With the death of Llewelyn the rebellion instantly collapsed, except that his brother Davydd, who had once betrayed him, kept up a show of resistance in the heart of Snowdonia. But in March 1284 he was betrayed and captured, and sent by Edward in chains to Shrewsbury to abide his trial. Davydd was unquestionably a bad man; but it is difficult to conceive of any degree of turpitude meriting the dreadful penalties which were inflicted upon him. A special Parliament was summoned to meet at Shrewsbury; and it was this body, representing, as we may fairly assume that it did, the finest intellect and character in the England of the day, that, sitting in cold blood, condemned the hapless prisoner to be drawn at the tails of horses through the streets of Shrewsbury, to be hanged, to be disembowelled while still alive, then to be quartered and beheaded. English historians have been known to contrast the superior civilization of the England of Edward I with the barbarity of the Wales of Llewelyn. One might well invite them to think the matter over afresh in the light of the doings of the Parliament of Shrewsbury. About the native Welsh princes, Owen M. Edwards has finely and truly said that "they had never tortured a prisoner, or betrayed a guest, or wreaked inhuman vengeance on a fallen enemy."

Wales was now conquered, and the "English Justinian" could proceed with the task of organization. In this work he was keenly interested, as is vouched for by the fact that he spent the greater part of the succeeding two years in the country. From Rhuddlan, in 1284, he issued the great Statute of Wales which, until the changes wrought by Henry VIII, remained the foundation upon which the government of Wales rested. The shire principle was extended. In the north Anglesey, Carnarvon, and Merioneth were made into shires, under the jurisdiction of the Justice of Snowdon. Likewise Flint became a shire under the jurisdiction of the Justice of Chester. In the south Cardigan and Carmarthen were made shires under the Justice of South Wales. There were to be County Courts as in England; and twice every year the new official, the sheriff, was to make his tourn through the commotes. The main body of Welsh law was to remain in force; but it was subject to a good deal of modification. For the protection of the land, and especially for the subjugation of Llewelyn's stronghold of Gwynedd, a circle of the newly-devised concentric castles was built—Conway, Beaumaris, Carnarvon, Criccieth, and Harlech. In order to break the old tribal system, and in order to anglicise the population as much as possible, the growth of towns was encouraged. These were given special privileges by Royal Charter. Cardigan, Builth, Montgomery, Welshpool, Rhuddlan, Aberystwyth, Carnarvon, Conway, Criccieth, Harlech, Caerwys, Beaumaris, and Newburgh were among those which received charters from Edward I; while Edward II gave charters to Bala, Llanfyllin, Cardiff, Usk, Caerleon, Newport, Cowbridge, and Neath.

In 1284 Edward, accompanied by his wife Eleanor, made a tour of the Principality. At the beginning of the tour Edward, the first English Prince of Wales, had been born; and, according to tradition, had been presented by his father publicly to the people of Carnarvon. From Carnarvon the royal progress wended its way to Nevin, where a splendid tournament was held. From Nevin it proceeded to Aberystwyth, and thence to St. David, and finally to Bristol.

But Edward was destined never to find rest in his relations with either Scotland or Wales. In 1294 a rebellion broke out, caused by the injustice of the new sheriffs. It was fairly general, breaking out simultaneously in Dyfed in Glamorgan, and in the North. Again the king led an army to Conway; and in a comparatively short time the rebellion was quelled. It was not, however, altogether fruitless. Edward seems to have realised that his policy was goading the country into revolt, and that a greater measure of clemency would serve his interests better. At all events administration became, for a time at least, more pure and less harsh. The last attempt to win independence for Wales in the reign of Edward I was, curiously enough, made by a Norman lord, Sir Thomas Turberville. He entered into an agreement with the French, by which he was to bring Wales to their assistance in their war against England, the reward for this service being the Principality itself. Before anything had been done, however, the plot was discovered; and Turberville's head was placed to rot on the Tower of London.

The question whether the Edwardian conquest was a benefit or a misfortune to Wales in the long run is one to which no certain answer can be given. In so far as it put an end to the rivalries and the internecine strife which, for centuries, had convulsed the land, it was an unalloyed blessing. But there were signs that Welshmen had already learnt the lesson of the past; and that they were willing, without the drastic measures applied to them from without, to set their own house in order. The multiplication of small States is now, no doubt, an evil; but the same cannot be said with confidence about the Middle Ages. The assertion of writers, unable themselves to read a line of Welsh, that the culture of England in the latter half of the thirteenth century was superior to that of Wales is certainly untrue. Indeed the direct contrary is the fact. Welsh literature, both prose and poetry, was far ahead of that of England; and the Welsh language had attained a decidedly higher stage of development. Welsh customs were "barbarous" only in the sense in which all that is strange is considered barbarous by the man of insular mind. We have now learned (and it is our good fortune that we have learned) that a nation can live its own free life of the mind and the spirit while forming, for political purposes, part of a larger body called a State; but it does not follow that, in the thirteenth century, a nation could exist at all without enjoying a large measure of political independence, if not sovereignty itself. Llewelyn may have been crafty, proud, and impulsive; but it is equally true that Edward was harsh, perfidious, and a narrow legalist always thinking in terms of strict feudal law. His plea that the amending or abrogating of Welsh laws was for the good of the Welsh people themselves is the excuse which strong empires have always made use of when seeking to justify the subjugation and assimilation of small nations. He talked much about justice; but this justice, which sounded so fair in theory, resolved itself in practice into the oppression and cruelty of ruthless and unsympathetic foreign officials. At heart what Edward most desired was not that Welshmen should remain Welshmen and be at peace with him, but that they should as quickly as possible be turned into Englishmen. It has been noted that in the towns which Edward founded in Wales English was the language of the people down to the close of the sixteenth century.

