A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (31 page)

But the prince did not need to meet the English army head on to see it defeated. Geography could do that for him. Wales, it bears repeating, was ‘not of easy access’. The same physical obstacles that limited Llywelyn’s dreams of expansion – marsh, forest and mountain – also served, in the final analysis, to protect the core of his power. What nature had made difficult, moreover, man might make doubly so. During the previous English invasion of 1257 Llywelyn had gone to great lengths to obstruct his enemy’s advance. Holes had been dug in the middle of fords to render them impassable; meadows had been ploughed up; bridges had been broken. The prince, so it was said, had even destroyed the mills of his homeland rather than see them used to grind corn to feed an English army.
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No doubt similar preparations were made in 1277. But, whatever else he might have done, the fact was that Llywelyn had already ensured that this new invasion would face far greater difficulties than its precursor. The destruction of the castles at Dyserth and Deganwy meant that Edward had no secure bases at which to aim his army. Everything west of Chester was hostile terrain that afforded neither shelter nor safe haven. In this environment, unforgiving and inhospitable, even the greatest armies might become entangled or bogged down, and once that had happened the eerie silence might suddenly be broken by the noise of a surprise attack. The Welsh might have lacked the latest military hardware, but they themselves were famously fierce and fearsome. Dressed in leather, armed with bows, arrows and spears, they would sweep down on their enemies, catching them unawares and wreaking havoc, before retreating with equal swiftness into the woods and hills. Such guerrilla tactics had served them well against would-be invaders for centuries. They were precisely the tactics by which a small nation might defeat a superpower.
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Edward was determined to avoid such a fate. Well aware of the challenges presented by the terrain he wished to traverse, he had already devised a strategy by which it would be tamed. The essential feature of his plan was new and better castles. Since early June royal agents had been busy recruiting hundreds of masons, carpenters, diggers and woodsmen, and this separate army of workers now marched with the main host as it advanced from Chester to the edge of hostile territory. Their first stop was a spur of rock on the estuary of the River Dee, which they christened ‘the Flint’. Work began immediately on the castle that has borne that name ever since.
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Protection was the first priority. More than half the 1,850 or so men engaged in the initial stages of construction were diggers, who laboured to create huge ditches around the site, ‘for the security of the king and his company’. Speed was also of the essence. Almost all of the initial building work was carried out in timber; carpenters outnumbered masons by more than two to one.
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Once again, however, speed was not all it might have been. Despite the impressively large workforce, it is clear that not enough building materials had been gathered in advance. At the end of July, by which point Edward had already been at Flint for over a week, trees were still being felled in the forests of Cheshire for use at the castle. The king was therefore obliged to retrace his steps in the direction of Chester in order to hasten the shipment of further supplies. The fact that his journey was a short one only served to emphasise how little had been achieved thus far. One month on from the muster, one week since beginning his assault, and Edward had advanced all of twelve miles.
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In the south things were moving faster. Edmund of Lancaster and his army had set out from their base at Carmarthen at some point after 10 July, and in the space of the fortnight that followed had driven more than fifty miles through the valleys of the Welsh interior. By 25 July they had reached Aberystwyth, their intended goal on the western coast. Their progress was, of course, considerably easier than that of their allies at Chester. The landscape of south Wales was no more forgiving in physical terms, but politically it had already been surrendered. Those Welsh lords who had not sought the king’s peace earlier in the year now fled north at the advent of his younger brother, leaving their lands to be conquered, and seeking sanctuary in Snowdonia with Llywelyn. Consequently there was little for Edmund to do by the end of July except consolidate his gains. At the start of August, another new royal castle was founded at Aberystwyth. Men and materials were shipped around the coast from Bristol to facilitate its speedy construction.
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Meanwhile, back in the north, a similar naval exercise was under way. Great quantities of timber were being sent from Chester to Flint, some of it on large rafts constructed specially for the purpose. At the castle site itself, diggers were encouraged to work harder by the payment of bonuses ‘by the king’s gift’. For those in charge the sense of urgency was doubtless compounded by the fact that the sailors of the Cinque Ports now had to be paid as well, their period of obligatory service having already expired.
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Yet if the man who was ultimately in charge was concerned about the rising costs and the lapse of time, he did an excellent job of disguising it. Edward was naturally anxious that the business in Wales be expedited as quickly as possible – that much is proved by his itinerary during the first half of August, which shows him touring those areas (the Wirral and the Mersey estuary) where requisitioning was most intense. His movements at this time, however, also reveal a characteristic assuredness; a calm confidence that enabled him, at a moment when his resources already seemed stretched, to extend them further still, and in a rather different direction.
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Until this point, the king had still done little to further his youthful vow to build a great Cistercian abbey. The site he had sponsored before departing on crusade, Darnhall, had proved unsuitable, and the project had been left to languish. Now, on the eve of another great military adventure, Edward clearly felt that it ought to be revived. In the middle of the first fortnight of August, therefore, he abandoned his logistical concerns and travelled to the eastern edge of the lordship of Cheshire. On 8 August the court was stopped near Northwich, and it was probably on the following day, a Sunday, that they came to the empty place on the banks of the River Weaver where the king’s new abbey was to be founded.

