A most suggestive poem by another Prince is a kind of summary of his progress through his dominions from the Ardudwy mountains,
“Fast by the margin of the deep
Where storms eternal uproar keep,”
to the hills above Llangollen where he proposes “to taste the social joys of Yale.” This is Howel, the illegitimate son of Owain Gwynedd, who seized and held for two years his father’s kingdom. Though so strenuous a warrior, his poems are rather of love and social life. He sings with much feeling of the joys of Wales; her fair landscape, her bright waters and green vales, her beauteous women and skimming seagulls, her fields clothed with tender trefoil, her far-reaching wilds, and plenteousness of game. Himself a successful stormer of castles, there is something richly suggestive in the action of a man laying down the torch and bloody sword and taking up the pen to describe his havoc:
“The ravens croaked and human blood
In ruddy streams poured o’er the land;
There burning houses war proclaimed;
Churches in flames and palace halls;
While sheets of fire scale the sky,
And warriors ‘On to battle!’ cry.”
Then the author wholly changes his mood:
“Give me the fair, the gentle maid,
Of slender form, in mantle green;
Whose woman’s wit is ever staid,
Subdued by virtue’s graceful mien.
Give me the maid, whose heart with mine
Shall blend each thought, each hope combine;
Then, maiden fair as ocean’s spray,
Gifted with Kymric wit’s bright ray,
Say, am I thine?
Art thou then mine?
What! silent now?
Thy silence makes this bosom glow.
I choose thee, maiden, for thy gifts divine;
’Tis right to choose—then, fairest, choose me thine.”
There is much misunderstanding as to the fashion in which the bards were treated by Edward the First. During war the leading minstrels were naturally identified with the patrons whose banners they followed and whose praises they sang; but the statement that they were put to death as bards rests on wholly secondary authority and seems doubtful. Stringent laws were certainly made against the lower order of minstrels who wandered homeless through the country, but they seem to have been devised as much for the protection of the common people, who were called on to support them, as against the men themselves, who were regarded by the authorities as mendicants and idlers. The superior bards, who kept strictly to the houses of the great, were probably not often interfered with. These, though they had regular patrons and fixed places of abode, made extended tours from time to time in which there seems to have been no special distinction between North and South Wales. The hatred of the bards towards England was a marked feature of their time, and was so consistent that though many Welsh princes, in their jealousy, lent their swords, as we have seen, to the invader, no bards, so far as one knows, turned against their countrymen. For generations they prided themselves in being intellectually superior to the Saxon. They also saw, after the Norman conquest, the English race despised and held down by their conquerors, and a species of serfdom in use among the Saxons which had no prototype in their own country. The ordinary bards, however, had beyond all doubt sacrificed much of their old independence and become the creatures of their patrons and ready to sell their praises for patronage. Even the respectable Meilir confesses:
“I had heaps of gold and velvet
From frail princes for loving them.”
Llewelyn the Great, the second, that is to say, of the three Llewelyns, aroused the enthusiasm of Bardic literature and was the subject of much stirring eulogy:
“None his valour could withstand,
None could stem his furious hand.
Like a whirlwind on the deep,
See him through their squadrons sweep.
Then was seen the crimson flood,
Then was Offa bathed in blood,
Then the Saxons fled with fright,
Then they felt his royal might.”