Chapter V: The Wars of Scotland, Northumberland, and Wales.1 (3)

On the plain of Salisbury the combatants met, and William of Eu was overthrown.[140] By the laws of the combat his defeat was full evidence of his guilt. But what was to be his punishment? Save the case of the beheading of Waltheof, there was no precedent in the ordinary jurisprudence either of England or of Normandy for any sentence harsher than banishment, forfeiture, and imprisonment.[141] The older English precedents went for banishment and forfeiture. The precedents of Normandy and of Norman rule in England went for imprisonment, such an imprisonment, it might be, as that of Robert of Mowbray. For the course actually taken there was no precedent in either land, unless it were the dealings of Harold the son of Cnut with the Ætheling Ælfred.[142] The punishment decreed was that of bodily mutilation. It is said that this course was proposed by Earl Hugh of Chester, and that on a singular ground. William of Eu was the husband of the Earl’s sister――her name is not mentioned. He had neglected his wife, while he had three children by a mistress.[143] If this was to be ground for the loss of eyes or limbs, the brothers of the Countess Ermentrude would have had a right to demand that the portly person of Earl Hugh should be cut down to a shapeless trunk.[144] Mutilation, it should be remembered, was a familiar punishment, a punishment which in that generation aroused no horror when the persons so dealt with were held to be real criminals.[145] But, with that common inconsistency which reverses the sound rule of smiting the leaders and sparing the commons, mutilation, death, or any heavy punishment, seems always to have aroused horror, or at least amazement, when it was inflicted on any criminal of lofty rank. Such things had been done in the isle of Britain and out of it, but hardly by the solemn sentence of the King of the English at the head of his Witan. But now William of Eu was blinded, and underwent a fouler mutilation as well.[146] His sentence was seemingly carried out at Salisbury, perhaps in sight of the assembly. Are we to infer that any show of indignation was called forth by the bloody sight, when we read directly afterwards that some of the lord of Eu’s fellow-sufferers were taken to London, and were blinded or otherwise mutilated there?[147]

[Sidenote: Story of Arnulf of Hesdin.]

[Sidenote: His innocence proved by battle.]

[Sidenote: He goes to the Crusade,]

[Sidenote: and dies.]

If we may trust a tale to be found in one of those secondary writers who often preserve scraps of truth, another accused man appealed to the wager of battle with better luck than William of Eu. This was Arnulf of Hesdin, a man whose name is familiar enough to us in Domesday, though it does not call up any distinct personal idea like the King’s unlucky kinsman.[148] He is set before us as a man of great bodily stature, brave and active, and in the enjoyment of large possessions, out of which he and his wife Emmeline had made gifts to the abbey of Gloucester.[149] He was charged, unjustly and enviously we are told, with the same crime as the rest.[150] He defended himself by his champion, who proved his lord’s innocence by overthrowing a man of the King’s who was matched against him.[151] But Arnulf was so stirred up with wrath and grief at the unjust charge, that, notwithstanding the King’s entreaties to stay, he threw up all the lands that he held of him, and left England for ever.[152] Before the end of the year, the Crusade offered him worthy occupation elsewhere. He marched with the Christian host as far as Antioch; he there fell sick, and declined all medical help; none should heal him save Him for whose sake he had gone on pilgrimage. Arnulf, professing the opposite doctrine to Asa of Judah, fared no better than that king. Antioch was the last stage reached by the armed pilgrim of Hesdin.[153]

[Sidenote: Confiscation of lands.]

[Sidenote: William of Alderi is condemned to death.]

[Sidenote: The King refuses to spare him.]

[Sidenote: His pious end.]

