This document, a transcript of which is in the Record Office, is preserved at Paris among the French government archives and has attached to it by a double string an imperfect yellow seal, bearing the inscription, “Owenus Dei Gratia princeps Walliæ.” It is dated the last day of March in the year of our Lord 1406 and “the sixth of our reign.” The original is endorsed with a note in Latin to the effect that the above is the letter in which Owen, Prince of Wales, acknowledged obedience to “our Pope.”
This year was not a stirring one in Wales. France, to whom Owen was appealing, was in no condition, or at any rate in no mood, to try a serious fall with England. The policy of pin-pricks, to adapt a modern term to the more strenuous form of annoyance in practice in those times, had been pursued with tolerable consistency since the first year of Henry’s reign, and the most Christian King had never yet recognised his rival of England as a brother monarch. Richard the Second’s child-Queen and widow, Isabel, had, after much haggling, been restored by Henry to France, but that portion of her dower which, according to her marriage settlement, should have been returned with her, was unobtainable. She was married to the Duke of Orleans’s eldest son, aged eleven, the greater portion of her dower being a lien on Henry of England for the unpaid balance of the sum above alluded to, an indifferent security. International combats had been going merrily on in the Channel and piratical descents upon either coast were frequent. But this, of course, was not formal war, though a French invasion of England had been one of the chief nightmares of Henry’s stormy reign. Internal troubles in France, however, now began somewhat to relax the strained nature of the relationship with England, and Owen’s chances of Gallic help grew fainter. His son Griffith, or Griffin, was a prisoner in Henry’s hands; he had been committed to the Tower, and by an irony of fate was under the special charge of one of that powerful family to whom his father’s old captive, Reginald Grey of Ruthin, belonged. This gentleman, Lord de Grey of Cedmore, so the Issue Rolls of the reign inform us, was paid the sum of three and fourpence a day for Griffin, son of Owen de Glendowdy, and Owen ap Griffith ap Richard, committed to his custody. Another companion in captivity for part of the time, of this “cub of the wolfe from the west,” strange to say, was the boy-king of Scotland, who, like most monarchs of that factious and ill-governed country, was probably happier even under such depressing circumstances than if he were at large in his own country, and his life most certainly was much safer.
The Rolls during all these years show a constant drain on the exchequer for provisions and money and sinews of war for the beleaguered Welsh castles. Here is a contract made with certain Bristol merchants, mentioned by name, for sixty-six pipes of honey, twelve casks of wine, four casks of sour wine, fifty casks of wheat flour, and eighty quarters of salt to be carried in diverse ships by sea for victualling and providing “the King’s Kastles of Karnarvon, Hardelagh, Lampadarn, and Cardigarn.” Here again are payments to certain “Lords, archers and men-at-arms to go to the rescue of Coity castle in Wales.” The rate of pay allowed to the soldiers of that day for Welsh service is all entered in these old records and may be studied by the curious in such matters.
“To Henry, Prince of Wales, wages for 120 men-at-arms and 350 archers at 12d. and 6d. per day for one quarter of a year remaining at the abbey of Stratflur and keeping and defending the same from malice of those rebels who had not submitted themselves to the obedience of the Lord the King and to ride after and give battle to the rebels as well in South as in North Wales £666.13.4.” Again, in the same year: “To Henry Prince of Wales, for wages of 300 men-at-arms and 600 archers and canoniers and other artificers for the war who lately besieged the castle of Hardelagh [Harlech].”
From the latter of these extracts, which are quoted merely as types of innumerable entries of a like kind, it will be seen that cannons were used, at any rate in some of these sieges, and it is fairly safe to assume that those used against Glyndwr were the first that had been seen in Wales.
As the year 1406 advanced, the star of Owen began most sensibly to wane. He was still, however, keeping up the forms of regal state along the shores of Cardigan Bay, and we find him formally granting pardon to one of his subjects, John ap Howel, at Llanfair near Harlech. The instrument is signed “per ipsum Princepem,” and upon its seal is a portrait of Owen bareheaded and bearded, seated on a throne-like chair, holding a globe in his left hand and a sceptre in his right. Among the witnesses to the instrument are Griffith Yonge, Owen’s Chancellor, Meredith, his younger son, Rhys ap Tudor, and one or two others. There is much that is hazy and mysterious about the events of this year, but in most parts of Wales one hears little or nothing of any shifting of the situation or any loosening of the grip that Glyndwr’s party had upon the country. An armed neutrality of a kind probably existed between the Royalists in those towns and castles that had not fallen and the purely Celtic population in the open country, which had long before 1406 been purged of the hostile and the half-hearted of the native race, and purged as we know by means of a most trenchant and merciless kind.
“While quarrels’ rage did nourish ruinous rack
And Owen Glendore set bloodie broils abroach,
Full many a town was spoyled and put to sack
And clear consumed to countries foul reproach,
Great castles razed, fair buildings burnt to dust,
Such revel reigned that men did live by lust.”
