Cadwallader, the last of the Pendragons, was a terrible enemy to the kings of Mercia and Northumbria, and with him the Cymry consider that their glory ended. Looking on themselves for generation after generation as the lawful owners of the soil, and on the Saxons as robbers, they showed no mercy in their forays, and inflicted frightful cruelties on their neighbors on the Marches. Offa’s curious dyke, still existing in Shropshire, was a bulwark raised in the hope of confining them within their own bounds:
“That Offa (when he saw his countries go to wrack), From bick’ring with his folk, to keep the Britons back, Cast up that mightly mound of eighty miles in length, Athwart from sea to sea.”
The Danish invasions, by ruining the Saxons, favored the Welsh; and contemporary with Alfred lived Roderic Mawr, or the Great, who had his domains in so peaceful a state, that Alfred turned thither for aid in his revival of learning, and invited thence to his court his bosom friend Asser, the excellent monk and bard. Roderic divided his dominions—Aberfraw, or North Wales, Dinasvawr, or South Wales, and Powys, or Shropshire—between his three sons; but they became united again under his grandson, Howell Dha, the lawgiver of Wales.
Actuated perhaps by the example of Alfred, Howell collected his clergy and bards at his hunting-lodge at Tenby, a palace built of peeled rods, and there, after fasting and praying for inspiration, the collective wisdom of the kingdom compiled a body of laws, which the King afterward carried in person to Rome to receive the confirmation of the Pope; and much edified must the Romans have been if they chanced to glance over the code, since, besides many wise and good laws, it regulated the minute etiquettes and perquisites of the royal household. If any one should insult the King, the fine was to be, among other valuables, a golden dish as broad as the royal face, and as thick as the nail of a husbandman who has been a husbandman, seven years. Each officer’s distance from the royal fire was regulated, and even the precedence of each officer’s horse in the stable—proving plainly the old saying, that the poorer and more fiery is a nation, the more precise is their point of honor. It seems to have been in his time, as a more enlightened prince, that the Welsh conformed their time of keeping Easter to that of the rest of the Western Church. But Howell was no longer independent of the English: he had begun to pay a yearly tribute of dogs, horses, and hawks, to Ethelstane, and the disputes that followed his death brought the Welsh so much lower, that Edgar the Peaceable easily exacted his toll of wolves’ heads; and Howell of North Wales was one of the eight royal oarsmen who rowed the Emperor of Britain to the Minster of St. John, on the river Dee.
The Welsh had destroyed all their wolves before the close of Dunstan’s regency, and Ethelred the Unready not being likely to obtain much respect, the tribute was discontinued, until the marauding Danes again exacted it under another form and title of “Tribute of the Black Army.”
Fierce quarrels of their own prevented the Welsh from often taking advantage of the disturbances of England. As in Ireland, the right of gavelkind was recognized; yet primogeniture was also so far regarded as to make both claims uncertain; and the three divisions of Wales were constantly being first partitioned, and then united, by some prince who ruled by the right of the strongest, till dethroned by another, who, to prove his right of birth, carried half his genealogy in his patronymic.
Thus Llewellyn ap Sithfylht, under whom “the earth brought forth double, the cattle increased in great number, and there was neither beggar nor poor man from the South to the North Sea,” was slain in battle, in 1021, by Howell ap Edwin ap Eneon ap Owayn ap Howell Dha, who reigned over South Wales till the son of Llewellyn, or, rather, Gryflyth ap Llewellyn ap Sithfylht ap, &c., coming to age, dispossessed him, and gained all Wales. It was this Gryffyth who received and sheltered Fleance, the son of Banquo, when flying from Macbeth, and gave him in marriage his daughter Nesta, who became the mother of Walter, the ancestor of the line of kings shadowed in Macbeth’s mirror.
In the early part of Gryffyth’s reign, the Welsh flourished greatly. Earl Godwin, in his banishment, made friends with him, and, favored by Saxon treachery, he overran Herefordshire, and pillaged the cathedral. But, after Godwin’s death, Harold, as Earl of Wessex, deemed it time to repress these inroads, and, training his men to habits of diet and methods of warfare that rendered them as light and dexterous as the wild mountaineers, he pursued them into their own country, and burnt the palace and ships at Rhuddlan, while Gryffyth was forced to take refuge in one of his vessels.
Harold set up a pillar with the inscription, “Here Harold conquered;” and the Welsh gave hostages, and promised to pay tribute, while Harold erected a hunting-seat in Monmouthshire, and made an ordinance that any Welshman seen bearing weapons beyond Offa’s dyke should lose his right hand. Welshwomen might marry Englishmen, but none of the highborn Cymry might aspire to wed an Englishwoman. Hating the prince under whom they had come to so much disgrace, the Welsh themselves captured poor Gryffyth, and sent his head, his hands, and the beak of his ship, to Edward the Confessor, from whom they accepted the appointment of three of their native princes to the three provinces.
Thus the strength of Wales was so far broken, that William the Conqueror had only to bring a force with him, under pretext of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. David, to obtain the submission of the princes; and, in fact, the Cymry found the Norman nobles far more aggressive neighbors than the Angles had been since their first arrival in Britain.