Arnulf, according to this story, became landless, as far as England was concerned, by his own act. Others underwent the same loss by sentence, it seems, of the Assembly. Count Odo of Champagne and many others lost their lands.[154] In one case only does death seem to have been inflicted. William of Alderi, cousin and steward of William of Eu, was, as the Chronicle tells us, “hanged on rood.”[155] This somewhat startling formula doubtless means nothing but ordinary hanging; but it seemingly marks hanging of any kind as something which was not ordinary. As to the guilt or innocence of William of Alderi we have contradictory accounts. One weighty authority declares him to have been a sharer in the plot.[156] Others class him among many brave and guiltless men who were ruined by the charges brought by Morel and by Geoffrey of Baynard.[157] Guilty or innocent, he was, we are told, a man of high birth, goodly presence, and lofty spirit.[158] He was moreover the King’s gossip, bound to him by the same tie which bound Morel to Malcolm. We thus incidentally learn that there were those whom William Rufus had held at the font, and for whose Christian faith and Christian life he had pledged himself. But the spiritual kindred went for nothing with the Red King. Many of the great men are said to have earnestly begged for the life of William of Alderi, and to have striven to move the King’s greed by a mighty bribe. The Conqueror had refused Harold’s weight in gold as the price of his Christian burial; his son refused three times the weight of William of Alderi, both in gold and in silver, as the price of his life.[159] Why Rufus was so bent on his death does not appear; but nothing could move him. It marks the way in which the King’s will practically ordered everything, even in so great an assembly of the realm as that which had now come together, that William of Alderi was condemned and hanged without any attempt to rescue him, though many believed him to be guiltless, and though powerful men were eager to save him. When hope was gone, he made an ending at once as pious and, according to the ideas of other ages, more manly than the ending of Waltheof. He confessed his sins to Bishop Osmund, and was, seemingly at his own asking, scourged in the new-built minster and the other churches of the city on the waterless hill.[160] Then he gave away his clothes to the poor, and went naked or slightly clad to the place of hanging, staining his limbs with blood by often kneeling on the rough stones.[161] The Bishop and a crowd of people followed him to the place. He then made the most solemn protestations of his innocence. The Bishop sprinkled him with holy water, said the commendatory prayer, and then withdrew.[162] It was not for Osmund of Salisbury, whatever it might have been for Odo of Bayeux or Geoffrey of Coutances, to look on what was next to come. The work of death was then done, and all who beheld wondered that not a groan escaped the victim as death drew near, and not a sigh in the act of dying.[163]

[Sidenote: Last days of William of Eu.]

[Sidenote: End of Morel.]

There was thus a marked difference in the fate of the kinsmen and chief officers of the two leaders, if leaders they both were, in the conspiracy. The steward and cousin of William of Eu was done to death, while his master underwent a fate which to modern ideas seems worse than death. We are not told how long William of Eu lived on in blindness and misery; but his punishment did not involve forfeiture, at all events not corruption of blood; for a few years later we find his son Henry in possession of his county.[164] The steward and nephew of Robert of Mowbray seems to have gained but little by the act which, if it were formally allowed to be loyalty to the King, was likely to be far more commonly looked on as treason to his immediate lord. When he saw that his kinsman and master was condemned to life-long bonds, he left England, and died in banishment, poor and hated of all men.[165]

§ 3. _The Conquest and Revolt of Wales._

1093-1097.

[Sidenote: Relations with Wales.]

[Sidenote: Nature of the Welsh wars of Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Territorial advance and military ill-success.]

[Sidenote: Effect of the building of castles.]

