A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (32 page)

Dismissal, desertion, death: whatever the cause, the fighting strength of the king’s army was substantially diminished, and at the critical moment of his campaign. It had been here at Deganwy, twenty years before even to the very day, that Edward had stood with his father and contemplated the conquest of Gwynedd, only to have Henry decide that the task was beyond them, and order a retreat. Would Edward now be forced to do the same? Even the most charitable estimation of his predicament – dismissal – would suggest that he was running out of the wherewithal to pay or feed his infantry forces. His cavalry, meanwhile, had already served well beyond their obligatory forty days. According to one chronicler, the king had to dismiss some of their number, presumably because he could not afford to retain them. Faced with such circumstances, the king may well have stared at the mountains of Snowdonia and concluded that they were slipping beyond his reach.
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There was a possible solution to Edward’s problem, however, provided that he acted fast. To the north-west of Gwynedd lay the island of Anglesey, a large area of lowland that might be occupied with comparative ease. The challenge of access remained, but the obstacle now became an expanse of water. Could sufficient numbers of troops be sent across the strip of sea that separated the island from the mainland? Henry III had considered this question in 1257 and decided that the answer was no, for he lacked the ships and the necessary will. His son, by contrast, was in possession of both. In the early days of September, courtesy of the sailors of the Cinque Ports, Edward was able to dispatch some 2,000 soldiers across Conwy Bay and the Menai Strait, captained by his friends Otto de Grandson and John de Vescy. Within a matter of days, Anglesey was occupied.

For Llywelyn this was a devastating blow. Of all the territories he had lost to date, his offshore island was by far the most important. To the prince and his fellow countrymen, Anglesey was
Môn mam Cymru
(Mona, mother of Wales) because it contained the best arable land in the country. ‘This island produces far more grain than any other part of Wales,’ said the knowledgeable Gerald of Wales; indeed, it was ‘so productive that it could supply the whole of Wales with corn over a long period’. Anglesey, in other words, was Llywelyn’s granary, and Edward had snatched it from him. Along with his soldiers, the king had shipped to the island 360 other men, armed only with scythes, whose job it was to get in the harvest. It was a brilliantly executed, perfectly timed move: at a stroke Edward had resupplied his own army, while simultaneously depriving his opponent of the means to survive the coming winter. Perhaps for this reason, more than any other, a later English chronicler would describe this campaign as ‘the siege of Snowdon’. As in the bitterest sieges, the attacker hoped to starve the defender into submission.
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Llywelyn submitted. He had no other option. We do not know precisely how or when, but all indications are that he must have communicated a readiness to surrender soon after the fall of Anglesey, and possibly as early as 11 September, for by that date the English army was clearly standing down. Edward had left Deganwy and retired to Rhuddlan, where he busied himself building his new castle. Within a few days most of his infantry had been dismissed: in the middle of the month only 1,600 foot soldiers remained in the royal camp. The cavalry must have been released around the same time. Among the magnates, the earls of Warwick and Lincoln, Edward’s close friends, stayed by his side, but the other earls disappear from the records. The permission granted to the earl of Norfolk on 15 September to hunt in the king’s forest in Cheshire looks very much like a farewell gift. Edward had evidently sent immediate word to his brother advising him that the war was over: on 20 September Edmund disbanded his southern army and returned to England, leaving a small contingent to continue the castle-building at Aberystwyth. Finally, at the end of the month, the ships of the Cinque Ports were sent home, presumably with thanks for the sterling service they had rendered.
