The Brothers of Gwynedd

by Edith Pargeter

  With Dryslwyn secured, the command in the south could take its time about subduing the other princes along the Towy. Llewelyn had no opportunity to go to their aid, for he was fully occupied in the north, making fast his line against the threat from Chester.

  We had left the castle of Dolforwyn well garrisoned and provisioned, and its position was strongly defensible, but one thing we could not ensure for them. By fatal chance that was an early spring almost without rain or snow, a circumstance that not only negated many of our defences by marsh and river, but also dried up the well at Dolforwyn. Llewelyn said bitterly that the error was his, that he should have made better trial of the water supply before he placed a castle there, but the season was unusually dry, and once the combined forces of Mortimer and Lincoln had moved up the Severn valley to the siege, the castle could not long hold out, nor could we come to their relief. Early in April the garrison surrendered. So brief a history this castle had, and so tragic, full of contention, deceit, warfare and loss.

  At no time during this winter and spring did the royal forces strike any direct blow at Gwynedd itself, the heartland of Llewelyn's power. No, their efforts were all directed at gnawing away the edges of his outlying lands, and lopping away from him one by one the lesser princes who supported him, thus denying him, when the time came, both men and bases outside his own principality. But in other and more devious ways they struck close to home. In May an indignant page-boy, who had overheard talk not meant for his ears, came rushing to Tudor with what he had gleaned. Rhys ap Griffith ap Ednyfed, who was a nephew of the high steward and a trusted bailiff of the prince, had sent a petition to the king from Llewelyn's very court, seeking the royal peace for himself and his brother, and what the boy had overheard was their agreement on flight, they had actually received Edward's safe-conduct, and were making ready to use it. Tudor, in shame and anger, had them both seized and securely held before he broke this bitter news to Llewelyn. Instead of riding into Chester with the king's letter, they were thrown into the prince's prison, and kicked their heels there in discontent for the rest of the year. So close did treason come.

  It was then drawing near the day of the king's muster, his various companies already beginning to gather at Worcester. But as the term of feudal service is short, and he would have to revert afterwards to paid levies—though we had reason to believe that he preferred them—Llewelyn estimated that he would move north in arms from Worcester as quickly as possible, and make Chester his base, to strike at once at the prince's main stronghold. We were at Ruthin, with outriders stationed at intervals along the border to bring us early news of any movements, when a company of men rode in from the south, having travelled by way of Cymer and Bala, and the two young men who led them were brought in to where Llewelyn sat with Tudor and his captains in council. At sight of them he rose with an astonished cry, quicker to recognise them than were the rest of us, for they were stained and dusty and unkempt with hard and hasty riding. The younger flung himself first into the prince's arms, and then at his feet, and clung to his hands and kissed them. And then we saw that it was the youngest of the prince's nephews, his namesake and godson, Llewelyn ap Rhys Fychan, and the other was his brother Griffith.

  "My lord," blurted the boy, half in tears, and still with his face pressed against Llewelyn's hands, "we are come to join you, to fight beside you. We have brought you all the best we could gather. There's no other home or place for us, now. The south's lost—Dynevor, Carreg Cennen, Llandovery—all lost! The king's officers have taken them to make another Carmarthen, a crown stronghold. And our brother—our brother…" He was choked with tears and swallowed fiercely to clear his throat of the grief that strangled him, but for some moments could not get out a word more.

  Llewelyn freed his hands and took the boy by the forearms and strongly raised him. "Not dead?" he demanded in alarm. "Rhys is not killed?" He held the young man in his arms, the dark head buried in his shoulder, and looked across him at Griffith, who was fair, slender and quiet after his father's fashion, and slow to anger or outcry. "What has happened to him?"

  "He is alive and well," said Griffith. "No harm has come to him."

  "He has submitted!" cried the young Llewelyn, muffled by his uncle's clasp but loud in accusation. "He has surrendered his castles and gone with the king's men to Worcester, to make his submission to Edward! So have Griffith and Cynan ap Meredith of Cardigan, for themselves and their nephew. There is no one left of Deheubarth to keep faith with you, only we two." And he wept aloud for anger and shame. He was young, only twenty years old, and his uncle's worshipper from childhood.

  Still Llewelyn eyed the older brother. "They have all sued for grace," said Griffith honestly but without excitement, "and promised homage. We wanted no part of it. We are here. Those who would follow us we have brought with us."

  "And most welcome," said Llewelyn, "with or without your following." He lifted the disconsolate boy away from him, and shook him gently between his hands. "Never take it so hard, he is pressed in a way you cannot yet know, and he does but go after his kind. It is you who have learned something new. Though he has chosen a different way, that does not make your brother a villain."

  The boy lifted his head and blazed at his uncle with great, dark-blue eyes. "He is not my brother," he said with passionate bitterness. "I have renounced him! I am done with him!"

