4
The period from the Edwardian conquest of Wales to the Reformation and Acts of Union witnessed an unprecedented growth in Welsh historical writing, mostly in the Welsh language. However, this mainly took the form of curating and consolidating works produced earlier in the Middle Ages rather than the composition of new texts. For scribes and patrons, the history that mattered most concerned the Britons and their Welsh successors under the princes whose rule had ended in 1282. By contrast, narratives extending beyond the Edwardian conquest were few, brief, and focused on events in England more than those in Wales. If the Welsh gentry (W. uchelwyr) continued to hold power in their localities and in important respects were the successors of the princes, they viewed history as an inheritance to be conserved rather than a continuing process in which they succeeded the princes as the principal actors.1 The same is indicated by the copying of genealogies of earlier kings and princes; by contrast, it was not until the second half of the fifteenth century that ‘the pedigrees of the Welsh gentry were first recorded systematically’ by poet-genealogists such as Gutun Owain.2 By the fifteenth century members of the Welsh gentry also read history with the poets they patronized.3
The appeal of the past extended beyond the gentry. This was true of genealogy, the most widespread and durable use of the past in medieval Wales, since a knowledge of both paternal and maternal descent mattered to all claiming free—and thus, according to Welsh law, noble—status in Welsh society.4 Such knowledge was all the more valued by the later Middle Ages, when, owing to the expansion of free kindreds as the result of partible inheritance, many of those claiming noble descent were economically indistinguishable from peasants.5 The social and political circumstances of the period also help to explain the continuing popularity of Welsh historical or political mythology, centred on the loss of Britain and the prophetic hopes for its eventual recovery, which was especially potent at times of political tension and crisis.6 After the Edwardian conquest, Archbishop Pecham targeted the belief in Trojan origins that formed a cardinal element of Welsh political mythology, complaining that the Welsh were excessively given to ‘dreams and fantastic visions’, following the example of Brutus, who, after fleeing from Troy, had been told to come to Britain ‘by the whispering of Diana or rather the devil’. Moreover, he rejected the long established notion that Brutus and his followers were the first inhabitants of Britain by asserting that the island, then called Albion, was ‘previously inhabited by a Germanic people…from which stock the Saxons are believed to derive’ (and thus not by giants, as Geoffrey of Monmouth maintained). The Welsh should therefore abandon their ‘dreams and prophecies’ and no longer ‘exult in the vanquished and exiled Trojans’.7 Nevertheless, despite the archbishop’s demand, such politically charged notions of the past continued to exert a wide appeal. Commenting on the rebellion of Llywelyn Bren in Glamorgan in 1316, the author of the Life of Edward II echoed Gerald of Wales in explaining that the ‘rebellious habit’ of the Welsh derived from their attempts to fulfil the prophecy that the Britons would recover England.8 Over a century later, in 1443, the English authorities sought to apprehend a monk who ‘telleth Cronicles’ in gatherings around Wales, thereby allegedly provoking the people to civil unrest—an intriguing report which points to the subversive potential of the Welsh past and also, perhaps, to the reading of historical texts to a popular audience.9 Popular understandings of the past may also be reflected in a folk-tale recorded c.1500 relating how Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (d. 1240) outwitted his enemies while visiting the king’s court in London thanks to magical help from Cynwrig Goch of Trefriw (eventually revealed to be an angel in disguise sent by the Virgin Mary).10
The following discussion falls into two parts. It begins by outlining the main Welsh historical texts composed from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries, and especially efforts to give the history of the Welsh canonical form in a sequence of works which between them narrated events from the Trojan War to 1282. Attention will then turn to Gutun Owain, the most prolific writer of history in medieval Wales, and explore what his works reveal about Welsh understandings of the past towards the end of the fifteenth century.
The Continuing Influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth
The Edwardian conquest may well have helped to stimulate history writing in Wales. This is not to say that the conquest itself attracted significant attention from Welsh chroniclers, in contrast to historians in England. Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), here probably drawing on a Strata Florida chronicle, reported the war of 1276–7 and Llywelyn’s submission in some detail, but broke off before the outbreak of hostilities on Palm Sunday 1282, although subsequent events were covered in a later continuation, discussed below.11 The coverage of both wars in the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles, composed in the Welsh March respectively at Neath Abbey and St Davids, is brief and offers no comment on the conquest’s significance. The former text summarizes events in 1282–3 in four short sentences, which notice the killing of Llywelyn, Edward’s subjugation of Snowdonia, the building of Conwy castle, and the capture of the prince’s brother Dafydd. The slightly fuller account in the Cottonian chronicle focuses more on the dynasty of Gwynedd, supplying the date of Llywelyn’s death and also reporting the death of his wife in childbirth and the king’s subsequent removal of their daughter to England as well as details of Dafydd’s execution at Shrewsbury and the display of his head alongside his brother’s in London.12 By contrast, the conquest looms larger in several English chronicles, including those of Peterborough, Hagnaby, and Peter Langtoft, the last of which, spanning the period from Brutus to 1307, is notable for its use of Geoffrey of Monmouth to justify Edward I’s expansion in Britain, especially in Scotland but also in Wales, by depicting him ‘as a second Brutus and as Arthur returned’.13 Here, Langtoft was only following the precedent set by Edward I and his advisers of appropriating Welsh historical traditions in order to legitimize the conquest. Thus the king celebrated his success by holding a Round Table at Nefyn in July 1284 that cast him as the new Arthur, and the imperial eagles and differently coloured bands of masonry at Caernarfon castle, whose construction commenced the previous year, together with the alleged discovery of Magnus Maximus’s body, evoked the town’s legendary associations with the Roman Empire.14
