question in 1257 and decided that the answer was no, for he lacked the ships and the necessary will. His son, by contrast, was in possession of both. In the early days of September, courtesy of the sailors of the Cinque Ports, Edward was able to dispatch some 2,000 soldiers across Conwy Bay and the Menai Strait, captained by his friends Otto de Grandson and John de Vescy. Within a matter of days, Anglesey was occupied.
For Llywelyn this was a devastating blow. Of all the territories he had lost to date, his offshore island was by far the most important. To the prince and his fellow countrymen, Anglesey was Môn mam Cymru (Mona, mother of Wales) because it contained the best arable land in the country. ‘This island produces far more grain than any other part of Wales,’ said the knowledgeable Gerald of Wales; indeed, it was ‘so productive that it could supply the whole of Wales with corn over a long period’. Anglesey, in other words, was Llywelyn’s granary, and Edward had snatched it from him. Along with his soldiers, the king had shipped to the island 360 other men, armed only with scythes, whose job it was to get in the harvest. It was a brilliantly executed, perfectly timed move: at a stroke Edward had resupplied his own army, while simultaneously depriving his opponent of the means to survive the coming winter. Perhaps for this reason, more than any other, a later English chronicler would describe this campaign as ‘the siege of Snowdon’. As in the bitterest sieges, the attacker hoped to starve the defender into submission.71
Llywelyn submitted. He had no other option. We do not know precisely how or when, but all indications are that he must have communicated a readiness to surrender soon after the fall of Anglesey, and possibly as early as 11 September, for by that date the English army was clearly standing down. Edward had left Deganwy and retired to Rhuddlan, where he busied himself building his new castle. Within a few days most of his infantry had been dismissed: in the middle of the month only 1,600 foot soldiers remained in the royal camp. The cavalry must have been released around the same time. Among the magnates, the earls of Warwick and Lincoln, Edward’s close friends, stayed by his side, but the other earls disappear from the records. The permission granted to the earl of Norfolk on 15 September to hunt in the king’s forest in Cheshire looks very much like a farewell gift. Edward had evidently sent immediate word to his brother advising him that the war was over: on 20 September Edmund disbanded his southern army and returned to England, leaving a small contingent to continue the castle-building at Aberystwyth. Finally, at the end of the month, the ships of the Cinque Ports were sent home, presumably with thanks for the sterling service they had rendered.72
It remained to negotiate the terms of the surrender, and this took several weeks. There had evidently been some progress by 10 October, at which point Edward granted two of the Four Cantrefs to Dafydd ap Gruffudd – compensation for a prickly ally who now had to accept that, since the invasion had been called off, he would not be getting his hands on any part of Gwynedd in the immediate future. Gwynedd, it was allowed, would remain to Llywelyn. It was, however, just about the only territory he was permitted to retain: more or less everything else was to be kept by the conquerors. The prince was given to understand, for example, that the other two of the Four Cantrefs would once again become the property of the English Crown, controlled from the new castles at Rhuddlan and Flint. Anglesey, by contrast, would be returned to him, but only on the understanding that he should pay 1,000 marks (£666) a year for this privilege. On the same subject of money, it was felt appropriate that Llywelyn should make reparations for the injuries and damages he had inflicted: a sum of £50,000 was suggested. As for the rest of his once extensive empire, that was treated from the outset as a thing of the past. Authority in south and central Wales had slipped from the prince many months before; the lords of these areas had already accepted that their rightful overlord was the king of England. As a small sop to his dignity, it was allowed that Llywelyn should retain the homages of five minor Welsh lords, and also his title ‘prince of Wales’. But this was tantamount to a mockery, for he was patently nothing of the sort. The reality was that Edward had turned back the clock by thirty years, and Llywelyn’s life’s work had been undone.73
The prince agreed to these terms with English negotiators at Conwy on 9 November 1277, but his humiliation did not end there. There was still the matter of his personal subjection to Edward, so long resisted and at such great cost. The following day, therefore, Llywelyn was escorted from Snowdonia into the part of north Wales now under English occupation. Three miles west of Rhuddlan he was met by Robert Burnell and the earl of Lincoln. Finally, he was brought within the confines of the new royal castle, and before the king himself.
Edward was magnanimous in victory. Llywelyn had done all that had been required of him and placed himself entirely at his overlord’s mercy. The king acknowledged this with a gesture of his own, pardoning the prince his £50,000 fine and waiving the annual rent for Anglesey. He was not, however, minded to revisit the issue of homage – not yet. Rhuddlan was too remote an arena for a submission so significant and symbolic. On 20 November the king left the castle and returned to England.74
With him went Llywelyn. Westminster, not Wales, was to be the venue for the final act of this piece of political theatre. The king and his guest arrived there shortly before Christmas. It was on Christmas Day, surrounded by an assembly of English magnates, that Llywelyn finally knelt before Edward, placed his hands within the hands of the king, and promised to be an obedient prince.75