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It remained to negotiate the terms of the surrender, and this took several weeks. There had evidently been some progress by 10 October, at which point Edward granted two of the Four Cantrefs to Dafydd ap Gruffudd – compensation for a prickly ally who now had to accept that, since the invasion had been called off, he would not be getting his hands on any part of Gwynedd in the immediate future. Gwynedd, it was allowed, would remain to Llywelyn. It was, however, just about the only territory he was permitted to retain: more or less everything else was to be kept by the conquerors. The prince was given to understand, for example, that the other two of the Four Cantrefs would once again become the property of the English Crown, controlled from the new castles at Rhuddlan and Flint. Anglesey, by contrast, would be returned to him, but only on the understanding that he should pay 1,000 marks (£666) a year for this privilege. On the same subject of money, it was felt appropriate that Llywelyn should make reparations for the injuries and damages he had inflicted: a sum of £50,000 was suggested. As for the rest of his once extensive empire, that was treated from the outset as a thing of the past. Authority in south and central Wales had slipped from the prince many months before; the lords of these areas had already accepted that their rightful overlord was the king of England. As a small sop to his dignity, it was allowed that Llywelyn should retain the homages of five minor Welsh lords, and also his title ‘prince of Wales’. But this was tantamount to a mockery, for he was patently nothing of the sort. The reality was that Edward had turned back the clock by thirty years, and Llywelyn’s life’s work had been undone.
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The prince agreed to these terms with English negotiators at Conwy on 9 November 1277, but his humiliation did not end there. There was still the matter of his personal subjection to Edward, so long resisted and at such great cost. The following day, therefore, Llywelyn was escorted from Snowdonia into the part of north Wales now under English occupation. Three miles west of Rhuddlan he was met by Robert Burnell and the earl of Lincoln. Finally, he was brought within the confines of the new royal castle, and before the king himself.

Edward was magnanimous in victory. Llywelyn had done all that had been required of him and placed himself entirely at his overlord’s mercy. The king acknowledged this with a gesture of his own, pardoning the prince his £50,000 fine and waiving the annual rent for Anglesey. He was not, however, minded to revisit the issue of homage – not yet. Rhuddlan was too remote an arena for a submission so significant and symbolic. On 20 November the king left the castle and returned to England.
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With him went Llywelyn. Westminster, not Wales, was to be the venue for the final act of this piece of political theatre. The king and his guest arrived there shortly before Christmas. It was on Christmas Day, surrounded by an assembly of English magnates, that Llywelyn finally knelt before Edward, placed his hands within the hands of the king, and promised to be an obedient prince.
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Arthur’s Crown

F
rom the declaration of war on 12 November 1276 to the proclamation of peace on 9 November 1277, it had taken Edward just short of a year to reduce Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to obedience. After such a sustained military effort the king was anxious to ensure that the gains he had made and the terms he had imposed would not be undone or reversed. Consequently, for much of the year that followed, he remained highly engaged with Welsh affairs, directing his energy and resources to the task of creating a settlement that he intended would be permanent.
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The most visible manifestation of Edward’s will in this regard were his new castles. At Rhuddlan, Flint and Aberystwyth, as the king’s armies withdrew, his workmen stayed on, labouring in their thousands to transform the temporary timber stockades thrown up during the campaign into the stone fortresses that have survived to this day. Rhuddlan, in particular, required a tremendous deployment of manpower, for besides the castle (itself the largest of the three), Edward had foreseen the necessity of straightening the adjacent River Clwyd. Teams of diggers – at one point they numbered almost a thousand men – would work on this project for the next three years to ensure that in future the inland garrison could be kept supplied by sea.
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Nor was it just new foundations that received such attention. In mid-Wales Roger Mortimer had recovered for the king the castle at Builth that he had lost to Llywelyn some seventeen years before. Building work there was under way even before the main assault on Wales had begun. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the same region, and also further south, the Crown had obtained many other new lands and castles by virtue of depriving their former Welsh owners. Consider, for example, the fate of Rhys Wyndod, one of the most powerful lords of south Wales. He had offered minimal resistance in 1277 and come to terms swiftly, yet he was still obliged to surrender all his fortresses along the River Tywi – Dinefwr, Llandovery, and the lofty eyrie that is Carreg Cennen. All three now passed to Edward, expanding his stock of strongholds, but also increasing his already massive construction programme.