Nevertheless, while sketchy on the course of the conquest, historical writing in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Wales may be seen as responding to its consequences. A likely case in point is the compendium of historical texts contained in Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3514, very probably all written in a Welsh scriptorium, quite possibly at Whitland Abbey, and completed between 1285 and the early fourteenth century.15 The manuscript combines widely known texts—Pseudo-Methodius, Dares the Phrygian, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Henry of Huntingdon—with genealogies of Anglo-Saxon, Norman, French, and Welsh dynasties, and concludes with the Cronica de Wallia and another short chronicle covering the period from the fall of Troy to 1285.16 It thus places Welsh views of the past, from Trojan origins to the age of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, against a backdrop of universal history beginning with the creation of the world and embracing the island of Britain as well as, to some extent, France. Moreover, while some of the texts may have been copied before 1282, the collection was completed later in the thirteenth century and quite possibly marked a historiographical response to conquest that affirmed the special place of the Welsh in Britain after the extinction of princely rule.17 The same may be true of the short chronicle in Welsh, known from its opening words as Oed yr Arglwydd (‘The Age of the Lord’), that spans events from the death of Arthur to the accession of Edward II, and thus was compiled after 1307, possibly at Valle Crucis.18
Contemporary political events also stimulated the insertion c.1300 of historical texts into a copy of an abbreviated version of Domesday Book at Neath Abbey, namely the crown’s challenge to the marcher status claimed by the monastery’s patrons, the Briouze lords of Gower.19 The most substantial of these texts was the Breviate chronicle, discussed in Chapter 3. However, they also included a short chronicle also compiled at Neath Abbey, based on Tewkesbury, Waverley, and Winchester sources, which, after an annal for 600 recording Gregory the Great’s sending of Augustine to convert the English, covers the period 1066 to 1298, focusing mainly on England while including notices of events both farther afield in western Christendom and locally in Glamorgan.20 This drew in part on the Cardiff chronicle, covering the years 1066–1268, extant in an early fourteenth-century manuscript very probably copied at Tewkesbury Abbey’s priory of Cardiff and heavily indebted to the Annals of Tewkesbury and thence in turn to annals from Waverley and Worcester. In the final section from 1244 to 1268 the chronicle is strongly interested in, and sympathetic to, the Clare lords of Glamorgan, the priory’s patrons, and focuses on local events in south Wales, which may indicate that it was written in order to ensure that the Clares’ memory was preserved following the decline in their fortunes towards the end of the thirteenth century.21 Early modern antiquarian sources also attest to the existence of a register of charters recording grants of land to Neath, also probably compiled c.1300, that included a history of the Norman conquest of Gower.22
Historiographical efforts at Neath after the Edwardian conquest engaged the interest of early modern and later antiquarians who wrote about the history of Glamorgan, discussed in Chapter 6. However, the most influential post-conquest development in the historiography of Wales was the consolidation of a master narrative extending from the Trojan origins of the Welsh to 1282. This was accompanied by a decisive shift from Latin to Welsh as the main language of historical writing. The chronicle kept at Strata Florida perceptible in Brut y Tywysogyon petered out in early 1282 (though a continuation to 1290 may have been appended subsequently at the monastery), while the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles ended respectively in 1286 and 1288.23 True, translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan were made in or by the early thirteenth century, an important indication of the kinds of historical writing which appealed to (presumably lay) Welsh readers and listeners of that period who were unfamiliar with Latin. However, the use of the vernacular was extended significantly in the early fourteenth century with the creation of Ystorya Dared, a translation of the History of the Trojan War attributed to Dares the Phrygian,24 as well as of Brut y Tywysogyon and the related chronicle known as Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’). Welsh was likewise the language of almost all other historical texts composed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Wales, a pattern replicated across a wide range of works, both original compositions and translations, and paralleled by vernacular history writing in England and elsewhere in Europe.25 Thus Welsh history writing in the later Middle Ages formed an integral part of a wider vernacular literary culture patronized by the gentry.26 Texts continued to be produced mainly in Cistercian monasteries—several of which, notably Strata Florida and Valle Crucis, contained the tombs of native rulers that provided visible reminders of the old order—until the late fourteenth century, after which lay scribes and patrons were largely responsible for book production (although some maintained close links with religious houses, as in the case of Gutun Owain, discussed below).27
The creation of Brut y Tywysogyon affords further evidence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s continuing, indeed growing, influence on medieval Welsh historiography. As explained in Chapter 3, it is generally held that the conception of the chronicle as a continuation of Geoffrey of Monmouth went back to a lost ‘Latin Brut’ completed shortly after the Edwardian conquest and that copies of this were translated in the surviving chronicles in Welsh. The author of ‘the Latin Brut’ was evidently familiar with one or more Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s History (Brut y Brenhinedd) as well as earlier Welsh chronicles. Both the Peniarth 20 and Red Book of Hergest versions of Brut y Tywysogyon open with an annal which adapts the notice in the Harleian chronicle of Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon’s death in ‘a great plague’ in 682 and draws on the conclusion of Geoffrey’s work, faithfully translated in the earliest versions of Brut y Brenhinedd, to relate that Cadwaladr died in Rome ‘on the twelfth day from the Calends of May’, before declaring, to quote the Peniarth 20 version, that ‘thenceforth the Britons lost the crown of kingship, and the Saxons obtained it, as Myrddin [Merlin] had prophesied to Gwrtheyrn Wrthenau [Vortigern the Very Thin].’28 The passage continues by relating how Cadwaladr was succeeded by ‘Ifor son of Alan, king of Brittany, not as king but as leader’ (W. nid megys brenin namyn megys tywyssawc), who ‘held dominion over the Britons for forty-eight years’, before being succeeded in turn by Rhodri Molwynog.29 The reference to prophecy echoes the passage in Geoffrey which states that God did not wish the Britons to rule any longer in Britain ‘until the time came which Merlin had foretold to Arthur’.30 However, rather than reproduce that passage, with its hope of ultimate deliverance, Brut y Tywysogyon (presumably following its Latin source) emphasizes the finality of the Britons’ loss of sovereignty and, instead of naming Arthur, alludes to Geoffrey’s account of Merlin’s prophecies to Vortigern, the king blamed in medieval Welsh literary and historical texts as the traitor responsible for inviting the English to Britain.31 The description of Cadwaladr’s successor as ‘leader’ or ‘prince’ rather than ‘king’ likewise underlines the Britons’ defeat, albeit by developing a distinction between Welsh ‘leaders’ and English ‘kings’ drawn in Brut y Brenhinedd but lacking in Geoffrey’s History, which states that both peoples were ruled by ‘kings’ (L. reges) after the English conquest.32 The clear implication, then, was that the events related thereafter in Brut y Tywysogyon concerned the Britons, or Welsh, after their loss of sovereignty over the island of Britain; the chronicle was thus explicitly linked to a cardinal tenet of historical thinking in Wales from the time of Gildas onwards.