These years, so rich in events in Scotland and on the English lands nearest to the Scottish border, were at least equally rich in events on the other border of the English kingdom, towards the lands which were still held by the remnant of our British predecessors. Wars with the Welsh may be looked for, as a matter of course, in every reign during this period; but in the reign of William Rufus such wars form a special feature, and the position which they hold is a little singular. It is plain from the records of the time, it is still plainer from the results, that this reign was a time of great and lasting advance at the cost of the Britons. It was the time when large parts of Wales were more or less fully brought under the authority of the English crown. It is still more distinctly the time when Norman adventurers, subjects of the English crown, carved out for themselves, as its vassals, possessions and lordships within the British land. Yet the first impression which we draw from the writers who record the British warfare of this reign is that it was a time of ill success on the English side, especially in those campaigns in which the King himself took a part. The Chronicler records an expedition, and he sends up a wail at its ill luck. Nothing came of it; horses and men not a few were lost; the Welsh escaped to their moors and mountains where no man might come at them. One chief is put to flight in a battle, but the others go on doing mischief all the same.[166] The same story comes almost every year; one would think that the warfare of the Red King with the Welsh was a warfare than which none was ever more bootless. And a historian who aspires to more of critical and philosophical insight sums up the whole British warfare of the reign as a distinct case of failure.[167] Yet it is clear from the result that it was not so. And one passage in the Chronicle seems to give us the key to the whole matter. “When the King saw that he could there further nothing of his will, he came back into this land, and took rede that he might let make castles on the borders.”[168] An expedition which seemed mere failure, in which many men and horses were lost, while the Welsh escaped to moors and mountains with hardly any loss at all, was really successful in the long run, if it led to the building of a border castle. The Britons fled unhurt to their mountains; but while they lurked in the fastnesses where none might come at them, the most valuable part of their land was taken from them bit by bit. When they came down again from the mountains, they found a castle built, they found so much land as the castle could protect changed into a settlement of strangers. The lands might be harried; the castle might at some favourable moment be broken down; but it was sure to spring up again and again to do its work. The lasting possession of the fertile land had passed away to the invaders; the moors and mountains alone were left to the sons of the soil.

[Sidenote: Welsh campaigns of Harold and of William Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Use of horses.]

[Sidenote: Immediate defeat and lasting success.]

[Sidenote: Different objects of Harold and Rufus.]

The mention of these Welsh wars naturally carries us back to the thought of the great Welsh campaign of a generation earlier. We see how true, from one point of view, was the saying of the next century that none since Harold had known how to deal with the Welsh as Harold had known.[169] As a matter of military success, the failures of William Rufus stand out in marked contrast to the victories of Harold. The Red King had no pillars to set up to mark where he had overcome the Briton in open fight.[170] A single word helps us to at least one part of the cause. Harold, in his victorious campaign, must have undergone some loss of men, but he underwent no loss of horses. He found that the English tactics were not suited for British warfare, and he made his housecarls turn themselves into light-armed Welshmen.[171] But the Norman tactics were still less suited for British warfare than the English. There were places in the moors and mountains which the mailed housecarl might reach, if with difficulty, but which the mounted knight could not reach at all. But William Rufus does not seem to have suited his tactics to the country as Harold had done; the mention of horses suggests that he repeated the old mistake of Ralph the Timid in a worse shape.[172] As a matter of fighting then, Rufus failed where Harold had succeeded; but as a matter of enduring conquest, the failures of Rufus did more than the successes of Harold. Harold indeed had no general schemes of Welsh conquest. He overthrew the Welsh; but, except in the districts which were definitely ceded to England,[173] he made no attempt to occupy Wales. He gave back the land whose people he had overcome to princes of their own blood, bound to him simply by their oath of homage.[174] But wherever Rufus or his lords planted a castle, there was at once a piece of Welsh soil occupied, and a centre made ready for occupying more. The object of Harold in short was simply the defence of England; the object of William Rufus was the conquest of Wales.

[Sidenote: Comparison of the conquest of Wales with the English and Norman Conquests.]

[Sidenote: Geographical conditions of the conquest.]

[Sidenote: Extension of England by conquest and settlement.]

[Sidenote: Various elements in Wales.]

[Sidenote: The Flemings.]

[Sidenote: Endurance of the Welsh language.]

