by Marc Morris
Two weeks later the invasion of Gwynedd began. On 13 March 1283 Edward sailed across the mouth of the Conwy and established a new base camp on the river's western shore. With Eleanor by his side, the king took up residence in the hall that had been built there by Llywelyn, while his troops occupied the grounds of the nearby Cistercian abbey where the bones of the prince's ancestors lay buried. The following day new writs went out. The earls and barons of England were summoned once again to muster at Montgomery and Carmarthen. One week later, a further 5,000 English infantry were ordered.The occupation of Wales was finally under way.
There was one man, above all, whom Edward wanted to catch, and Dafydd ap Gruffudd responded by running. At first he fled south, into the mountains of Meirionnydd, holing up in the isolated Castell-y-Bere at the foot of Cadair Idris. That fortress soon came under siege by English forces, and fell in the last week of April, but by then the fugitive prince had fled again. As a consequence, the English invasion of Snowdonia began to assume the character of a massive manhunt. Roger Lestrange led his men into Wales from the middle March; Valence pushed up from the south; the army of Anglesey, now under the more competent command of Otto de Grandson, crossed the pontoon bridge and penetrated the interior. Finally, in the second week of May, the king himself marched up the Conwy with 7,000 men and set up a temporary headquarters at Dolwyddelan. Bands of Englishmen swarmed through the valleys and over the mountains, finding many Welshman who were ready to make their submission. Dafydd, however, still could not be found.
No doubt somewhat frustrated, Edward returned to his camp at Conwy in early June, and a fortnight later retired to Rhuddlan in order to celebrate his birthday. He was still there a week or so later when, like a belated birthday present, the longed-for news arrived. Dafydd had been taken, captured near Llanberis at the foot of Mount Snowdon. On 28 June the king sent out jubilant letters to his people in England, announcing that the prince, 'last of a treacherous line', was now in his custody, having been caught by 'men of his own tongue'. Edward immediately returned to Snowdonia for a two-month tour, during which hostages were taken and the submissions of communities were received. It was only at the end of August, after an absence that had lasted more than a year, that the king finally returned to England.
The conquest of Wales, so often contemplated by previous English kings but never carried through, was at last complete. It had taken a monumental effort on the part of Edward, his magnates and his people. The financial cost alone was colossal. As far as can be determined, the total budget stood somewhere in the region of £120,000 — that is, around five times the amount spent on the previous Welsh war. The king's subjects in England had dug deep into their pockets to find him a tax of nearly £50,000; the Riccardi of Lucca, his bankers, had strained to keep the river of silver pennies flowing into the war zone in order that the troops could be paid. In terms of those troops, the cost had been higher still. Among the English nobility, the sons of William de Valence, Robert Burnell and Roger Clifford were just a few of the numerous high-status casualties; among the common foot soldiery, the numbers must have run to countless hundreds, probably thousands. As early as October 1282, before the invasion of Snowdonia had even started, the military cemetery at Rhuddlan had already run out of room for bodies. The bitter cold of a winter campaign - itself an unprecedented undertaking — must have accounted for the fact that many of those who had been marched to Wales from distant villages in England would not be returning home. Nor, of course, had the burden been borne by England alone: men and supplies had poured into Wales from Ireland, Gascony and Ponthieu at Edward's behest.
But nowhere, naturally, was the impact of conquest felt more forcefully than in Wales itself. 'What is left us that we should linger?' wondered the author of Llywelyn's lament. 'No place of escape from Terror's prison, No place to live — wretched is living!' The trauma of 1282-83 was not to be measured merely by the loss of a prince, however mighty. It was also to be reckoned in the appropriation of the halls, houses and castles that had belonged to Llywelyn's dynasty since rime out of mind; the confiscation of Welsh secular treasures and holy relics; the destruction of churches and abbeys, most notably in the case of the abbey at Conwy. It must have been felt, above all, in terms of human suffering and loss, to an extent that is now unknown but that must have exceeded the English death toll many times over.