The Welsh translations of Geoffrey’s History were by far the most popular and influential historical works in later medieval Wales.33 It is quite likely that Dares the Phrygian was translated specifically in order to provide a prequel to Geoffrey of Monmouth, just as Brut y Tywysogyon was conceived as its sequel, and that the three vernacular works—Ystorya Dared, Brut y Brenhinedd, and Brut y Tywysogyon—were a cultural response to conquest that emphasized the deep roots and distinctive history of the Welsh people. Archbishop Pecham’s call for the Welsh to be weaned from their belief in their Trojan origins evidently fell on deaf ears. Moreover, some scribes and patrons understood the three works as forming a historical continuum that narrated the making of the Welsh from Troy to the end of the age of the princes, since they follow each other in several manuscripts from the mid-fourteenth century onwards such as the Red Book of Hergest (see Chapter 1), or else combine Brut y Brenhinedd with just one of the other works.34 Despite being first attested as preceding Ystorya Dared in a late fifteenth-century manuscript (Jesus 141, discussed below), it is also possible that Y Bibyl Ynghymraec, the Welsh translation datable to c.1300 of the Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi attributed to Peter of Poitiers which provides an account of biblical history beginning with the Creation, was conceived from the outset as forming part of the historical continuum, as it adds a passage making Aeneas a descendant of Japhet son of Noah and refers to both Brut y Brenhinedd and Ystorya Dared.35
One indication of the central position occupied by the Welsh versions of Geoffrey in the later Middle Ages is the survival of manuscripts copied by members of the laity, apparently for their own use. Thus in 1444 Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais copied a text of Brut y Brenhinedd, to which he appended his own Welsh translation of a Latin version of the chronicle Brenhinedd y Saesson, tasks quite possibly undertaken while banished from Aberystwyth following his murder of two members of a rival family, and it is likely that an Anglesey landowner produced the extensively illustrated copy of Brut y Brenhinedd in Peniarth MS 23 datable to c.1500.36 The continuing appeal of Geoffrey’s History was probably both aesthetic and ideological, as its fast-paced narrative of the Britons’ triumphs, betrayals, and eventual loss of the sovereignty of Britain provided not only entertainment but an explanation for the position of the Welsh in the present.
Further evidence of an attempt to connect Geoffrey’s History to later history is provided by Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’).37 This may be seen as a variant of Brut y Tywysogyon which sought to combine the histories of the Welsh and English kings, thereby combining in one text the two separate tasks Geoffrey left respectively to Caradog of Llancarfan and to Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury.38 The work survives in several versions. The earliest occurs in BL Cotton Cleopatra B.V, a manuscript written c.1330 at Valle Crucis Abbey, where it follows a version of Brut y Brenhinedd by the same translator and in the same hand.39 This version covers events from 682 to 1198, but originally continued further, quite possibly into the early fourteenth century, as the manuscript is incomplete and breaks off at that point.40 A later version, which continues to 1461, is found in the Black Book of Basingwerk, and will be considered, along with another version in Oxford, Jesus College MS 141, in the discussion below of Gutun Owain’s historical writings.41 As we have seen, a Latin version was translated into Welsh in 1444 by Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais.42 The Cotton Cleopatra version of Brut y Brenhinedd was clearly intended to precede Brenhinedd y Saesson, as it alters Geoffrey’s conclusion, accurately reproduced in other Welsh translations, by naming Caradog of Llancarfan as the writer to whom was left the history, not only of the Welsh princes but also of the kings of the English, thereby removing the reference to Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury as the preferred authors of the latter. Likewise the allusions to Geoffrey at the beginning of Brenhinedd y Saesson are much fuller than those that provide a link with him in Brut y Tywysogyon, mainly by providing details of the Saxon conquests of Britain.43
Brenhinedd y Saesson resembled Brut y Tywysogyon, then, by conceiving of the history of the Welsh after the late seventh century as a continuation of the history of the Britons related by Geoffrey of Monmouth. In its earliest, Cotton Cleopatra version, Brenhinedd y Saesson falls into two main sections. The first covers events in Wales and England from 682 to 1095, and draws on three principal sources: a Welsh Latin chronicle similar to that underlying Brut y Tywysogyon, Winchester annals, and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum (‘Deeds of the Kings of the English’). This section preserves the entries from the Latin sources of Brut y Tywysogyon virtually intact, in contrast to the following section from 1096 onwards that focuses mainly on Wales, where they are condensed and the attempt to combine Welsh and English history is largely abandoned, though some entries concerning events in the March of Wales, England, and the Continent are derived from the Breviate chronicle (B-text of the Annales Cambriae), which reached its final form at the monastery of Neath.44 It has been argued that the different Latin sources had already been combined in a Latin chronicle, possibly at Neath or Whitland, Cistercian houses in south Wales, whence a copy reached Valle Crucis by c.1330, where it was translated into Welsh as Brenhinedd y Saesson.45
That Geoffrey’s History spoke to contemporary concerns in Wales after the Edwardian conquest is also revealed by complaints in some manuscripts about the oppression of the Welsh. The most anti-English in sentiment appear in a mid-fourteenth-century copy of the Dingestow version of Brut y Brenhinedd, which declared that Hengist and Horsa ‘are in hell’; nor were their descendants any better, since, just as Hengist sought to deceive the Britons, ‘so always do the ever accursed pagan English’.46 By contrast, a generation or so later, around 1400, Hywel Fychan, a layman employed as a professional scribe on several major manuscripts, wrote two short texts that attributed the woes of the Welsh to their own failings. One is a colophon in a copy of Brut y Brenhinedd in Philadelphia MS 8680.47 After a pious preamble requesting all readers of the book to pray for the souls of Hywel and his patron Hopcyn ap Tomas of Ynysforgan, near Swansea, the scribe draws lessons for his own day from the text he has copied by condemning Gwrtheyrn (Vortigern) and Medrawd (Modred) as the least praiseworthy of the princes whose history has been related, and continues: ‘For because of their betrayal and their deceit and their counsel the most excellent princes were ruined, which their heirs after them lamented from then until today—those who suffer pain and want and exile in the land of their birth.’48 The subordinate position of the Welsh a century after the Edwardian conquest was thus situated in a narrative of betrayal and loss that went back to the post-Roman period.
