MONNINGTON COURT AND CHURCH.
Men born of Welsh parents on both sides were now forbidden to purchase land near any of the Marcher towns. They were not permitted to be citizens of any borough, nor yet to hold any office, nor carry armour nor any weapon. No Welshman could bind his child to a trade, nor bring him up to letters, while English men who married Welsh women were disfranchised of their liberties. In all suits between Englishmen and Welshmen the judge and jury were to be of the former race, while all “Cymmorthau,” or gatherings for mutual assistance in harvest or domestic operations, were strictly forbidden.
These laws were kept on the statute books till the real union of Wales and England in Henry the Eighth’s time, but gradually became a dead letter as the memory of the first ten bloody years of the century grew fainter. Glyndwr, however, believed in the justice of his cause, and if he expressed remorse for the methods which he had used to uphold it, we hear nothing of such apologies. That he showed the courage of his convictions in heroic fashion no one can gainsay. That men could be found to stand even yet in such numbers by his side is the most eloquent tribute that could be paid to his personal magnetism. He had lost all his castles, unless indeed, as seems likely, those grim towers of Dolbadarn and Dolwyddelan in the Snowdon mountains were left to him. He became henceforward a mere outlaw, confined entirely to the mountains of Carnarvon and Merioneth, between those fierce and rapid raids which we dimly hear of him still making upon the Northern Marches. His old companions, Rhys and William ap Tudor, who had been with him from the beginning, were in the King’s hands, and were about this time executed at Chester with the usual barbarities of the period. The elder was the grandfather of Owen Tudor, and consequently the ancestor of our present King. David Gam was still a prisoner in Owen’s hands till 1412, when the King entered into negotiations for his release through the agency of Llewelyn ap Howel, Sir John Tiptoft, and William Boteler. What terms were made we know not; an exchange was in all likelihood effected, seeing how many of Owen’s friends were in captivity. David’s liberation, however, was by some means successfully accomplished, and he lived to fight and fall by the King’s side at Agincourt, being knighted, some say, as he lay dying upon that memorable field.
When, in 1413, Prince Henry came to the throne, he issued a pardon to all Welsh rebels indiscriminately, not excepting Glyndwr. But, obstinate to the last, the old hero held to his mountains, refusing to ask or to receive a favour, striking with his now feeble arm, whenever chance offered, the English power or those who supported it. When Henry IV. succumbed to those fleshly ills which constant trouble had brought upon his once powerful frame, Glyndwr was still in the field and royal troops still stationed in the Welsh mountains to check his raids. Tradition has it that he was at last left absolutely alone, when he is supposed to have wandered about the country in disguise and in a fashion so mysterious that a wealth of legend has gathered around these wanderings.
“In 1415,” says one old chronicler, “Owen disappeared so that neither sight nor tidings of him could be obtained in the country. It was rumoured that he escaped in the guise of a reaper bearing a sickle, according to the tidings of the last who saw and knew him, after which little or no information transpired respecting him nor of the place or name of his concealment. The prevalent opinion was that he died in a wood in Glamorgan; but occult chroniclers assert that he and his men still live and are asleep on their arms in a cave called Ogof Dinas in the Vale of Gwent, where they will continue until England is self-abased, when they will sally forth, and, recognising their country’s privileges, will fight for the Welsh, who shall be dispossessed of them no more until the Day of Judgment, when the earth shall be consumed with fire and so reconstructed that neither oppression nor devastation shall take place any more, and blessed will he be who will see that time.”
Carte says that Owen wandered down to Herefordshire in the disguise of a shepherd and found refuge in his daughter’s house at Monnington.