And yet, with the conquest now complete, the killing came to an end. Choleric English clerics at the Roman Curia, of course, full of Christian charity, might well wish the Welsh 'extermination', and no doubt other Englishmen, their deep-seated antipathy stoked by Edward's propaganda, must have felt the same way. The king himself, however, subscribed to higher ideals of justice and chivalry. In victory, it behoved him to be fair, magnanimous and merciful. Thousands of Welshmen might have died, but they had died fighting. Those who had submitted or were captured might suffer imprisonment, but their lives would be spared.
Except Dafydd ap Gruffudd. His crimes, in Edward's eyes, were too great, and his treachery too profound, to be punished or pardoned in the normal way. As the instigator and inciter of rebellion, Dafydd was deemed to deserve death, just as surely as that earlier troublemaker, Simon de Montfort, had done. But Montfort, and for that matter Llywelyn, had obliged the king by dying in battle; Dafydd had merely been wounded in the course of his capture. This may have been a cause of regret for Edward, for it meant that he had to take unprecedented action in the autumn of 1283. No one, however, would have more cause to regret his failure to die on the slopes of Snowdon than Dafydd himself.
In September the captive prince was brought under armed escort from Rhuddlan to Shrewsbury, and there, on the last day of the month, a parliament assembled to decide his fate. Edward proposed, and his magnates agreed, that the prince was guilty of treason: the crime of plotting the king's death. Notionally, treason had existed for a long time, but never before had it been twisted to apply to rebellion, or attributed to someone of such exalted rank. The chroniclers who described what followed were aware that they had witnessed something 'in previous times unknown'. On 2 October Dafydd was subjected to a four-fold punishment. For his treason, he was dragged through Shrewsbury 'at the horse's tail' to a scaffold; there, for his homicides, he was hanged alive. Next, for having committed his crimes in Holy Week, he was disembowelled, and his entrails were burned. Lastly, for having plotted the king's death, his body was quartered, and the parts were dispatched to the four corners of Edward's kingdom. His head was carried off by the citizens of London, to be displayed next to that of his brother.
After the blood-letting came the thanksgiving. From Shropshire, Edward moved south, touring the cathedrals, abbeys and priories of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. Having returned to Rhuddlan for Christmas, in the New Year he crossed the Pennines to repeat the exercise in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. There can be no doubt that the king considered that the offerings he made during these months and the ceremonies he attended were entirely fitting and important in the wake of his victory. Yet the suspicion remains that he was also deliberately killing time, awaiting the onset of spring for the momentous finale he had planned.
When the spring arrived, Edward returned to Wales for a second time, and he came fully conscious of his rights and responsibilities as a conqueror. On 19 March, at Rhuddlan, a great statute was promulgated, setting out how Snowdonia and the other royal lands in Wales would be governed in the future. It was, on the whole, a wisely worded and well-balanced document, insisting, for example, that English law should apply in criminal cases, but also allowing that, for civil pleas (inheritance, debts and contracts) Welsh procedures might be maintained. Nevertheless, this synthesised system was to be administered on purely English lines. From now on, Snowdonia would be run by the full panoply of royal officials familiar in England — sheriffs, coroners, bailiffs and their deputies — all answering to a new justiciar of northwest Wales. As the king explained in the statute's preamble, 'Divine providence, which is unerring
in its dispositions . . . has now, of its grace, wholly and entirely converted the land of Wales ... into a dominion of our ownership.'
From Rhuddlan Edward moved west, back into Snowdonia itself. There he was able to assess how the physical process of transformation was progressing. Just as with his earlier campaign, the king's new conquest was being cemented with a trio of new castles. Each of them, like their precursors, was located on the coast so as to be suppliable by sea, and each of them, more so than before, was state of the art in terms of its defensive capabilities. These latest castles, too, were set to possess a glamour that their counterparts at Flint, Rhuddlan and Aberystwyth would lack by comparison. At Conwy, for instance, where Edward and Eleanor arrived on 26 March, a castle was rising every bit as fantastical as the one they were still fashioning at Leeds. Meanwhile, across the other side of the mountains, on a rock called Harlech, a similar fortress, replete with multiple towers and turrets, was also being founded.