The second text occurs in the Red Book of Hergest, and was inserted by Hywel after the sequence of historical works (Ystorya Dared, Brut y Brenhinedd, and Brut y Tywysogyon) copied by the other main scribe of the manuscript.49 This is the earliest surviving copy of the text, which was composed in the fourteenth century to judge by some of its vocabulary.50 Whether Hywel was its author is unknown, but he must at least have thought the text pertinent to the historical narrative that precedes it. It opens with the words ‘Gyldas hen broffwyt y Brytaniaid’ (‘Gildas the old prophet of the Britons’), and lists what purport to be the four reasons given by Gildas, in what are described as ‘the old histories of the Britons’ (W. hen ystoryaeu y brytanyeit), for why ‘the Britons lost their honour in the large fertile island that is called Britain’. First, their leaders were blamed for each wanting to be lord and king, so that God decided to deprive them of their lordship and honour. The second target of divine punishment were the clergy, who had failed to perform their pastoral duties and, afraid of losing their temporal wealth, had allowed the powerful to sin. Third came legal and other officials who had failed to administer impartial justice, preferring to take bribes. Fourth, the common people were condemned for their immorality, on account of their thieving, rape, violence, and so on. The text finishes by drawing a comparison with Ecclesiastes 10:8, which it explains as stating that ‘a kingdom is taken from its indigenous people, and given to a people unrelated to it, on account of violence, betrayal, wickedness, and falsehood’. The point is then reinforced by citing the verse from Ecclesiastes from the Latin Vulgate.51 Although both the general moralizing tone and providential explanation for the Britons’ woes echo the condemnations of the Britons in the De Excidio Britanniae, the text is not simply a summary of Gildas’s work. In particular, the first reason may allude to the conflicts between British and then Welsh rulers depicted both in Geoffrey’s work and in Brut y Tywysogyon, and has some similarities with Gerald of Wales’s condemnation of the failure of the Welsh to unite under one ruler.52 Above all, by invoking Gildas Hywel Fychan looked back to the Britons’ loss of sovereignty over Britain in the post-Roman period for the key to understanding the contemporaneous significance of the preceding narrative from the fall of Troy to 1282.
Accounts of events after the Edwardian conquest provide further evidence of the continuing salience of the framework provided by Geoffrey’s History. Most of these are set against the backdrop of the ancient history of the Britons, either as continuations of chronicles in turn conceived as continuations of the Welsh versions of Geoffrey (Brut y Brenhinedd) or as short independent texts. The former occur in the Peniarth 20 version of Brut y Tywysogyon, composed at Valle Crucis, and the versions of Brenhinedd y Saesson written by Gutun Owain, discussed below. The Peniarth 20 continuation narrates events from the outbreak of war on Palm Sunday 1282 to Edward Balliol’s attempt to gain the throne of Scotland in 1332.53 The most recent analysis argues that the continuation falls into two main parts, one extending to 1319, whose early entries may have originated as an extension of a Latin chronicle at Strata Florida, followed by annals for 1320–9 indebted to information provided by Madog ap Llywelyn (d. 1332), a prominent Welsh magnate and office-holder, who also contributed to subsequent entries made for 1330–1; the last entries were written in 1332 after Madog’s death.54 Irrespective of its precise textual history, though, the section covering 1282–1332 throws significant light on historical thinking at Valle Crucis c.1330 in its insistence that the history of the Britons and Welsh that originated in Troy had continued beyond the Edwardian conquest to the scribe’s own day.55
In addition, three independent chronicles set post-conquest events in a Galfridian framework. Brut y Saeson (‘The History of the English’), versions of which are extant in three related manuscripts of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, gives an account of the kings of England from the death of Cadwaladr to the reign of Richard II (1377–99), and provides a striking witness to how long-established notions in Wales of the Britons’ loss of sovereignty over Britain could sustain an interest in English as well as Welsh history.56 Two other short chronicles adopt an even longer timeframe. One, a Latin text composed in Glamorgan, and also extant in an abridged version datable to 1404, extends from the coming of Brutus to Britain in 1230 bc to 1375.57 The other, in Welsh, extant only in several versions in manuscripts from c.1400 onwards, sets the history of the Britons in the context of Christian history, opening with the statement that ‘There were 5200 years but one from the time that Adam was made until Christ came in man’s flesh’ before recording Brutus’s arrival, likewise placed ‘1230 years before the birth of Christ’.58 Known as Blwydyn Eiseu (‘But one year’, after its opening words), this survives in two versions, of which the earlier continued to 1321, while another version, extant in early modern copies and attributed to a ‘book of William Llŷn’ (presumably the poet of that name who died in 1580), extends the narrative to the coronation of Henry VI in 1422, including an account of the rising of Owain Glyndŵr.59 However, the fullest contemporary narrative of the rising by a Welsh author appears in the chronicle of Adam Usk (c.1350–1430). A cleric and lawyer whose career included service to the archbishop of Canterbury, King Henry IV, and the papacy in Rome, Usk was ‘drenched in Welsh history and genealogy’ but ‘also a man of equivocal allegiance’, who, in order to advance his prospects, appears to have supported Glyndŵr while the prince’s power was at its height but later agreed to spy on him on behalf of the English authorities.60
In addition, three short chronicles open in the thirteenth century without reference to Galfridian origins: notices of events focused on south-east Wales from 1294 to 1348 composed in Latin at Abergavenny Priory, extant in a manuscript copied c.1400;61 brief Latin annals copied by the antiquary Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt (1591/2–1667) covering the period from the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282 to 1448;62 and an eighteenth-century copy of annals in Welsh from 1251 to 1501.63 Also relevant in this context is a collection of historical notices written in various fifteenth-century hands in or near Oswestry. These mostly record events between 1400 and 1461 (among them the rising and death of Owain Glyndŵr) but also include references to the deaths of Thomas Becket in 1170 and ‘Llywelyn Prince of Wales’ in 1282.64