It is quite certain that in 1415, Henry V., full of his French schemes and ambitions, and with no longer any cause to trouble himself about Wales, sent a special message of pardon to Glyndwr. Perhaps the young King felt a touch of generous admiration for the brave old warrior who had been the means of teaching him so much of the art of war and the management of men, and who, though alone and friendless, was too proud to ask a favour or to bend his knee. Sir Gilbert Talbot of Grafton, in Worcestershire, was the man picked out by Henry to accomplish this gracious act. Nothing, however, came of it immediately. Perhaps the great campaign of Poitiers interfered with a matter so comparatively trifling. But on the King’s return he renewed it in February, 1416, commissioning this time not only Talbot but Glyndwr’s own son, Meredith, as envoys. Whether or no it would have even now and by such a channel been acceptable is of no consequence, as the old hero was either dead or in concealment. Common sense inclines to the most logical and most generally accepted of the traditions which surround his last years, namely, the one which pictures him resting quietly after his stormy life at the home of one or other of his married daughters in Herefordshire. Monnington and Kentchurch both claim the honour of having thus sheltered him. Probably they both did, seeing how near they lie together, though the people of the former place stoutly maintain that it is in their churchyard his actual dust reposes.
At Kentchurch Court, where his daughter Alice Scudamore lived with her husband, and which still belongs to the family, a tower of the building is even yet cherished as the lodging of the fallen chieftain during part at any rate of these last years of obscurity. The romantic beauty of the spot, the survival of the mansion and of the stock that own it, would make us wish to give Kentchurch everything it claims, and more, in connection with Glyndwr’s last days. Above the Court, which stands in a hollow embowered in woods, a park or chase climbs for many hundred feet up the steep sides of Garaway Hill, which in its unconventional wildness and entire freedom from any modernising touch is singularly in keeping with the ancient memories of the place. The deer brush beneath oaks and yews of such prodigious age and size that some of them must almost certainly have been of good size when Thomas Scudamore brought Alice, the daughter of Owen of Glyndyfrdwy, home as a bride; while just across the narrow valley, through which the waters of the Monnow rush swift and bright between their ruddy banks, the village and ruined castle of Grosmont stand conspicuous upon their lofty ridge. It must in fairness to the claims of Monnington be remembered that Grosmont was not precisely the object upon which Glyndwr, if he were still susceptible to such emotions, would have wished his fading eyesight to dwell long, since of all the spots in Wales (and it is just in Wales, the Monnow being the boundary) Grosmont had been the one most pregnant, perhaps, with evil to his cause. For it was the defeat of Glyndwr’s forces there that may be said to have broken the back of his rebellion. And as we stand upon the bridge over the Monnow midway between England and Wales, the still stately ruins of the Norman castle that must often have echoed to Prince Henry’s cheery voice crown the hill beyond us; while behind it the quaint village that rose upon the ashes of the town Glyndwr burnt, with all its civic dignities, looks down upon us, the very essence of rural peace.
Glyndwr’s estates had long ago been forfeited to the Crown and granted to John, Earl of Somerset. Soon after his death Glyndyfrdwy was sold to the Salusburys of Bachymbyd and of Rûg near Corwen, one of the very few alien families that in a peaceful manner had become landowners in North Wales before the Edwardian conquest. It is only recently indeed that there has ceased to be a Salusbury of Rûg. Owen’s descendants, through his daughters, at any rate, are numerous. A few years after his death, Parliament, softening towards his memory, passed a special law for the benefit of his heirs, allowing them to retain or recover a portion of the proscribed estates. In consequence of this, Alice Scudamore made an effort to recover Glyndyfrdwy and Sycherth from the Earl of Somerset apparently without success, so far as the former went, in view of the early ownership of the Salusburys.
Of Griffith, the son who was so long a prisoner in the Tower in company with the young King of Scotland, we hear nothing more. But of Meredith this entry occurs in the Rolls of Henry V., 1421: “Pardon of Meredith son of Owynus de Glendordy according to the sacred precept that the son shall not bear the iniquities of the father.” To another daughter of Glyndwr, probably an illegitimate one, Gwenllian, wife of Phillip ap Rhys of Cenarth, the famous bard, Lewis Glyncothi, wrote various poems, in one of which he says: “Your father was a potent prince, all Wales was in his council.”