The conquest which now began, that which we may call either the English or the Norman Conquest of Wales, differed widely both from the English Conquest of Britain and from the Norman Conquest of England. It wrought far less change than the landing at Ebbsfleet; it wrought far more change than the landing at Pevensey. The Briton of those lands which in the Red King’s day were still British was gradually conquered; he was gradually brought under English rule and English law; but he was neither exterminated nor enslaved nor wholly assimilated. He still abides in his ancient land, still speaking his ancient tongue. The English or Norman Conquest of Wales was not a national migration, like the English Conquest of Britain. Nor was it a conquest wrought under the guise of an elaborate legal fiction, like the Norman Conquest of England. William Rufus did not ask the people of Wales to receive him as their own lawful king; he did not give himself out to all mankind as the true heir of Gruffydd the son of Llywelyn, defrauded of his rights by perjured usurpers. Europe had passed the stage at which a conquest of the earlier kind was possible; and there was in this case no excuse or opportunity for a conquest of the later kind. William Rufus was not a man to seek, like his father, to justify his acts by legal fictions; nor had he the same room for devising them as his father had. He had doubtless, with the crown of the Old-English kings, inherited their claims to Imperial supremacy over the whole island; he called himself “Monarch of Britain” no less than the kings who had gone before him.[175] But that monarchy gave him no claim to bring the lands of his subordinate princes under his immediate rule. If an invasion of Wales needed any justification in the eyes of William Rufus and his barons, that justification would take the shape of reprisals. We may be sure that there was no moment when the men on the border, either on the English or the Welsh side, could not have brought some complaint against the other side which might have been deemed to justify reprisals by a more scrupulous prince than the Red King. But for men like the Norman adventurers of his day it was enough that a land adjoining to the land which they had made their own lay open to be conquered. Therein lay another great difference between this conquest and either of the other two conquests with which we have compared it, in the fact that the land to be won lay adjoining to the land which was already won. The Angles and Saxons wholly forsook their old homes beyond the sea, and, if the Normans in England did not in the same way wholly forsake theirs, the sea at least rolled between the old home and the new. But the Norman whose lot was cast on the Welsh frontier of England had nothing to do but to press on from the point where he already was. He had simply to add on the next field to his own field, subject to such resistance as the actual occupiers of the next field might be able to make. From this geographical cause, while the Norman Conquest of England was in no sense an extension of Normandy, the English or Norman Conquest of Wales was in every sense an extension of England. The Normans in England did not bring Normandy with them; they had from the very beginning to put on more or less fully the character of Englishmen, and to live according to English law. But the Norman who from England went on into Wales had no thought of putting on the character of a Welshman or of living according to Welsh law. Wherever he settled, he most truly carried England with him, such as England had been made through his own coming. But then for a long time he settled only here and there in the British land. Where he did settle, the speech, the laws, the national life, of the Briton passed away in such sort as the speech, the laws, the national life, of the Englishman never at any moment passed away from England. But alongside of these conquered districts there long remained independent districts, where the natives under their native princes still bade defiance to the invaders. England had already an uniform aspect; it was the old England with certain changes; its laws were the laws of King Eadward with the amendments of King William. Wales, for a long while after the time with which we are now dealing, was as far from uniformity as any land east of the Hadriatic. Here was the castle of the Norman lord, with his following, Norman, English, Flemish, anything but British. Here was the newly-founded town, with its free burghers, again Norman, English, Flemish, anything but British. Here again was a whole district from which the Briton had passed away as thoroughly as he had passed away from Kent or Norfolk, but which the Norman had not taken into his own hands. He had found that it suited his purpose to leave it in the hands of the hardy and industrious Fleming, the last wave of Low-Dutch occupation in the isle of Britain. And alongside of all, there was the still independent Briton, still keeping his moors and mountains, still ready to pour down from them upon the richer lands which had been his fathers’, but which had passed into the stranger’s grasp. Those days have long passed away; for three centuries and more Briton and Englishmen have been willing members of a common state, willing subjects of a common sovereign. But the memory of those days has not passed away; it abides in the most living of all witnesses. England has for ages spoken a single tongue, her own ancient speech, modified by the coming of the conquerors of eight hundred years ago. But in Wales the speech of her conquerors, the speech of England, is still only making its way, slowly and fitfully, against the abiding resistance of that stubborn British tongue which has survived _three_ conquests.[176]

[Sidenote: Local nomenclature of Wales.]

[Sidenote: Contrast with that of England.]

[Sidenote: Teutonic and French names.]

[Sidenote: Places bearing two names.]