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To oversee such a major exercise in castle-building required a project manager of considerable genius, and so it was fortunate that Edward had just such a man at his disposal. Five years earlier, in the course of his return journey from the Holy Land, the king passed through the lands of his mother’s relatives, the counts of Savoy; for a week or so in the summer of 1273 he and his fellow crusaders had paused at Count Philip’s new castle of St Georges de Espéranche, not far from the French city of Lyon. And there, it seems, Edward was probably introduced to the castle’s designer and builder, a young master mason who came to be known as Master James of St George. For some years James and his father had been selling their building services to the counts of Savoy and their nobles; a string of towns and castles in the Swiss and Italian Alps still stand as witness to the duo’s industry and skill, and also their flair for organisation. In the autumn of 1275, however, Master James himself vanishes from the administrative records of Savoy. When he reappears, some two and a half years later, it is in the pay of a new employer. On 8 April 1278 Edward I sent him from England into Wales ‘to ordain the works of the castles there’.
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The new castles were not intended to be isolated outposts where lonely English garrisons would guard against future Welsh insurgency. On the contrary, they would be the focal points of the new and better Wales that Edward saw it as his job to build. Rhuddlan and Flint were administrative centres, attached to the justiciar of Chester, from which royal bailiffs could superintend the Welsh interior, and to which the Welsh were regularly summoned to attend the king’s courts. Aberystwyth played a similar role in the west, ultimately answering to a new ‘justiciar of west Wales’, based at Carmarthen. Edward, it is fair to say, did not try as part of this exercise to introduce English law into Wales. When, in January 1278, he appointed a seven-man legal team (the so-called Hopton Commission) ‘to hear and determine all suits and pleas … in the Marches and in Wales’, three of its members were Welsh, and they were instructed to do justice ‘according to the customs of those parts’. Nevertheless, he intended that both Welsh law and Marcher law should be brought firmly within the framework of his own overarching jurisdiction. The king’s high estimation of his authority in Wales is well demonstrated by his ongoing efforts to thin out its forests and widen its roads. Marcher and Welsh lords alike were ordered to see to it that this work was done in their districts, or else the king’s agents would do it for them and charge them for the privilege.
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And if, moreover, it was impracticable to introduce English law into Wales, anglicisation could still be advanced by other means. At Flint, Rhuddlan and Aberystwyth, the king’s new castles were paired with new royal towns, not for the benefit of the natives, but in order to host immigrant communities of English settlers. England’s population was rising in the thirteenth century, and the country was already approaching a stage where it had more people than the land could support. Consequently there was no shortage of Englishmen and Englishwomen ready to accept the offer of a new life in Wales, even if it meant living in the midst of a hostile people. Edward’s new boroughs were surrounded by palisades and ditches, and ultimately protected by their adjacent castles. The settlers would supply the soldiery by providing local services and – here was the ultimate hope – soften the natives by their peaceful, law-abiding and industrious example.
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And what of the man who, despite his reduced circumstances, remained the greatest and potentially the most hostile native of them all? It is clear that, despite his symbolic submission at Christmas 1277, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was still regarded with considerable suspicion in England, especially by the king. Although in the new year Edward allowed his erstwhile adversary to return to his diminished principality, he had already taken steps that effectively placed the prince on probation. One of the conditions of the surrender, for example, had been Llywelyn’s agreement to an annual oath-taking ceremony, by which twenty men from every district in his possession would swear that their belittled leader was behaving himself. In the more immediate term, the prince had also been required to hand over ten hostages, and at the start of 1278 these men remained in the Crown’s custody. And to their number, of course, could be added Edward’s long-term guest, Eleanor de Montfort. Her release was probably discussed during Llywelyn’s visit to England, but was not carried out. For a while longer, she too would remain in the king’s keeping as a guarantee of her fiancé’s good conduct.
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