Gutun Owain
The continuing vigour in late medieval Wales of the master narrative of the Britons and Welsh and its use as a framework for the history of recent events is vividly attested by the work of Gutun Owain (fl. c.1451–1499).65 A member of a Welsh gentry family from the Welsh-speaking border with Shropshire who held land in the lordship of Oswestry and enjoyed close links with the abbey of Valle Crucis, Gutun was a poet and a prolific scribe whose manuscripts, written over more than four decades, included works of medicine, astrology, hagiography, and grammar as well as genealogy, heraldry, and history. Moreover, since a significant number of his manuscripts were produced for Welsh gentry patrons, both laymen and Cistercian abbots in north-east Wales, they attest to a wider interest in the learning they contained among contemporaries of a similar social background.66 The same is true, on a more limited scale, of Gutun’s south Walian contemporary, the poet Ieuan Brechfa (fl. c.1490–c.1520), whose works included genealogical manuscripts and a chronicle based on the Red Book of Hergest version of Brut y Tywysogyon for 720–1079 supplemented by other sources.67 Gutun is particularly significant in the context of the present discussion as a representative of Welsh bardic learning and culture who sought to preserve and transmit medieval interpretations of the past. Thus, while deeply conservative, he developed a dynamic approach based on an increasing mastery of the texts he read and brought his own editorial imprint to bear on the manuscripts he copied. In addition, Gutun expanded the boundaries of Welsh-language learning by assimilating historical writing and other material, notably medical texts, from England.
Genealogy was central to Gutun’s understanding of the past and his four genealogical manuscripts, written between the 1480s and 1497, reveal his increasing skill and sophistication as an editor who adapted existing accounts to serve the needs of his day.68 As well as rearranging material from earlier collections, these manuscripts contain numerous innovations, especially new sections on the pedigrees of the gentry as well as the earliest copies of the lists of the ‘Five Kingly Tribes of Wales’ and ‘Fifteen Tribes of Gwynedd’, schemes attributing earlier medieval founders to the dynasties and families concerned.69 Furthermore, his latest genealogical collection, Rylands Welsh 1 (1497), explicitly linked the pedigrees extending from Brutus ‘to the old kin-groups which were prior to this age’, extant in a collection originating in the age of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, to the gentry pedigrees of contemporaneous kin-groups (‘the noble descent of this age’) that followed in the text.70 His work on Welsh genealogy work proved extremely influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Gutun also wrote at least three manuscripts containing historical narratives. The best known, already mentioned, is the Black Book of Basingwerk (NLW MS 7006), written at Valle Crucis Abbey, and completed by Gutun probably as a presentation copy for Thomas Pennant on the latter’s appointment as abbot of Basingwerk, an office he held from c.1481 to c.1523. This contains texts of Dares the Phrygian (Ystorya Dared), Brut y Brenhinedd, and Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’), exemplifying the historical continuum from Troy to medieval Wales.71 The version of Brenhinedd y Saesson largely reproduced the material down to 1198 found in the earlier Cotton Cleopatra version of Brenhinedd y Saesson, which Gutun very probably copied. However, it is uncertain whether Gutun added a section covering 1198–1332 derived from the Peniarth 20 and Red Book versions of Brut y Tywysogyon, as this may originally have been contained in the original complete Cotton Cleopatra manuscript that now breaks off in 1198. If the latter, Gutun was responsible only for briefly extending the narrative from 1346 to the accession of Edward IV in 1461; he also added further details to the account of the period down to (at least) 1198.72 The lost paper folio manuscript held at Llannerch (Denbighshire) in the eighteenth century contained a similar combination of texts, namely Ystorya Dared followed by versions of both Brenhinedd y Saesson and Brut y Tywysogyon.73 Most ambitious in scope is a paper volume (Oxford, Jesus College MS 141), written 1471 × c.1500, probably for Gutun’s personal use.74 Now misbound and incomplete, this assembled a compendium of historical texts in Welsh comprising a world chronicle beginning with Adam (including part of Y Bibyl Ynghymraec, the Welsh translation of the Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi attributed to Peter of Poitiers), followed by Ystorya Dared, an expanded version of Brut y Brenhinedd, and a version of Brenhinedd y Saesson that continued to 1461.75 The manuscript also contains a description of Britain (Disgrifiad o Ynys Brydain) originally translated into Welsh in 1471 from Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon together with other material on early British history as well as the oldest surviving copy of the fifteenth-century heraldic treatise Llyfr Dysgread Arfau.76
The versions of Brenhinedd y Saesson in the Black Book of Basingwerk and Jesus 141 throw valuable light on Gutun’s approach to history writing. Comparison of the former version with that in the now incomplete Cotton Cleopatra B.V shows that Gutun engaged critically with the text, as he not only rephrased passages but also provided further details concerning both English and Welsh rulers.77 Particular attention was paid to kinship ties. For example, the annal recording the death of Rhodri Mawr in 878 adds the names of his parents, traces his mother’s pedigree back to Cadwaladr the Blessed, and corrects the identification of the kinsman killed with Rhodri as his son (rather than brother).78 Likewise, in observing that the West Saxon dynasty ended with Edward the Confessor, Gutun traced Edward’s pedigree back to Ecgberht, ‘the first king of the English who brought the kingdoms of England under one rule’, while, most strikingly, the version of Brenhinedd y Saesson in the lost Llannerch manuscript reportedly included ‘Pedigrees of the Kings beautifully drawn’.79 These examples suggest that, for Gutun, genealogy was not simply a discrete branch of learning but offered a structure for apprehending the past applicable to chronicle writing too.