The results of this state of things, where so many contending elements so long stood side by side, are still to be seen on the face of the British land. The local nomenclature of Wales tells a wholly different tale from that of England. In England the nomenclature is everywhere essentially Teutonic; we might say that it is everywhere essentially English; for the names given by the Danes form one class along with those given by the Angles and Saxons, as opposed either to Celtic survivals or to Romance intruders. Both these two last classes are in England mere exceptions to the general law of Teutonic nomenclature. But in Wales, while the great majority of the names are Celtic, the Teutonic names are somewhat more than exceptions. In some districts, as I have already said, they are the all but invariable rule. French names, too, though not very common, are, I think, less rare than in England. Nothing is more common than for a place to bear different names, according as English or Welsh is spoken. And these names sometimes translate one another, and sometimes do not. All this is natural in a land where distinct and hostile races so long dwelled side by side, each one a thorn in the side of the others. It marks a kind of conquest different alike from the conquest where the conquered vanish from the soil and from the conquest where they swallow up their conquerors.

[Sidenote: The Welsh castles.]

[Sidenote: Lack of castles in England.]

[Sidenote: Houses in England.]

[Sidenote: Border castles.]

[Sidenote: The Welsh towns.]

There is again a visible feature, one so characteristic of the scenery of Wales as to be all but a natural feature, which arises out of the nature of the conquest with which we have now to deal. The traveller who comes back, I will not say from the land of the Grey Leagues, but from that nearer land of Maine with which our tale will soon have so much to do, to one of the hilly districts of England, feels something missing in the landscape, or in the memories called up by the landscape. On the isolated hill, on the bluff which ends the long ridge, he comes instinctively to look for the shattered castle or for the lines which show that the castle once stood there. It is one of the special signs of what English history has been, one of the signs which should make us thankful that it has been what it has been, that in England those bluffs, those island hills, on which the castle or its traces can still be seen, are in truth few and far between. After all that we hear of castles and castle-builders, the castle was, at any moment of English history save the nineteen years of anarchy, a rare thing in England compared to what it was in other lands. Save where there was a town to protect or to keep in obedience, save where there was some special post of military strength that needed to be guarded, the lord of an English lordship, in whichever host his forefather had fought on Senlac, found that a simple manor, sheltered perhaps by some slight defence, served his purpose as well as the threatening tower. On all the borderlands it was otherwise; the pele-tower of the north is but the Norman keep on a miniature scale. And, above all, Wales is, as every one knows, pre-eminently the land of castles. Through those districts with which we are specially concerned, castles, great and small, or the ruins or traces of such castles, meet us at every step. It was needful to strengthen every height, to guard every pass, while the moors and mountains, the Asturias or the Tzernagora of the Cymry, still remained unsubdued. The castles are in truth the leading architectural features of the country; the churches, mostly small and plain, might themselves, with their fortified towers, almost count as castles. The towns, almost always of English foundation, were mostly small; they were military colonies rather than seats of commerce. As Wales had no immemorial cities like Exeter and Lincoln, so she had no towns which sprang up into greatness in later times, like Bristol, Norwich, and Coventry. Every memorial of former days which we see in the British land reminds us how long warfare remained the daily business alike of the men of that land and of the strangers who had made their way into it at the sword’s point.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Advance before the accession of Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Robert of Rhuddlan.]

[Sidenote: Rhys ap Tewdwr.]

[Sidenote: Saint David’s robbed by pirates. 1091.]

