CHAPTER X
ABERYSTWITH. OWEN’S POWER DECLINES
1407-1408
LITTLE is known of Owen’s movements during the first half of the year 1407. Entries here and there upon the Rolls indicate that no improvement so far as the general peace of Wales was concerned had taken place, whatever there may have been in Henry’s prospects of ultimately recovering his authority there, prospects which now wore a much brighter look. For though Glyndwr and his captains were still active in the field, there nevertheless runs through all the scant scraps of news we now get of him an unmistakable note of depression on the part of his friends, with proportionate confidence on that of his enemies. Prince Henry was still Lieutenant of the Marches of South Wales, in addition to his hereditary jurisdiction, such as it now was, over the royal counties. A great effort was in contemplation, in view of Owen’s failing strength, to put a complete end to the war. Pardons were freely offered to his supporters, and even urged, upon the most lenient terms, and the Marcher Barons, who were inclined at times, when not personally in danger, to forget the conditions on which they held their lands, were sternly forbidden to leave their castles. Things had not been going well in France; Calais had been hard pressed and the great English possessions in the South had been lamentably reduced in extent. Edward the Third is computed to have reigned over six million subjects to the north of the Pyrenees, a population much greater than that of England and Wales combined. Henry had but a fraction left of this kingdom, and that fraction most unsteady in its devotion. He had been several times on the very point of making a personal attempt to repair his failing fortunes beyond the Channel. But his health was beginning even thus early to fail, and his nerves were completely unstrung. He had made up his mind, however, to lead one more expedition against Owen, now that the chances seemed so much more favourable than on former occasions. From even this, however, it will be seen that he ultimately flinched, and it was perhaps well that he did so. His son and the captains round him understood Welsh warfare much better than Henry. The rush of great armies through Wales had failed hopelessly as a means of coercing it, and would fail again. The steady pressure of armed bands upon Owen’s front and flanks, and liberal terms to all who deserted him, were the only methods of wearing out the resources of this stubborn patriot, and they were already succeeding. That he was himself pressing hard upon Pembrokeshire, however, just at this time is evident from the orders which were issued for forwarding arms and provisions for the defence of the royal castles in that county, the recipient being Sir Francis À’Court, the King’s constable there. Aberystwith castle, however, was to be the chief point of the Prince’s attack this autumn, and his father, as I have said, was expected to take part in an expedition that came to be associated with much éclat.
An impression not altogether easy to account for, that the fall of this great castle would prove the final blow to Owen’s resistance, got abroad, and there was a great rush of knights and nobles to take part in the ceremony. A picked force of 2400 archers and men-at-arms was told off for the service, and an entry in the Issue Rolls notes the sum of £6825 as being set aside for their pay over the period of six months beginning in June. This was a strong nucleus for an expedition that could be supplemented by the levies of the border counties and the spare strength of the local Marcher barons. Aberystwith Castle occupies a site of much distinction, placed upon a bold promontory projecting into the sea. Its ruins still survive as one of the innumerable witnesses to Cromwell’s superfluous vandalism, and afford a favourite lounge to summer visitors at the popular Welsh watering-place. But the first castle built on Norman lines was erected in the twelfth century by Gilbert de Strongbow, the earliest Norman adventurer in this district. A centre for generations of Norman-Welsh strife, dismantled and restored again and again by contentious chieftains, it was finally rebuilt by Edward I.; and what Cromwell and time’s destroying hand have left of it dates chiefly from that luminous epoch in Welsh history. Not many of those, perhaps, who loiter amidst its lifeless fragments are aware that in the season of 1407 it was the object of quite a fashionable crusade on the part of the chivalry of England, well supplied with every requisite of siege warfare that the primitive science of the period could provide.
Harlech was at this time the headquarters of Glyndwr’s family, including Edmund Mortimer, but to localise Glyndwr himself becomes now more difficult than ever. Since Carmarthen and most of South Wales had forsaken their allegiance, his energies must have been still more severely taxed in keeping up the spirit and directing the movements of his widely scattered bands. We heard of him lately raiding through Pembroke and threatening the Flemish settlements. Merioneth and Carnarvon in the North were still faithful, and we can well believe that the great castles of Aberystwith and Harlech, lying midway between the remnant of his southern followers and those of the North, were in some sort the keys to the situation. Aberystwith, in which Glyndwr had placed a strong garrison under a trusty captain, seemed so, at any rate, to the English. Great guns were sent all the way from Yorkshire to Bristol, to be forwarded thence by sea to the coast of Cardigan, while ample stores of bows and arrows, bowstrings, arblasts, stone-shot, sulphur, and saltpetre were ordered to be held in readiness at Hereford. Woods upon the banks of the Severn were to be cut down and the forest of Dean to be picked over for trees, out of which was to be contrived the siege machinery for the subjugation of hapless Aberystwith. A troop of carpenters were to sail from Bristol for the devoted spot and erect scaffolds and wooden towers upon a scale such as had not been before witnessed at any of the innumerable sieges of this Welsh war. Proclamations calling out the great nobility of western England and the Marches to meet the King and Prince at Hereford were sent out. Owen, as well as Aberystwith and Harlech, was to be crushed, and the King himself, with the flower of his chivalry, was to be there to witness the closing scene. How far off even yet was the final extinction of Owen, no one then could have well imagined.