In addition, Gutun continued the narratives in both versions of Brenhinedd y Saesson to the accession of Edward IV in 1461. True, much of the material he recorded for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries focused on kings of England. Moreover, the much fuller continuation from the accession of Richard II in 1377 onwards in Jesus 141 derives in large measure from the Middle English prose Brut chronicle. This originated as a translation of the Anglo-Norman Brut towards the end of the fourteenth century, but Gutun appears to have used the first printed edition, which continued to Edward IV’s accession in 1461 and was published in 1480 by William Caxton, who almost certainly compiled the work’s continuation beyond 1419 as this is not attested before his edition.80 The debt to the Brut is clear, for example, in Gutun’s accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, Jack Cade’s rising in 1450, and the invention of printing in Mainz (placed around 1456) and its subsequent dissemination ‘throughout the world’.81
Yet Gutun, in common with the authors of other Welsh chronicles covering the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, did not present the Welsh as having been completely subsumed in the history of England after the Edwardian conquest. While the English Brut seems to have provided a framework for his account of events from 1377 to 1461, Gutun was both highly selective in the passages he translated and supplemented its narrative by drawing on other sources, including material concerning events in Wales. As in his versions of the earlier part of Brenhinedd y Saesson, this was largely a matter of supplying additional details such as the names of the Welshmen who captured the Lollard leader Sir John Oldcastle in Powys.82 However, Gutun went further with respect to Owain Glyndŵr’s rising, as he declined to follow the Brut’s hostile treatment and instead reproduced the short account he had already included in the Black Book of Basingwerk.83 Even so, like the Welsh annals charting the rising composed earlier in the fifteenth century, Gutun’s account is circumspect and avoids conferring legitimacy on Glyndŵr by referring to him as Prince of Wales.84
Gutun Owain thus exemplified a wider assumption among late medieval Welsh writers of history that the canonical narratives of the Welsh past, extending from Troy to the age of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, should be both conserved and continued. That accounts of events beyond the Edwardian conquest focused mainly on the kings and kingdom of England does not weaken the case for their having been regarded as continuations of an ancient story. To begin with, as we have seen, those accounts still paid some attention to Wales. More fundamentally, though, their Anglocentric emphasis was itself consistent with aspects of Welsh historical writing earlier in the Middle Ages, especially understandings of the past that situated the history of the Welsh and their British ancestors within the orbit of Britain. Indeed, kings of England were arguably an integral component of medieval Welsh historiography. After all, Brenhinedd y Saesson had been designed as a continuation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History that combined both Welsh and English history, while, more generally, Welsh chroniclers had long been concerned with the kings of England and their deeds, especially but not exclusively in relation to Wales. After the Edwardian conquest English political and military history was all the more relevant to readers of Welsh historical texts, as many of the Welsh gentry served the crown as administrators or soldiers: the episodes in the Hundred Years War with France narrated by Gutun Owain could be seen as pertaining to the history of the Welsh not merely because they were subjects of the king of England but because they fought in royal armies.85 For Gutun Owain, then, the history of the Welsh in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was inextricably linked to the kingdom of England and predicated on loyalty to its monarch, but nevertheless retained a distinctively Welsh inflection—a balance encapsulated in his description of Henry V as ‘king of England and Wales’.86 Much Welsh historical writing in the following centuries sought to strike a similar balance.
Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0005
1 Cf. R. R. Davies, Conquest, 415–18; A. D. Carr, The Gentry of North Wales, chs. 2 and 7.
2 Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 44–6, 101–3, 159, 162–5, 170–5, quotation at 45; Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 344–6, 352–60.
3 Poems of the Cywyddwyr, ed. Rowlands, xvi–xvii.
4 R. R. Davies, Conquest, 115–18; Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, 172–5.
5 R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 49–50, 208; R. R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: IV’, 21–2.
6 R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 159; R. R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: IV’, 21–3.
7 Registrum Epistolarum, ed. Martin, 2: 741–2 (28 June 1284); see also R. R. Davies, The First English Empire, 114, and cf. DGB, 26–9 (I.21).
8 Vita Edwardi Secondi, ed. and trans. Childs, 118–19.
9 Proceedings and Ordinances, vol. 5, ed. Nicholas, 233; cf. R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 91; Lynch, Proffwydoliaeth, 37.
10 Thomas Jones, ‘Pethau Nas Cyhoeddwyd’; trans. T. Gwynn Jones, Welsh Folk Lore, 223–5.
11 BT, Pen20Tr, 118 (1276–7); BT, RBH, 264–7 (1276–7).
12 AC, 106–7 (1282–3).
13 Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307, 441, 443, 452–3, 476–8, quotation at 478; Prestwich, Edward I, 120–2; J. Beverley Smith, Llywelyn, 465–7, 561–5; The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, ed. Wright, 1: xv–xx; 2: 168–73, 176–83, 264–5. See further Summerfield, ‘Context and Genesis’, 322–3, and, for Langtoft’s use of history with respect to Edward I’s claims over Scotland, Summerfield, ‘The Testimony of Writing’. By contrast, Walter Bower included an account of Edward’s conquest of Wales in his mid-fifteenth-century Scotichronicon as a warning to the Scots of the dangers of disunity and English treachery: Dylan Foster Evans, ‘Welsh Traitors’, 148–52.
14 R. R. Davies, The First English Empire, 31–2; Wheatley, ‘Caernarfon Castle’.
15 Crick, ‘The Power and the Glory’.
16 Contents listed in Crick, ‘The Power and the Glory’, 36–8. Last two chronicles also discussed in Henley, ‘The Use of English Annalistic Sources’, 240–2.
17 Crick, ‘The Power and the Glory’, 30–5.
18 Edited and translated in Guy, ‘A Lost Medieval Manuscript’, 101–4, discussed at 82, 84, 86–7; Jones, HWMW, 291, 293, 296–7.