  Llewelyn's smile, though to my eyes somewhat grim and dread, nevertheless respected such rage and grief, and would not mock the boy's vehemence. He clapped him lightly on the shoulder, and laid an arm about him to bring him to a seat among the council.

  "Don't write him out of your life too soon," he said. "Time will teach you—not too roughly, I pray God!—that brothers are not so easily done with!"

  Thus we came to the beginning of July, with our powers drawn in upon themselves and shrunk to half the ground we had formerly held, with most of the south already occupied, and much of the border territory hacked away, leaving the king's approach to Gwynedd open but for our arms. It had been our invariable custom in the past to avoid great loss by withdrawal into our difficult mountain country, to keep our forces intact and deny all our resources to the enemy, while doing him all the injury we could, and then, when he was at length forced by pressure of time and weather and want of funds to recoil and break off the engagement, to follow at every step, regaining the lost lands and harrying the retreating foe. Our speed of movement and our knowledge of the ground was our strength. And thus it had seemed right and wise to do yet again, rather than crash into pitched battle with immensely larger numbers than our own. Never before had we had cause to doubt these tactics, again and again they had served us well. Yet now, as I know, Llewelyn had moments of grave disquiet and self-searching, even self-blame, before he was shown cause.

  "God forgive me," he said to me once, as we rode along the river near Rhuddlan, and looked out broodingly towards Chester, in the summer calm that mocked our anxieties, "God forgive me if I have misread the signs, and let him deceive me. How if this time it goes not as we are used to? If he has some new design? We have relinquished so much with hardly a fight. I know it has paid us time and again, but how if this time it was a mistake? Samson, year after year I have thought over the time before Evesham, and been shamed that I did not then have the courage to throw myself and all I had into Earl Simon's fight. Now it is on my heart that I may have made the same error again—that I should never have surrendered so much ground, but struck hard and risked all to break their concentrations as they formed, and keep them from ever moving far into Welsh ground."

  "You could not have done it," I said. "You could not have held together all those little chieftains in the south, kept fast hold of Bromfield, and fended off three armies, by your own strength alone. You were right, it is time that threatens us, the years you have not been granted to change men's minds and hearts."

  "Well," he said, and set his jaw, "we must work with what we have, fallible chieftains, a flawed prince, and brave but morta
l men. I doubt it is not only poor Rhys Wyndod and his like who have erred in harking back to the past. I fear I may be just as guilty. Have I not loosed my hold of much of Wales to make Gwynedd into a fortress?"

  In its way this was true, but also true that it was by far the soundest policy for us, for of all Wales the most unconquerable land was our sheer, silvered mountain country of Snowdon, and if half was to be sacrificed for a time to ensure an impregnable base from which all could be recovered, then that base could only be Gwynedd.

  Upon this fortress of steely rock King Edward, in the first weeks of July, began his expected advance.

  CHAPTER X

  It is a strange thing that Welshmen should undo Wales, but so it was. We were a society so inward and tribal, so little disposed to look to a wider state, that as the chieftains in all the lands but Gwynedd fell away when threatened, and made their peace one by one, hardly one considering an association with his neighbours for a common resistance, so the ordinary men of those disputed and ceded lands listened with interest when the king's men came recruiting among them, and cheerfully contracted to fight for the side that was able to arm and pay them. Fighting was their business, and this was work and wages offered, and it mattered nothing to them that they were asked to fight against Wales. Wales was a word still, and no more. They belonged to a village and a commote, not to a nation, which was itself a conception out of their knowledge. So great numbers of men born Welsh, speaking the Welsh tongue, took Edward's pay and went to war for him against Llewelyn.

  The prince was right. He had not had long enough to reach hearts and minds, to teach a new generation how the very air that nourished Wales was changed. It was his grief that the hour came upon him so much too soon. It was his glory that even in the short time he had, he had won so many voices and minds, even if not enough. His young namesake from Dynevor raged and ate out his heart when he knew how many south Welsh archers had accepted Edward's pay. But Llewelyn himself never cursed them.

  So far as I can recount King Edward's movements in that campaign, he must have left Worcester about the tenth day of July, with some eight to nine hundred cavalry, and of foot soldiers, lancers, knifemen, archers and swordsmen, perhaps nearly two thousand five hundred, to be added to those already recruited in the three commands. He moved, for such a company, very rapidly, through Shrewsbury to Chester, where he came on the fifteenth day of the month, and there he had also the men of the earl of Warwick, and David's two hundred and twenty troopers of his bodyguard, all in Edward's pay. Of archers and spearmen here, in the retinue of the various lords of those parts, there were perhaps two thousand, with large numbers of crossbowmen among them. The archers of Macclesfield were famous, and the muster included one hundred of them. It was no light army, and not lightly supported and provisioned. I tell you, we had never encountered so calculated and organised a force aimed at us. It was not easy to make the adjustment and see them coldly and truly.