We have seen that neither the days of Eadward nor the days of the elder William were days of peace along the Welsh border. The English frontier had advanced during both reigns. Rhuddlan,[177] Montgomery,[178] Cardiff,[179] had become border fortresses of England. An indefinite tract of North Wales was held by Robert of Rhuddlan;[180] Radnor was an English possession;[181] the followers of Earl Roger of Montgomery had harried as far as the peninsula of Dyfed.[182] The whole land seems to have made some kind of submission to William the Great at the time when he made his pilgrimage to Saint David’s, and set free so many of his captive subjects.[183] But real conquest does not seem to have gone very far beyond the border fortresses, as within the _march_ of the Marquess of Rhuddlan it did not go very far from the coast. In the days of the rebellion we have seen that the hearts of the Cymry rose again, and that they again ventured on offensive warfare with no small effect. They and their Scandinavian allies had broken the power and taken away the life of the man who had so long kept their northern tribes in awe. In that work we have seen that Rhys ap Tewdwr, the King of Deheubarth, whose dominions took in the greater part of South Wales, had a hand.[184] Under him Cedivor seems to have been the vassal prince of Dyfed. The reign of Cedivor ended in a time of misfortune, ominous of greater misfortunes to come. The shrine of Saint David was robbed. The holy bishop Sulien died, and presently his church and city, the holy place of Saint David, were again sacked by the pagans of the isles.[185] Is this simply a traditional way of speaking of Scandinavian invaders, or were there still any wild wikings who avowedly clave to the faith of Odin? Then Cedivor himself died, and his sons revolted against their over-lord Rhys, but were again overthrown.[186] This was the year of the Red King’s siege of Saint Michael’s Mount, the year of his journey to the North; and one account hints that the movements in Wales as well as in Scotland had a share in bringing him back from the mainland.[187] But it is not till two years later that Welsh warfare began to put on enough of importance for its details to be recorded by English writers.

[Sidenote: Beginning of the Conquest of South Wales. 1093.]

[Sidenote: Legend of the conquest of Glamorgan.]

It seems to have been in the year of Anselm’s appointment, the year of Malcolm’s death, that the conquest of South Wales began in earnest. It seems now to have been for the first time taken up by the King as part of the affairs of his kingdom. But the geography of the campaign shows that a gradual advance must have already begun along the south coast. Our public entries are concerned only with the land stretching nearly due west, from the mountains of Brecknock and Abergavenny to the Land’s End of Saint David’s. This leaves out the sea-land which, with the bold curve of its coast, projects to the south, the land of Morganwg or Glamorgan. Yet it may be taken as a matter of course that this land was not left to be won later than inland Brecheiniog and far distant Dyfed. The unlucky thing is that, while the conquest of Brecheiniog and Dyfed is recorded in notices which, though meagre enough, are fully trustworthy as far as they go, the conquest of Morganwg, strangely left out in all authentic records, has become the subject of an elaborate romance which has stepped into the empty place of the missing history. The romance is, as usual, the invention of pedigree-makers, working, after their manner, to exalt the glory and increase the antiquity of this and that local family. This is perhaps the meanest of the many forms of falsehood against which the historian has to strive; but it is also one of the strongest and most abiding, and one which is specially strong and abiding on the northern coast of the Bristol Channel.[188]

[Sidenote: Story of Jestin and Einion.]

[Sidenote: Story of Robert Fitz-hamon and his knights.]

[Sidenote: Einion recalls Robert.]

[Sidenote: Division of Glamorgan.]

[Sidenote: Share kept by the children of Jestin.]