19 J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 72–7; Daniel Huws, ‘The Neath Abbey Breviate’.
20 ‘Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century’ [ed. Jones].
21 Henley, ‘The Cardiff Chronicle’.
22 Frank R. Lewis, ‘A History’; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 76. Two chronicles were also probably written at Tintern Abbey in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one of which extended to 1323 and included notices of events in the lordship of Strigoil and elsewhere in Gwent: Julian Harrison, ‘The Tintern Abbey Chronicles’.
23 For the possible continuation at Strata Florida compare G. and T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Continuation’, 302, with Jones, HWMW, 242–4, and Stephenson, ‘The Continuation’.
24 Fulton, ‘Troy Story’.
25 Cf. Morfydd E. Owen, ‘The Prose of the Cywydd Period’; Fisher, ‘Vernacular Historiography’; Kersken, ‘High and Late Medieval National Historiography’, 209–11.
26 See Chapter 1; Fulton, ‘Literary Networks’. For English parallels see Radulescu, ‘Literature’, esp. 113–15.
27 Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 14–17; Abram, ‘Monastic Burial’, 104, 109; Jones, HWMW, ch. 2, esp. 89–95.
28 Texts in Pen. 20 and RBH, with English translation, in Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ed. and trans. Dumville, 4–5. See also BT, Pen20Tr, 1, and notes at 129–30; and cf. Annales Cambriae, ed. and trans. Dumville, 2; DGB, 280–1 (XI. 206).
29 BT, Pen20Tr, 1 (682); BT, Pen20, 65a–b. Brut y Brenhinedd follows Geoffrey of Monmouth in making Ifor Cadwaladr’s son: DGB, 280–1 (XI. 206); Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 207.
30 DGB, 279 (XI. 205); Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 206. However, Gwrtheyrn is substituted for Arthur in an early fourteenth-century Welsh version of Geoffrey: Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. and trans. Parry, 216. This could, perhaps, have influenced the adaptation of the passage in Brut y Tywysogyon.
31 DGB, 144–59 ([VII]. 111–17). Cf. Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, 392–6.
32 Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 208; Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Parry, 217–18; DGB, 280–1 (XI. 208).
33 At least four versions of Brut y Brenhinedd have been identified, extant in about twenty-five medieval manuscripts: see p. 52.
34 Earliest examples listed in Jones, HWMW, 431.
35 Y Bibyl Ynghymraec, ed. Jones, esp. xlvi–xlvii, 63; Moore, The Works of Peter of Poitiers, ch. 4; Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing’, 17–18; Jones, HWMW, 49–50.
36 Himsworth, ‘Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais’; Himsworth, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Brenhinedd y Saesson’; Liber Coronacionis Britanorum, ed. Sims-Williams, 2: 5–6.
37 BS; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’.
38 DGB, 280–1 (XI. 208).
39 BS, xvi–xviii.
40 Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’, 85–6.
41 BS, xiv, 329.
42 Himsworth, ‘Fifteenth-Century Brenhinedd y Saesson’. The text in Dafydd’s manuscript is incomplete, breaking off in the reign of Edward the Confessor.
43 Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Parry, 217–18; BS, 2–5.
44 J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 60–5, 67–72; BS, xiv.
45 J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 77, 80–6.
46 Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 236–7 (quotations in notes to 91.4, 94.26); Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Fersiwn Dingestow’, 350; Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 59 (for date of the manuscript, Cardiff 1.362 (Havod 1)). Strong Anglophobia also appears in fifteenth-century Welsh poetry: E. D. Jones, Beirdd y Bymthegfed Ganrif, 12–19; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘The Later Welsh Poetry’, 523–30.
47 Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Un o Lawysgrifau’; Guy, ‘A Welsh Manuscript in America’ (colophon reproduced at 25).
48 Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Un o Lawysgrifau’, 227.
49 Jesus College, Oxford, MS 111, cols. 376, l. 10–377, l. 18; transcription in
‘Welsh Prose 1300–1425’, http://www.rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk/en/ms-page.php?ms=Jesus111&page=89v&l=c376l10 (last accessed 13 September 2021); edited by Melville Richards, ‘Gildas a’r Brytaniaid’; discussed in Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Gildas a’r Brytaniaid’.
50 ‘bikarieit’ and ‘raglofyeit’ (col. 376, lines 29, 40): Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.vv. bicar, bicer1and rhaglaw.
51 Col. 377, lines 10–18.
52 Cf. DK, II. 9. The last three reasons may echo criticisms in later medieval sermons, which also influenced Welsh religious poetry: cf. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 242–86, 338–49, 361–70; Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church (2nd edn.), 184–5, 238–41.
53 BT, Pen20Tr, lxii–lxiii, 120–7.
54 Stephenson, ‘The Continuation’.
55 G. and T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Continuation’, 300–4.
56 ‘Brut y Saeson’, in The Text of the Bruts, ed. Rhŷs and Evans, 2: 385–403. The other complete version, in NLW Peniarth MS 32, fols. 125v–132v, is transcribed in ‘Welsh Prose 1300–1425’, http://www.rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk/en/ms-page.php?ms=Pen32&page=251 (last accessed 13 September 2021). The version in NLW Peniarth MS 19 breaks off in 979. See Jones, HWMW, 43–4, 282; Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 60.
57 ‘Epitome Historiæ Britanniæ’; Luft, ‘The NLW Peniarth 32 Latin Chronicle’.
58 Try, ‘A Forgotten Welsh Chronology’, 359.
59 Try, ‘A Forgotten Welsh Chronology’; ‘Appendix: List of the Chronicles’, 425, 426 (nos. 14, 21). Editions and translations of the annals for 1400–15: J. E. Lloyd, Owen Glendower, 149–54; Owain Glyndŵr, ed. Livingston and Bollard, 172–5, 371–9.
60 The Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. and trans. Given-Wilson, xxiii–xxiv, xxix–xxxiii, lxxx–lxxxiii, 100–1, 128–9, 134–5, 144–53, 158–61, 168–73, 176–7, 212–13, 218–19, 238–43, 262–3, quotations at xxiii.