The occasion was deliberately grand and participatory as well as solemn. Surrounded by an assembly of his greatest subjects, Edward himself laid the first stone on the spot where the high altar was to be built. Eleanor laid the second and third – for herself, and for their son, Alfonso. Other stones were then placed by a long line of nobles, including the earls of Gloucester, Cornwall, Surrey and Warwick. The king’s friend and chancellor, Robert Burnell, celebrated mass, emphasising that the event was above all a pious act, intended to bring God’s blessing on their enterprise in Wales. At the same time it was a bold statement of Edward’s own power. His new abbey was laid out to be the largest of its kind in Britain, bigger than its sister house at Fountains in Yorkshire, an equal for his father’s house at Westminster. He named it Vale Royal, intending (so its historian later asserted) ‘that no monastery should be more royal in liberties, wealth, and honour’.
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Back at Flint, work progressed apace in anticipation of the king’s imminent return. The timber shipped from Chester was being raised, and the workforce was still increasing in number. The same day, 9 August, that Edward was at Vale Royal, a further 300 diggers arrived from Lincolnshire at the castle site. They were brought under armed escort, ‘lest they should flee on the road’, as well they might, given the hazardous nature of their assignment. For the next stage of his advance the king had to pass through the interior of the Four Cantrefs, and what one English chronicler called ‘a forest of such denseness that the royal army could by no means penetrate without danger’. Edward, of course, had no intention of taking any such risks. In advance of his arrival, the workmen, guarded by the men with crossbows and supervised by certain household knights, were charged with the task of cutting back the enveloping trees. In this way, as the same chronicler explained, ‘the king opened out for himself a very broad road’, and he may have had little scope for exaggeration. When, some years later, Edward introduced similar road-widening measures in England, for similar reasons (‘so that there may be no ditch, underwood or bushes where one could hide with evil intent’), he required clearance and levelling ‘within two hundred feet of the road on either side’. This conjures the arresting image of the king’s workforce in Wales (assuming similar standards were applied) cutting and burning a path some 400 feet wide – around four times the width of a three-lane motorway.
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By the time, therefore, that Edward returned to Flint on 18 August, almost everything was ready. Infantry were at last starting to rise to respectable levels. The new road must have been well advanced. The king and his army were finally ready to embark on their major offensive. Only one question remained.

To what end were they about to march? Did they go to conquer Gwynedd or merely to punish its disobedient prince? One man, above all, who wanted clarification on this issue was Dafydd ap Gruffudd. Llywelyn’s treacherous younger brother had at first been pleased to have Edward’s support in his lifelong struggle for a share of his patrimony, but latterly he had begun to appreciate its inherent disadvantages. The English military and political establishment, once up in arms, acquired a momentum and an agenda of its own. If there was land to be conquered, the king and his greatest subjects would inevitably want their share. According to the earl of Warwick, who wrote to Edward on the matter, Dafydd was becoming dangerously disaffected, already irked by what he perceived as the diminution of his rights to payment and booty.

The king took heed, and sought to reassure Dafydd by issuing a formal statement of his intentions. According to this document, their aim was indeed the outright conquest of Gwynedd and, by implication, the deposition of Llywelyn. In future, north-west Wales would be shared. Dafydd would, at last, receive his portion, as would his other brother, Owain. But, as the document also made plain, the matter would not end there. Edward, not unnaturally, intended to keep a large slice of whatever was conquered for himself, and he further expected that both Dafydd and Owain would attend his parliaments at Westminster, ‘just like our other earls and barons’. Whether Dafydd was satisfied with this proposal is a moot point. Another is whether Edward was entirely in earnest. His promise to Dafydd was only a piece of parchment that sketched out a future yet to be realised. Its date of issue – 23 August – suggests a temporary expedient for appeasing an unstable ally at a crucial moment in the campaign. That same day, Edward and his army set out.
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If there was hard fighting it took place in the course of the week that followed. English chronicle accounts are sparse, and tend to give the impression of an easy progress. One speaks of the king advancing along his newly cut road ‘in triumph’, but concedes that it had to be occupied ‘by strong attacks’. On the first day out from Flint, the army moved some fifteen miles to Rhuddlan, a settlement on the River Clwyd, two miles downstream from the cathedral town of St Asaph. The bishop there, no friend of Llywelyn, was nevertheless appalled by the onslaught of Edward’s war machine, and complained to the archbishop of Canterbury about the destruction of church property, sacrilege and rape carried out by English soldiers. Royal records, though more voluminous, are more difficult to interpret with certainty. From them we can see the king’s stay at Rhuddlan was short, lasting no more than a few days. While there he began to raise another new castle, preferring a site by the side of the Clwyd to the hilltop position his father had favoured at nearby Dyserth. Edward’s overriding objective, however, was sustaining the forward momentum of his forces. For all those who stopped to secure this second camp, many more must have poured across the river to continue the advance and the clearance of a path to the west. By this stage, Edward had soldiers to spare. At Rhuddlan the infantry swelled to more than 15,000 men.
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When Edward and his army reappear, it is the end of August, by which time they have reached Deganwy, the lofty hill on the eastern side of the River Conwy, where Henry III’s castle stood in ruins. Suddenly, everything does not seem so sanguine. No new building works are begun, though perhaps none were ever intended. More striking is the sharp drop in the number of infantry: numbers have fallen by half, from 15,000 to just under 7,500. This might be interpreted in several ways. The first, and by far the most favourable, is the traditional explanation that the missing men were dismissed, and that the reduction was therefore a conscious decision on the king’s part, by which he hoped to render his army more manageable. Another, arguably more plausible scenario is that these troops left of their own accord. From what we know of Edward’s later campaigns, desertion among the rank and file was rife, and easily the most common cause of attrition. The third possibility is perhaps less significant but nevertheless impossible wholly to discount: some of these soldiers must have been killed in the course of the advance.
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