A Book of North Wales

by S. Baring-Gould

Matholwch was furious at the insult, and was with difficulty appeased by Bran giving him a silver rod as tall as himself and a plate of gold as wide as his face, and by assuring him that the outrage had been committed without his knowledge and against his wishes.

Then Matholwch sailed away with his bride. In the course of a year she bore him a son, whom she called Gwern. Now the story of the insult offered to their king circulated in Ireland, and this produced very bitter feeling against the queen, and Matholwch was himself so turned against her that he degraded her to be cook in his palace.

Bronwen reared a starling in the cover of the kneading trough, and wrote a letter telling her woes, and tied it to a feather of the bird’s wing, and let it fly. The bird departed and reached Caer Seiont, or Carnarvon, where King Bran then was, lighted on his shoulder and ruffled its plumes, and, discovering the letter, he detached and read it. Then, in great wrath, he collected a force and manned a fleet, and sailed to Ireland to revenge the wrongs offered to his sister.

Matholwch, unprepared to resist, invited him to a conference and a banquet, and in compensation for the wrongs offered to raise his own son Gwern to the throne, and to abdicate.

Now at the banquet the boy Gwern entered the hall, and for his beauty and courtesy was by all admired and fondled save by the malevolent Evnyssien, who, when the lad came before him, suddenly grasped him by head and feet and flung him into the fire that burned before them. When Bronwen saw her child in the flames she endeavoured to spring in after him, but was restrained by her brother Bran and another, between whom she was seated.

This shocking act of violence caused a general fight between the Welsh and the Irish. Evnyssien fell and many others on the side of Bran, who was obliged to retreat to his ships and escape over the sea to Britain, wounded in the foot in the fray by a poisoned dart.

On reaching Wales Bran felt that he was death-struck, and he commanded that his head should be cut off and taken to London, and buried on the White Mount, where is now the Tower, and that the face should be set towards France. Bronwen, who had escaped, soon after died of a broken heart. “Woe is me!” she said, “that ever I was born; for two islands have been destroyed because of me!”

She was buried in Anglesey, in a spot since called Ynys Bronwen. In 1813 the traditional grave was opened.

“A farmer, living on the banks of the Alaw, having occasion for stones to make some addition to his farm-buildings, and having observed a stone or two peeping through the turf of a circular elevation on a flat not far from the river, was induced to examine it, where, after paring off the turf, he came to a considerable heap of stones, or carnedd, covered with earth, which he removed with some degree of caution, and got to a cist formed of coarse flags canted and covered over. On removing the lid, he found it contained an urn placed with its mouth downwards, full of ashes and half-calcined fragments of bone.”

In the Mabinogion the grave is thus described:—