61 St. John Brooks, ‘The Piers Plowman Manuscripts’, 141, 144–51; Stephenson, ‘The Continuation’, 157–61.
62 NLW MS 9092D: https://archives.library.wales/index.php/brut-y-tywysogion-10 (last accessed 13 September 2021).
63 NLW Panton MS 40: RMWL, 2: 849–50.
64 J. R. S. Phillips, ‘When Did Owain Glyndŵr Die?’, 67–9, 73–6, quotation at 74; Gruffydd Aled Williams, The Last Days, 46–8.
65 Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Owain, Gutun’; J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Gutun Owain’; Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 62; Matonis, ‘A Case Study’; Matonis, ‘Gutun Owain’; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Prolegomena’; Jones, HWMW, 47–51, 59–60, 76–7, 108, 114–18, 121.
66 For Gutun’s patrons see Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church (2nd edn.), 263, 284; D. J. Bowen, ‘Guto’r Glyn’, 158–60; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Prolegomena’, 351–2, 372–4.
67 Guy, ‘Brut Ieuan Brechfa’.
68 Guy, ‘Writing Genealogy’, 105–12. See also Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 352–6; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Prolegomena’, 352–4.
69 Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 353; Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry: Volume I, 381.
70 Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 172 and cf. 413.
71 BS, xviii–xx; Jones, HWMW, 47, 59–60, 75–6, 114. Gutun copied about 75 per cent of the manuscript, the texts of Ystorya Dared and the first part of Brut y Brenhinedd being in the hand of an older contemporary.
72 BS, xiv, 272–7; Jones, HWMW, 48.
73 Jarman, ‘Lewis Morris’, 174–8.
74 RWML, 2: 35–8. For the date see Daniel Huws, A Repertory, s.n. Jesus 141. See also Y Bibyl Ynghymraec, ed. Jones, lix–lxi; J. R. S. Phillips, ‘When Did Owain Glyndŵr Die?’, 69, 73; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 223; Jones, HWMW, 49–51.
75 References to digitized images of Jesus College MS 141 at ‘Welsh Chronicles’, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/4371cece-efdb-4b6c-b90c-a434e0a44304 (last accessed 13 September 2021). Although the continuation of Brenhinedd y Saesson in Jesus 141 breaks off in 1459 (fol. 123v), a stray folio now bound in NLW MS 1585, fol. 132r–v, shows that it originally continued at least to Edward IV’s accession in 1461: Owens, ‘Llawysgrifau N.L.W. 1585 a J.C. 141’.
76 Jesus MS 141, fols. 124v–150v; Siddons, Development of Welsh Heraldry: Volume I, 31–3; Thomas Jones, ‘Syr Thomas’, 46–9. The ‘Description of Britain’ is preceded by a statement that the work had been translated in 1471 for the benefit of those lacking books. The date therefore does not refer, as implied in RMWL, 2: 35, to the last year of the continuation of Brenhinedd y Saesson (which ended in 1461): Thomas Jones, ‘Syr Thomas’, 48. It is unknown whether Gutun was the translator.
77 For differences between the texts of the chronicle down to 1197 in NLW 7006 and Cotton Cleopatra B.V see the textual notes in BS, 2–195. To judge by its legible portions, the version of Brenhinedd y Saesson in Jesus 141 was a different adaptation of the Cotton Cleopatra text from that in NLW 7006: Jesus MS 141, fols. 48v–58v, 102r–103v.
78 BS, 24 and n. 13 (trans. BS, 25 and n. 1). For other examples of additional genealogical detail see BS, 78 and n. 19 (trans. BS, 79 and n. 1); 162 and n. 17 (trans. BS, 163 and n. 2); BS, 168 and n. 19 (trans. BS, 169 and n. 2). Although such additions seem to be mostly accurate, Gutun misidentified two notables in south-east Wales as members of the dynasty of Gwynedd: BS, 158 and nn. 22–3.
79 BS, 72–5 (also Jesus MS 141, fol. 57r–v); Jarman, ‘Lewis Morris’, 175.
80 Jesus MS 141, fols. 109r–123v; NLW MS 1585, fol. 132r–v; Caxton, The Cronicles. For the English Brut see Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’; Matheson, The Prose Brut, 47–9, 157–9, 164–6; Wakelin, ‘Caxton’s Exemplar’. The conclusion in 1461 of the short continuation in the Black Book of Basingwerk may indicate that Gutun was acquainted with Caxton’s edition by c.1481; however, the verbal parallels with the latter are too few to establish a direct debt and the common terminal date may be coincidental.
81 Jesus MS 141, fols. 109r–v, 120v–121v, 122v (quotation); NLW, MS 1585D, fol. 132v; Caxton, The Cronicles, sig. r5v–r6v, x6v–x7v, y1v, 5v; cf. Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’, 599–600.
82 Jesus MS 141, fols. 113v–114r; Caxton, The Cronicles, sig. u1v–u2r.
83 BS, 274–5; Jesus MS 141, fols. 114v–115r; cf. Caxton, The Cronicles, sig. s8v. The passages in BS and the Brut are edited and translated in Owain Glyndŵr, ed. Livingston and Bollard, 174–7, 212–13. See also J. R. S. Phillips, ‘When Did Owain Glyndŵr Die?’, 69, 76–7.
84 See n. 59 above. Fifteenth-century Welsh poetry, by contrast, is more fulsome in its praise of Glyndŵr, indicating that poets and their gentry patrons continued to celebrate him as a legitimate political leader seeking to liberate the Welsh: Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Later Welsh Poetry’, 519–31, 549.
85 BS, 272–5; Jesus MS 141, fols. 115r–116v. Cf. Ralph A. Griffiths, The Principality; Stansfield, ‘Prosopography’, esp. 28–31; A. D. Carr, ‘Welshmen and the Hundred Years’ War’; A. D. Carr, The Gentry of North Wales, ch. 2.
86 BS, 274–5.