CHAPTER VII
CALM BEFORE THE STORM

With the death of Edward I Wales settled down to a long period of comparative tranquillity. The next eighty years were as peaceful a time as the unhappy country had enjoyed for centuries. Edward II was now on the throne of England; and his Welsh birth, his mild disposition, and his obvious desire to deal justly with the Principality caused him to be regarded with trust and even with affection. On two occasions during the reign the new Welsh shires were allowed to send representatives to the English Parliament. All forms of lawlessness were sternly repressed. The consequence was that the Welsh people began, as they had never done before, to turn their attention to trade and the accumulation of wealth. The fourteenth century witnessed a great increase in industry and commerce all over Western Europe, and both England and Wales participated in the increase. Edward III conferred a most precious benefit upon Wales by bringing it within the scope of the Statute of Staple. In 1332 Shrewsbury and Carmarthen were constituted staple towns for the Principality. Then came the Black Death, which swept over England and Wales in the year 1349. The amount of immediate distress which it occasioned was immense; but some of its results were good. The fact that among the labouring classes the rate of mortality had been something like fifty per cent. made labour very scarce; and in spite of the efforts of Parliament to control the situation by means of Statutes of Labourers, the economic and social position of the villeins was immensely improved. But it was not in Wales only that Welshmen were bettering their position; they were covering themselves with glory on all the great battlefields of Europe. The fourteenth century was the age of the long bow; with it the finest victories of the Hundred Years' War were won; and the home of the long bow was Wales. The weapon had been in use for a long time in border wars, and its superiority to the cross bow had been clearly demonstrated. The Black Prince, who became Prince of Wales in 1343, was immensely popular in the Principality, and a large body of archers and spearmen from Wales followed him to the French wars. At Crécy there were five thousand Welsh troops; and it was at the close of that battle that the Prince assumed the crest and the motto which ever since have been worn by all Princes of Wales. No lover of English literature is ever likely to forget the pages in which Shakespeare has drawn an amusing but kindly caricature of the Welshmen who distinguished themselves on the field of Agincourt. But it was not only in the armies of their own sovereign that Welshmen were to be found; they were, throughout the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, among the most famous mercenary troops in Europe. Many of them fought in the French armies against the Black Prince and against Henry V. Owen of Wales, the friend of the great condottiere Bertrand du Guesclin, won much fame as the leader of a Free Company. This Owen, however, was much more than a successful mercenary captain: he remembered the land of his birth; and the great ambition of his life was to win back Welsh independence with the assistance of France and Spain.

The Black Death had very adversely affected the monastic life of Wales. Even in the thirteenth century—the golden age of monasticism—Wales was too poor a country to support such princely foundations as Fountains or St. Albans. Its monasteries were, for the most part, small, drawing what wealth they possessed from acres of barren mountain land. As we have already seen, Wales, from the first coming of Christianity into the country, had its monastic foundations. So far back as the sixth century, those of Bangor Iscoed and Llantwit Major were famous throughout Christendom. The rule of St. Benedict, which dates from that century, seems to have found much favour in Wales; for in South Wales alone there were some fifteen Benedictine houses, one of them being an abbey, and the remaining ones priories. Soon, however, these priories fell into evil odour; for they were "alien" in the sense that they belonged to some foreign abbey whose abbot used them merely for the purpose of augmenting his revenues. The great Cluniac reformation of the tenth century had singularly little influence upon the religious life of Wales, and only three priories were established in the country. The lives of the monks who inhabited them were notoriously lax, and gave considerable scandal even in that age of easy morals. It was the Cistercian Order, however, that seems to have won the religious heart of the Welsh people. All the most famous religious houses in Wales—Strata Florida, Strata Marcella, Aberconway, Valle Crucis, Basingwerk, Cwm Hir, Margam, Whitland, Neath, Dore, Grace Dieu, Tintern, Cymer, and Llantarnan—were Cistercian. For the most part the monks favoured the cause of national independence. They were not great scholars, nor did any particular sanctity pertain to their lives; but they were excellent farmers, their conduct was at least decent, they were witnesses after their fashion to the value of the spiritual life, and they occasionally wrote chronicles like the Annales Cambriæ and the Brut which are invaluable to the historian of to-day.