  About the same time that the host was moving up from Shrewsbury to Chester, we had word from our patrol boats, keeping watch off Anglesey, of the ships of the Cinque Ports navy being sighted rounding the island, holding well off from the land, and clearly sailing to rendezvous with Edward and lie at his orders in the estuary of the Dee. Gradually their numbers were reported, as they were sighted, to the number then of eighteen ships. Somewhat later others followed them, bringing the tally to twenty-seven, and one of them at least was French. The masters and sailors owed the king fifteen days of service without pay, from the day they came into effective action, and from the beginning of August he must have taken them into full pay, and very dear they would cost him. Our scouts also reported great numbers of men assembled at Chester who appeared to bear no arms, but to be workmen massed for some prodigious task, as though Edward intended extensive building, or something equally unusual in such a campaign. We began to see the full, daunting extent of his preparations, the like of which had never been used against Wales before, and I confess it chilled us.

  "He is willing to beggar himself," said Llewelyn, "to break me."

  We had our line of outposts, the first defence, along the forest land above the Dee, and the mass of our northern forces well in cover inland, ready to act upon whatever word we received. The forest there was of great extent and very thick, a sturdy protection to us because we knew it well, and could penetrate it where we would with small, fast-moving raiding parties, while the royal army could not hope to operate well in such country, or bring us to open battle. It was our design to harry their every move by raids, and draw them as far into the forest as we could, where we could pick off any stragglers very easily, and hamper all their movements, especially since we expected them to be laden with all their baggage and supplies once they moved from Chester. And this was the first miscalculation, for they had now a large and powerful fleet lying in the estuary, and when they marched from Chester they marched almost as light as we, the ships carrying their supplies and keeping pace with them along the coast. Nor did Edward advance deep into the forest at all. He moved with method along the coast, his ships alongside, and all that great army of knights, troopers, archers and labourers went with him, north-westward towards the abbey of Basingwerk.

  We in the forest moved with them, too, picking off any unwary enough to stray, and by night local knifemen silently stalked and killed such as they could of the sentries guarding the camps. But soon we saw how different this war was to be from any we had known. Edward's burdening himself with all those labourers was explained within two days, for they were felling trees ahead of the host, strongly guarded as they worked, and opening up a great swathe to make a road which an army could use. Unless we could prevent, we should be robbed of one of our greatest advantages, the difficulty the English always had in bringing up their supplies. Now they had the ships on one hand, and were tearing apart our forest to make a highroad on the other.

  By day and by night we harried and raided them, and took heavy toll, but with our cover stripped in this wide swathe between us and them, and their picked companies of archers, more than three hundred of them, constantly on guard while the labourers worked, we had lost much of our sting. We tried every means of luring them into the thicker woods, but plainly Edward's plans were absolute and his orders were obeyed, and there were very few rash sallies, and only when we pressed them hard at some risk to ourselves. In ten days they had cut their way to within a few miles of the abbey of Basingwerk, where there was a great level plane of rock jutting out into the estuary, and there the main army made a strong camp, cleared about on every side so that we had no cover to approach them undetected. And there they stayed, so arraying their forces that it was clear they meant to fortify and hold that spot as a base. This rock we called the Flint.

  An advance guard, strong in archers, still pushed on along the coastal edge of the forest with the woodsmen, who continued their felling, digging and levelling, and burned the underbrush as they went. Our scouts brought back word that the king had taken up residence at Basingwerk, and seemed prepared to stay some time, and that there was great activity at the main camp at the Flint. Several of his Cinque Ports ships were observed going back and forth to Chester, and bringing up and unloading cargoes of timber, while other materials, cords, wooden planking, lime, were already being carted along the new road in an endless chain of wagons. Within a few days we heard what was toward, though we had guessed it before. Edward's labourers were building there a very large and strong base post, which would surely be well garrisoned even when the main army moved on.

  This was the first time that Llewelyn turned to tactics the Welsh seldom used, and made one attack in force against the half-built stronghold. We did not then know it, but at that time Edward was not with his army, but had taken ship and crossed the estuary to return to Chester, partly to ensure that his transport lines in Cheshire were working properly, partly to meet his queen at a spot where he had decided to build a great abbey, to be called Vale Royal. This was the time he chose to see the
foundations of that church laid, so confident and resolute was he, and such deserved trust did he place in his captains in the field, Warwick, Montalt, de Knovill, the warden of the Cinque Ports, who commanded the fleet, and many more. Yes, and David, too, for David was always close about his person and first among the defenders wherever we attacked. Thus it happened that in Edward's absence David with his own guard and other troops was in command of the defences of Flint the day the prince made his strongest bid to destroy the fences and walls they had raised. It was to be then or never, before too much work had been done, and too much ground cleared about it.

  It was all timber, and might be fired if the wind was right. A wind driving up the estuary was what we wanted, for our best approach was from seaward, where the road was still in the making and less open, and with good fortune we might even fire any ships that happened then to be lying alongside, and destroy their landing-stage.