It was for his third new castle, however, that the king had instructed Master James of St George and his colleagues to create something truly exceptional: Caernarfon, he intended, would be the greatest of all their many projects. The prominence it was afforded was, in part, a reflection of its future role. Situated at the southern end of the Menai Strait, the settlement was conveniently located in the heart of what used to be Gwynedd; from here the other parts of the king's new conquest could be most easily reached. It was, therefore, an appropriate place for the new justiciar of north-west Wales to have as his base.
But Caernarfon had a stronger appeal still, and that was the pull of its past. A thousand years and more beforehand, the Romans had come to this part of Wales, and the remains of their legionary fort, Segontium, still stood close by (where, less extensive, they can still be seen today). Since that time, however, its origins had become the stuff of legend. According to Welsh tradition, the fort had stood since the time of Magnus Maximus, a Roman emperor who had seen it a dream, and who had come to Wales to discover it was a reality: 'a great castle, the fairest that mortal had ever seen.' And this was what Edward and his architects aspired to recreate, albeit on a new site at the mouth of the River Seiont: a truly tremendous castle, bristling with towers and turrets, amply supplied with arrow-loops, and apartments appropriate for future royal visits. To their design, moreover, they also decided to add a telling detail. The Emperor Maximus, so it was said, was the father of the Emperor Constantine. Caernarfon was therefore going to be built with polygonal towers, and different coloured bands of masonry, so as to resemble the walls of Constantinople.
When Edward arrived at Caernarfon at the start of April 1284, he was no doubt pleased to inspect the progress of the building works, but he had other, more important motives in mind. With the king, as ever, travelled the queen, who at that time was entering the ninth month of what was probably her sixteenth pregnancy. As a consequence, every effort was made to ensure that the royal couple felt as comfortable as possible in the midst of a busy construction site. Temporary timber apartments, constructed the previous year, were improved in advance of their coming by the addition of new glass windows; nearby, as at Conwy and Rhuddlan, a garden was laid out for Eleanor's enjoyment. After keeping the court waiting for three more weeks, and missing St George's day by just forty-eight hours, the queen gave birth on 25 April. To general rejoicing, the child was a boy, and a few days later he was baptised Edward after his father. The tradition that the king presented this new arrival to the Welsh as their future prince is a later improvement of the story, not recorded until the sixteenth century; precisely what future Edward senior foresaw for his second son at this stage we will never know. What can hardly be doubted, however, is that the child's birth at Caernarfon was intentional. In the person of this new Edward, Wales's distant imperial past and its future as an English dominion were deliberately linked.
Other symbolic events had already been contrived at Caernarfon to reinforce the connection. The previous year, during his hostage-taking tour, Edward had 'discovered' the body of the Emperor Maximus there; on the king's orders, it was exhumed and then reburied in the local church. Here, in other words, was a repeat performance of the disinterment of Arthur some five years earlier, and to much the same purpose. Maximus was said to be the father of Constantine; Constantine was known to be the grandfather of Arthur — Geoffrey of Monmouth had said so. It was no coincidence that, around the same time, Edward had been presented with a coronet that had once belonged to Llywelyn, which was said to be 'Arthur's crown'. In the spring of 1284, once the royal goldsmith had rendered it more impressive, this trophy was sent to England. At some point soon after, Edward's oldest son and heir, Alfonso, presented it at the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.
Back in Wales, the search for symbols of conquest and the celebration of victory continued in a similarly Arthurian vein. For most of June, including his forty-fifth birthday, the king chose to keep his court at Llyn Cwm Dulyn, a deep, dark lake in the mountains to the south of Caernarfon, reputed to have mystical properties. At the end of July he held a magnificent 'Round Table' tournament at Nefyn, a remote little town where the prophecies of Merlin were said to have been found. In early August he toured the far reaches of the Llyn peninsula, even the tiny islands off the coast. Edward was evidently revelling in his discoveries, and the knowledge that he had been further and seen more than any of his predecessors. Excepting Arthur, of course.
It was not until the middle of August that the festivities began to wind down. By 13 August the king was back at Caernarfon, and on 22 August he set out east along the coast, back in the direction of England. It was probably on that day that messengers from England arrived to meet him, with the news that Alfonso was dead.