But a temporary check came to these great preparations. The King, as he had shrunk from crossing the Channel, now shrank from crossing the Welsh border. A pestilence, somewhat more severe than those which were almost chronic in the country in those days, swept over the island and was more virulent in the West than elsewhere. It may have been this that for a time suspended operations. Strange to say, too, the Richard myth was not quite extinct, for during this summer bills were found posted up about London proclaiming that he was “yet alive and in health, and would come again shortly with great magnificence and power to recover his kingdom.” But neither pestilence nor the vagaries of the King nor false rumours of the dead Richard were allowed to permanently unsettle the Aberystwith enterprise. Fighting in Wales had by no means been a popular or fashionable pastime, when there was no territory to be won or to be defended. It was poor sport for the heavy-armed sons of Mars of that period, all athirst for glory, this tilting over rough ground at active spearmen who melted away before their cumbrous onslaught only to return and deal out death and wounds at some unexpected moment or in some awkward spot. But now whole clouds of gay cavaliers, besides men scarred and weather-beaten with Welsh warfare, gathered to the crusade against Aberystwith. French wars just now were at a discount, not because the spirit was unwilling, but because the exchequer was weak, so, the supply of fighting knights and squires being for the moment greater than the demand, Prince Henry reaped the benefit of the situation in his march through South Wales.
But the bluest blood and the most brilliant equipment were futile in attack against castles that nature and Edward the First had combined to make invulnerable. The guns and scaffolds and wooden towers were all there but they were powerless against Aberystwith and the brave Welshmen who, under Owen’s lieutenant, Rhys ap Griffith ap Llewelyn, defended it. The King’s particular cannon, weighing four and one half tons, was there, which, with another called the Messenger, shook the rock-bound coasts, striking terror, we may well fancy, into the peasants of that remote country and proving more destructive to those behind it than those before, for we are told that it burst during the siege, a common thing with cannons of that day, dealing death to all around. Once an hour, it is usually estimated, was the greatest rapidity with which these cumbrous pieces could be fired with safety, and we may well believe that the moment of explosion must have been a much more anxious one, seeing how often they burst, to their friends beside them than to their foes hidden behind the massive walls of a Norman castle. The Duke of York was there, and the Earl of Warwick, who, two years previously, had defeated Glyndwr in a pitched battle and was eager, no doubt, to meet him again. Sir John Grendor, too, was present, no courtier, but a hero of the Welsh wars, and Sir John Oldcastle, a typical border soldier, who became Lord Cobham and was ultimately hunted down as a Lollard at Welshpool and burned by Henry V.; while Lord Berkeley commanded the fleet and managed the siege train. It was not known at Aberystwith, either by the Welsh or the besiegers, where Owen was. He could not readily trust himself in castles, besieged both by land and sea, and run the risk of being caught like a fox in a trap. He bided his time, on this occasion, as will be seen, and arrived precisely at the right moment. Prince Henry found the castle impregnable to assault, and there was nothing for it but to sit down and reduce it by starvation. The only hope of the garrison lay in Owen’s relieving them, and with such an army before them the possibility of this seemed more than doubtful. Provisions soon began to fail, and in the middle of September Rhys ap Griffith made overtures and invited seventeen of the English leaders within the castle to arrange a compromise. One of these was Richard Courtney of the Powderham family, a scholar of Exeter College, Oxford, and Chancellor of the University. Mass was said by this accomplished person to the assembled Welsh and English leaders, after which they received the sacrament and then proceeded to draw up an agreement which seems a strange one. By it the Welsh undertook to deliver up the castle on November 1st if Glyndwr had not in the meantime appeared and driven off the besiegers. Till that date an armistice was to continue. Those of the garrison who would not accept these terms were to be turned out to take their chance; the rest were to receive a full pardon at the capitulation. The abbot of Ystradfflur, who, though a Cistercian, had taken Owen’s side, and three Welsh gentlemen, were given up as hostages.
Copyright F. Frith & Co.
ABERYSTWITH CASTLE.