When dawns the day on Cambry,
Great Arthur forth will sally
Alive to work her weal!
Not so with regard to the hopes associated with the name of Owen Lawgoch; for we have it on Gwynionyđ’s testimony, p. 464, that our old baledwyr or ballad men used to sing about him at Welsh fairs: it is not in the least improbable that they still do so here and there, unless the horrors of the ghastly murder last reported in the newspapers have been found to pay better. At any rate Mr. Fisher (p. 379) has known old people in his native district in the Ỻychwr Valley who could repeat stanzas or couplets from the ballads in question. He traces these scraps to a booklet entitled Merlin’s Prophecy[19], together with a brief history of his life, taken from the Book of Prognostication. This little book bears no date, but appears to have been published in the early part of the nineteenth century. It is partly in prose, dealing briefly with the history of Merlin the Wild or Silvaticus, and the rest consists of two poems. The first of these poems is entitled Dechreu Darogan Myrđin, ‘the Beginning of Merlin’s Prognostication,’ and is made up of forty-nine verses, several of which speak of Owen as king conquering all his foes and driving out the Saxons: then in the forty-seventh stanza comes the couplet which says, that this Owen is Henry the Ninth, who is tarrying in a foreign land. The other poem is of a more general character, and is entitled the Second Song of Merlin’s Prognostication, and consists of twenty-six stanzas of four lines each like the previous one; but the third stanza describes Arthur’s bell at Caerỻeon, ‘Caerleon,’ ringing with great vigour to herald the coming of Owen; and the seventh stanza begins with the following couplet:—
Ceir gweled Owen Law-goch yn d’od i Frydain Fawr,
Ceir gweled newyn ceiniog yn nhref Gaerỻeon-gawr.
Owen Lawgoch one shall to Britain coming see,
And dearth of pennies find at Chester on the Dee.
It closes with the date in verse at the end, to wit, 1668, which takes us back to very troublous times: 1668 was the year of the Triple Alliance of England, Sweden, and Holland against Louis XIV; and it was not long after the Plague had raged, and London had had its Great Fire. So it is a matter of no great surprise if some people in Wales had a notion that the power of England was fast nearing its end, and that the baledwyr thought it opportune to refurbish and adapt some of Merlin’s prophecies as likely to be acceptable to the peasantry of South Wales. At all events we have no reason to suppose that the two poems which have here been described from Mr. Fisher’s data represented either the gentry of Wales, whose ordinary speech was probably for the most part English, or the bardic fraternity, who would have looked with contempt at the language and style of the Prognostication. For, apart from careless printing, this kind of literature can lay no claim to merit in point of diction or of metre. Such productions represent probably the baledwyr and the simple country people, such as still listen in rapt attention to them doing at Welsh fairs and markets what they are pleased to regard as singing. All this fits in well enough with the folklore of the caves, such as the foregoing stories represent it. Here I may add that I am informed by Mr. Craigfryn Hughes of a tradition that Arthur and his men are biding their time near Caerleon on the Usk, to wit, in a cave resembling generally those described in the foregoing legends. He also mentions a tradition as to Owen Glyndwr—so he calls him, though it is unmistakably the Owen of the baledwyr who have been referred to by Mr. Fisher—that he and his men are similarly slumbering in a cave in Craig Gwrtheyrn, in Carmarthenshire. That is a spot in the neighbourhood of Ỻandyssil, consisting of an elevated field terminating on one side in a sharp declivity, with the foot of the rock laved by the stream of the Teifi. Craig Gwrtheyrn means Vortigern’s Rock, and it is one of the sites with which legend associates the name of that disreputable old king. I am not aware that it shows any traces of ancient works, but it looks at a distance an ideal site for an old fortification. An earlier prophecy about Owen Lawgoch than any of these occurs, as kindly pointed out to me by Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans, in the Peniarth MS. 94 (= Hengwrt MS. 412, p. 23), and points back possibly to the last quarter of the fourteenth century. See also one quoted by him, from the Mostyn MS. 133, in his Report on MSS. in the Welsh Language, i. 106. Probably many more such prophecies might be discovered if anybody undertook to make a systematic search for them.
But who was Owen Lawgoch, if there ever was such a man? Such a man there was undoubtedly; for we read in one of the documents printed in the miscellaneous volume commonly known as the Record of Carnarvon, that at a court held at Conway in the forty-fourth year of Edward III a certain Gruffyđ Says was adjudged to forfeit all the lands which he held in Anglesey to the Prince of Wales—who was at that time no other than Edward the Black Prince—for the reason that the said Gruffyđ had been an adherent of Owen: adherens fuisset Owino Lawegogh (or Lawgogh) inimico et proditori predicti domini Principis et de consilio predicti Owyni ad mouendam guerram in Wallia contra predictum dominum Principem[20]. How long previously it had been attempted to begin a war on behalf of this Owen Lawgoch one cannot say, but it so happens that at this time there was a captain called Yeuwains, Yewains, or Yvain de Gales or Galles, ‘Owen of Wales,’ fighting on the French side against the English in Edward’s Continental wars. Froissart in his Chronicles has a great deal to say of him, for he distinguished himself greatly on various critical occasions. From the historian’s narrative one finds that Owen had escaped when a boy to the court of Philip VI of France, who received him with great favour and had him educated with his own nephews. Froissart’s account of him is, that the king of England, Edward III, had slain his father and given his lordship and principality to his own son as Prince of Wales; and Froissart gives Owen’s father’s name as Aymon, which should mean Edmond, unless the name intended may have been rather Einion. However that may have been, Owen was engaged in the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, and when peace was made he went to serve in Lombardy; but when war between England and France broke out again in 1369, he returned to France. He sometimes fought on sea and sometimes on land, but he was always entrusted by the French king, who was now Charles V, with important commands[21]. Thus in 1372 he was placed at the head of a flotilla with 3,000 men, and ordered to operate against the English: he made a descent on the Isle of Guernsey[22], and while there besieging the castle of Cornet, he was charged by the king of France to sail to Spain to invite the king of Castile to send his fleet again to help in the attack on La Rochelle. Whilst staying at Santander the earl of Pembroke was brought thither, having been taken prisoner in the course of the destruction of the English fleet before La Rochelle. Owen, on seeing the earl of Pembroke, asks him with bitterness if he is come there to do him homage for his land, of which he had taken possession in Wales. He threatens to avenge himself on him as soon as he can, and also on the earl of Hereford and Edward Spencer, for it was by the fathers of these three men, he said, his own father had been betrayed to death. Edward III died in 1377, and the Black Prince had died shortly before. Owen survived them both, and was actively engaged in the siege of Mortagne sur Mer in Poitou, when he was assassinated by one Lamb, who had insinuated himself into his service and confidence, partly by pretending to bring him news about his native land and telling him that all Wales was longing to have him back to be the lord of his country—et lui fist acroire que toute li terre de Gales le desiroient mout à ravoir à seigneur. So Owen fell in the year 1378, and was buried at the church of Saint-Léger[23] while Lamb returned to the English to receive his stipulated pay. When this happened Owen’s namesake, Owen Glyndwr, was nearly thirty years of age. The latter was eventually to assert with varying fortune on several fields of battle in this country the claims of his elder kinsman, who, by virtue of his memory in France, would seem to have rendered it easy for the later Owen to enter into friendly relations with the French court of his day[24].