Old Churchyard, who wrote these lines, lived at any rate much nearer to Glyndwr’s time than he did to ours, and reflects, no doubt, the feeling of the border counties and of no small number of Welshmen themselves who were involved in that ruin from which Wales did not recover for a hundred years. In this year 1406, say the Iolo manuscripts, “Wales had been so impoverished that even the means of barely sustaining life could not be obtained but by rewards of the King,” referring, doubtless, to the Norman garrisons. “Glamorgan,” says the same authority, “turned Saxon again at this time though two years later in 1408 they were excited to commotions by the extreme oppressions of the King’s men,” and when Owen returned once more to aid them, their chiefs who had forsaken his cause burnt their barns and stack-yards, rather than that their former leader and his people should find comfort from them. They themselves then fled, the chronicler continues, to England or the extremities of Wales, where in the King’s sea-washed castles they found refuge from Owen’s vengeance and were “supported by the rewards of treason and strategem.”
More serious, however, than Glamorgan, bristling as it was with Norman interests and Norman castles and always hard to hold against them, the powerful and populous island of Anglesey in the north and the Vale of the Towy in the south fell away from Glyndwr. Sheer weariness of the strife, coupled perhaps with want of provisions, seems to have been the cause. It was due certainly to no active operations from the English border. Pardons upon good terms were continually held out in the name of Prince Henry and the King throughout the whole struggle to any who would sue for them, always excepting Owen and his chief lieutenants, though even his son, as we have seen, was well treated in London. Anglesey was threatened all the time by the great castles of Conway, Carnarvon, and Beaumaris, which held out steadily for the King. Though there was no fighting in the island it is not unnatural that Glyndwr’s supporters from thence, being cut off from their homes, which were liable to attacks by sea even when the castles were impotent, were among the first to give in. The strength of the following which he gathered from beyond the Menai is significant of the ardour of national enthusiasm in this old centre of the Princes of Gwynedd, no less than 2112 names of Anglesey men being submitted at one time in this year for pardon. It is possible that these backsliders did not all go home empty-handed, but that a fair amount of plunder from the sack of Marcher castles and the ravage of Marcher lands found its way back with them. However that may be, a royal commission was opened at Beaumaris on November 10th of this year 1406 for the granting of pardons and the assessment of fines to be paid therefor. There is a list still extant in manuscript of the whole two thousand-and-odd names. It will be sufficient to notice, as a point not without interest, that the six commotes of Anglesey paid £537.7.0. in fines upon this account. The goods of those slain in battle were forfeited to the King, to be redeemed at prices ranging from 2s. for a horse to 4d. for a sheep. A few were outlawed, among whom was David Daron, Dean of Bangor, at whose house the Tripartite Convention was signed early in the year, while Bifort, Bishop of Bangor, Owen’s agent as he might almost be called, together with the Earl of Northumberland, was naturally excluded from purchasing his pardon. Henceforward we hear little of Anglesey in connection with Owen, though the remaining years of his resistance are so misty in their record of him that it would be futile to attempt a guess at the part its people may or may not have played in the long period of his decline.
The defection of Ystrad Towy, the heart and life of the old South Welsh monarchy and always a great source of strength to Owen, must have been still more disheartening, but it seems likely that the submission of his allies between Carmarthen, Dynevor, and Llandovery was of a temporary nature. Mysterious but undoubtedly well-founded traditions, too, have come down concerning the movements of Glyndwr himself during the latter part of this year. He is pictured to us as wandering about the country, sometimes with a few trusty followers, sometimes alone and in disguise. This brief and temporary withdrawal from publicity does not admit of any confusion with the somewhat similar circumstances in which he passed the closing years of his life. All old writers are agreed as to this hiatus in the midst of Glyndwr’s career, even when they differ in the precise date and in the extent of his depression. One speaks of him as a hunted outlaw, which for either the year 1405 or 1406 is of course ridiculous. Another, with much more probability, represents him as going about the country in disguise with a view to discovering the inner sentiments of the people. A cave is shown near the mouth of the Dysanni between Towyn and Llwyngwril, where during this period he is supposed to have been concealed for a time from pursuing enemies by a friendly native. Upon the mighty breast of Moel Hebog, over against Snowdon, another hiding-place is connected with his name and with the same crisis in his fortunes. A quite recently published manuscript[15] from the Mostyn collection contains a story to the effect that when the abbot of Valle Crucis, near Llangollen, was walking on the Berwyns early one morning he came across Glyndwr wandering alone and in desultory fashion. The abbot, as head of a Cistercian foundation, was presumably unfriendly to the chieftain whose iconoclasms must have horrified even his friends the Franciscans. There is nothing of interest in the actual details of this chance interview. The fact of Glyndwr being alone in such a place is suggestive and welcome merely as a little bit of evidence recently contributed to the strong tradition of his long wanderings. The abbot appears from the narrative to have been anything but glad to see him and told him that he had arisen a hundred years too soon, to which the Welsh leader and Prince made no reply but “turned on his heel and departed in silence.”