[123b] Alberic de Veer, or Vere, came into England with William the Conqueror, and as a reward for his military services, received very extensive possessions and lands, particularly in the county of Essex. Alberic, his eldest son, was great chamberlain of England in the reign of king Henry I., and was killed A.D. 1140, in a popular tumult at London. Henry de Essex married one of his daughters named Adeliza. He enjoyed, by inheritance, the office of standard-bearer, and behaved himself so unworthily in the military expedition which king Henry undertook against Owen Gwynedd, prince of North Wales, in the year 1157, by throwing down his ensign, and betaking himself to flight, that he was challenged for this misdemeanor by Robert de Mountford, and by him vanquished in single combat; whereby, according to the laws of his country, his life was justly forfeited. But the king interposing his royal mercy, spared it, but confiscated his estates, ordering him to be shorn a monk, and placed in the abbey of Reading. There appears to be some biographical error in the words of Giraldus—“Filia scilicet Henrici de Essexia,” for by the genealogical accounts of the Vere and Essex families, we find that Henry de Essex married the daughter of the second Alberic de Vere; whereas our author seems to imply, that the mother of Alberic the second was daughter to Henry de Essex.
[124] “And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel, and of the chesnut tree, and peeled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods. And he set the rods, which he had peeled, before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs, when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink. And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle speckled and spotted.”—Gen. xxx.
[125a] Owen Gwynedd, the son of Gruffydd ap Conan, died in 1169, and was buried at Bangor. When Baldwin, during his progress, visited Bangor and saw his tomb, he charged the bishop (Guy Ruffus) to remove the body out of the cathedral, when he had a fit opportunity so to do, in regard that archbishop Becket had excommunicated him heretofore, because he had married his first cousin, the daughter of Grono ap Edwyn, and that notwithstanding he had continued to live with her till she died. The bishop, in obedience to the charge, made a passage from the vault through the south wall of the church underground, and thus secretly shoved the body into the churchyard.—Hengwrt. MSS. Cadwalader brother of Owen Gwynedd, died in 1172.
[125b] The Merlin here mentioned was called Ambrosius, and according to the Cambrian Biography flourished about the middle of the fifth century. Other authors say, that this reputed prophet and magician was the son of a Welsh nun, daughter of a king of Demetia, and born at Caermarthen, and that he was made king of West Wales by Vortigern, who then reigned in Britain.
[126] Owen Gwynedd “left behind him manie children gotten by diverse women, which were not esteemed by their mothers and birth, but by their prowes and valiantnesse.” By his first wife, Gladus, the daughter of Llywarch ap Trahaern ap Caradoc, he had Orwerth Drwyndwn, that is, Edward with the broken nose; for which defect he was deemed unfit to preside over the principality of North Wales and was deprived of his rightful inheritance, which was seized by his brother David, who occupied it for the space of twenty-four years.
[128a] The travellers pursuing their journey along the sea coast, crossed the æstuary of the river Conway under Deganwy, a fortress of very remote antiquity.
[128b] At this period the Cistercian monastery of Conway was in its infancy, for its foundation has been attributed to Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, in the year 1185, (only three years previous to Baldwin’s visitation,) who endowed it with very extensive possessions and singular privileges. Like Stratflur, this abbey was the repository of the national records, and the mausoleum of many of its princes.
[129a] [David was the illegitimate son of Owen Gwynedd, and had dispossessed his brother, Iorwerth Drwyndwn.]
[129b] This ebbing spring in the province of Tegeingl, or Flintshire, has been placed by the old annotator on Giraldus at Kilken, which Humphrey Llwyd, in his Breviary, also mentions.
[129c] See before, the Topography of Ireland, Distinc. ii. c. 7.