7
Peaceful Endeavours
Contemporary chroniclers, if they noticed it, maintained a discreet silence; posterity, as a result, has also failed to register its alarming significance. But it can hardly have escaped the attention of Edward I, engaged as he was in the summer of 1284 with the manipulation of myth and search for historical validation: Alfonso, the son and heir to whom he had recently dispatched 'Arthur's crown' for presentation at the high altar of Westminster Abbey, had died on 19 August — the very date on which, ten years earlier, the king himself had stood in the same sacred space on the day of his coronation.
To a man who had proclaimed that his recent conquest was proof of the unerring dispositions of divine providence, such a coincidence must surely have been more than a little jarring. Alfonso, ten years old at the time of his death, had passed beyond the more perilous years of infancy that had claimed the lives of his predeceased brothers. The toys that Edward had bought him - which included a wooden castle and a miniature siege-engine - had already been exchanged for hawks, hounds and horses. It was premature to call the boy, as one chronicler did, 'the hope of knighthood', but surely no exaggeration for the same writer to suggest that Alfonso had been 'a comfort to his father'. As Archbishop Pecham put it his letter of condolence to the king, 'the child . . . was the hope of us all'. Once again, death had robbed the realm of its future security, and left the succession dangling on the fate of a four-month-old baby.
Nevertheless, Edward, as usual, succeeded in disguising his discomfort. Alfonso was swiftly buried in Westminster Abbey, a week after his death, and with neither of his parents present. Such apparent indifference might seem callous, or perhaps be thought typically medieval, but neither was necessarily the case. Henry III and his queen, for example, had shown great and public concern during the sicknesses of their children and exhibited extreme grief when one of them (a girl called Katherine) had died at a young age. But Katherine was seemingly their sole casualty; their eldest son and his wife, by contrast, had not been nearly so lucky. Edward and Eleanor's first three children - all daughters — had died before the couple departed on crusade and, within four more years, their eldest sons had likewise been lowered into early graves. Given such a record, it would be understandable
if the king and queen came to regard their children with greater detachment than most parents. Other evidence, however, suggests that, in spite of their frequent absences, the king and queen were neither emotionally distant nor uninvolved. Edward's presents for his son, like the similar gifts he showered on his daughters, are reasonable indicators of genuine affection. Eleanor regularly wrote letters asking after her children's health. And, while she was unable to attend his funeral, the queen had Alfonso's heart preserved, in order that it could one day be buried with her own.
What prevented Edward and Eleanor from rushing back to Westminster that August was an overriding commitment to completing their business in Wales. With the conquest and the celebrations over, the king had elected to embark on a victory tour that would take in the whole country. In September, as a prelude, he travelled to his new abbey at Vale Royal in Cheshire and presented the monks with yet another significant trophy — a silver chalice, made from the melted seal matrices of Llywelyn, Dafydd and Eleanor de Montfort. This was followed a few days later by another festive assembly, which took place on the border at Overton. According to royal financial accounts, a thousand Welsh minstrels gathered there, presumably to perform for the court's entertainment during the fortnight that followed. It was not until early October that Edward crossed the River Dee and the tour began in earnest. The rest of that month was spent visiting each of the new castles in north Wales — Conwy, Caernarfon and Harlech. Then, in November, it was the turn of west Wales, and for the first time the king got to see his castles at Aberystwyth and Cardigan, as well as the cathedral at St David's. Finally, in December, Edward and Eleanor moved into the south of the country. Until this point they had been accompanied only by their friends and servants (Robert Burnell, Otto de Grandson and John de Vescy are the foremost witnesses to royal charters), but now they were joined, and welcomed, by several of their great magnates in turn. At the castles of Cardiff, Caldicot and Chepstow, the earls of Gloucester, Hereford and Norfolk were all pleased to play host to the court, which consequently swelled in size as the tour, and the year, drew to a close. Around 21 December the king and his companions took ship across the Severn estuary to Bristol, where they stopped to celebrate Christmas.
