A Book of North Wales

by S. Baring-Gould

This outrage was the occasion of civil war. Gerald of Windsor, with his followers, raged against the Welsh, destroying all around them with fire and sword. Two uncles of Owen, Ithel and Madog, were goaded on by the unscrupulous Bishop of London to take up arms and kill or capture Owen and his father, the king of Powys, who was guiltless of connivance in the abduction of Nest. Two other Welsh princes associated themselves with Ithel and Madog, urged by revenge, as Owen had killed their brothers; and these foes solemnly vowed to bring Owen and his father, alive or dead, to the bishop, who was at Shrewsbury. They marched into Ceredigion, laying waste the country as they went, and unless the inhabitants had been forewarned all would have been butchered. The day before these blood-thirsty human hunters reached the coast Owen had fled to Ireland, and Ceredigion was devastated, every house and church burnt, and every human being come across was massacred.

Cadwgan appealed to King Henry, protesting his innocence, and at last the English king consented to allow him to return to desolated Ceredigion, but exacted from him a fine; however, he allowed Ithel and Madog to keep possession of Powys.

Owen, hearing that his father had made peace with King Henry, returned from Ireland, but his father refused to see him. Owen went off into Powys and managed to patch up a reconciliation with Madog, who had lately sought his life as the murderer of his brothers. The recent enemies met and swore a solemn oath of perpetual friendship and of united hostility to the King of England. Owen, with a party of ruffians who had come with him from Ireland, now entered his father’s territories in Ceredigion, and thence made a series of marauding visits into Dyfed, using for the purpose the ships in which he had crossed from Ireland. In one of these he killed a Bishop William of the Flemings, who was on his way to the English court. The news reached King Henry whilst Cadwgan was with him on some business connected with the settlement of Welsh affairs. The King, exasperated to the last degree, bitterly reproached Cadwgan for not restraining this wild son of his, and at once despatched troops to chastise Owen, who immediately fled to Ireland.

Cadwgan was suffered to return to Powys, but was there assassinated by Madog, his son’s ally, who at once hastened to announce the news to the Bishop of London, and was received with favour.

Owen hurried back from Ireland; Madog was caught in an ambush, and Owen put out his eyes with red-hot irons.

Curiously enough, now King Henry received Owen into his favour, and took him as a companion to Normandy, where he acquitted himself gallantly, and was knighted by the King. On his return to England Henry sent him into Wales with a commission and promises of favour and assurances of confidence. But Gerald of Windsor was awaiting his opportunity. Owen on entering Wales began to butcher and burn with the utmost barbarity, and some peasants who escaped informed Gerald as to his whereabouts. Gerald hastened to intercept him, surrounded him, and Owen was pierced to the heart with an arrow.

A run of half an hour by train takes us to Corwen, a dingy little town at the junction of the line to Ruthin and Rhyl. Lying under steep mountains to the south, it comes off scantily for sun in winter.

Here the church has been rebuilt in very bad taste, with hideous plate-tracery in the windows, and a cumbrous French “Gothic” arcade within. The English and French architects of the Middle Ages started with different conceptions as to how to deal with the arch and the capital of the pillar on which it rested. The Frenchman made of his arch a hole bored in slabs of stone with sharp angles. If he had to sustain it on a circular drum of a pillar, he accommodated the capital to the arch by taking the Ionic crown as his type and reproducing the horns at the corners which serve as supports to the four angles of the arch resting on it.

But the English architect saw how crude and harsh and unpleasant to the eye was the bald, sharp-angled arch, and he bevelled it away, substituting delicate mouldings, and the section of the block of masonry at the spring of the arch was now not a parallelogram, but a hexagon. There was accordingly no need for the Ionic horns, and he treated his capital as a basket of flowers or foliage, or as a bowl wreathed round with leaves. This is infinitely more beautiful.