The legend pieces itself on to that point of the genuine history when the sons of Cedivor were defeated by Rhys ap Tewdwr. A brother of Cedivor, Einion by name, who had been in the service of either the elder or the younger William, and had served the King in his continental wars, now flees to another enemy of Rhys, Jestin son of Gwrgan, described as prince of Gwent and Morganwg.[189] Jestin promises his daughter to Einion with an ample estate, if he can obtain help from England against the common enemy Rhys. This, it is supposed, Einion’s friendship with the King and his knights will enable him to do. Nor was Jestin’s hope disappointed. No less a man than Robert Fitz-hamon hearkened to the invitation of Einion; he set out at the head of a company of twelve knights and their followers to give help to the prince of Morganwg. Their joint forces overcame Rhys in a battle on the borders of Brecheiniog, and Rhys himself, flying from the field, was taken and beheaded. His kinsmen and followers seem to have been killed or dispersed, and we are told that Robert Fitz-hamon and his companions, being well paid for their services by Jestin, went away towards London. Then Einion demands his reward; but Jestin says that he will not give either his daughter or his land to a traitor. Then Einion persuades Robert and his companions to come back, and take Jestin’s dominions for themselves. They are of course in no way unwilling; and they are joined by some of Jestin’s Welsh enemies. Jestin is driven out, and his land is partitioned. The rough mountain land is assigned to Einion and his Welsh companions, and Einion also marries Nest the daughter of Jestin. Robert Fitz-hamon and his twelve knights divide the fertile vale of Glamorgan among them. Each man establishes himself in a lordship and castle, and all do homage to Robert as lord of Glamorgan, holding his chief seat in his castle of Cardiff. But, while the traitor Einion obtains so sorry a portion, a son of Jestin is admitted to a share in the rich vale, and is allowed to hand on his lordship to his descendants. Another of the family, a grandson of Jestin, Gruffydd son of Rhydderch, refuses to submit, withstands the invaders in arms, contrives to defend Caerleon, and to hand on to his son Caradoc a principality in Gwent, seemingly east of the Usk.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Estimate of the story.]

[Sidenote: Elements of truth.]

[Sidenote: Settlement of Robert Fitz-hamon at Cardiff.]

[Sidenote: Legendary names in the list.]

[Sidenote: Question of Jestin’s descendants.]

Now how much of this story is to be believed? Jestin is a most shadowy being, of whom personally nothing is recorded. But there is evidence enough for the existence of his descendants, and for their retention of an important lordship in Glamorgan.[190] This may make us inclined to put some faith in the account of the transactions between Jestin, Einion, and Robert Fitz-hamon. The general outline of the tale is perfectly possible, except the very unlikely story that Robert or any other Norman, when once standing in arms on British or any other ground, simply marched out again after receiving a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. That Robert Fitz-hamon did conquer Glamorgan and establish himself at Cardiff cannot be doubted. The settlement of some of his followers is equally historical; but the list of them as given in the legend is untrustworthy, as containing names of families which did not appear in the district till later. That the Normans were invited by a Welsh prince to help him against his enemies, and that they then took his lands to themselves, is quite possible, though the story rests on no certain evidence. That the Norman invaders took the valuable land, the fertile vale, to themselves, and left the rugged mountains to the Britons, is doubtless a true description of the general result, though it is not likely to have been caused by any formal division. The only thing to suggest such a division is the portion which was kept by the descendants of Jestin. But such an anomaly as this last might be accounted for in various ways. The defeat and death of Rhys in Brecheiniog is beyond doubt, and it is not unlikely that Robert Fitz-hamon may have had a hand in it; but at all events the date is utterly wrong.[191] The most unlikely part of the story is that which describes a grandson of Jestin as founding a principality in that part of Gwent which had already long been an English possession. This story might almost seem to be a confusion with an event of earlier times. We are tempted to think that the Caradoc son of Gruffydd and grandson of Rhydderch, who now settles himself in Gwent, is a mythical repetition of the Caradoc son of Gruffydd and grandson of Rhydderch who destroyed King Eadward’s hunting-seat at Portskewet.[192]

[Sidenote: Robert Fitz-hamon;]

[Sidenote: other notices of him.]

[Sidenote: He holds the lands of Brihtric.]

[Sidenote: He marries Earl Roger’s daughter.]

[Sidenote: Marriage of his daughter to Robert of Gloucester.]

[Sidenote: His works at Gloucester and Tewkesbury.]

[Sidenote: Grant of Welsh churches to English monasteries.]

[Sidenote: Conquest of Glamorgan.]

[Sidenote: Building of castles.]

Robert Fitz-hamon, conqueror of Glamorgan――for of his right to that title there is no doubt――has his place in the history of this reign and of the early years of the next. We have already heard of him as one of the few faithful among the Normans in England at the time of the great rebellion against the present King.[193] Son or grandson of the famous rebel of Val-ès-dunes,[194] he had an elder brother of his father’s name, who appears, with the title of _Dapifer_, among the land-owners of eastern England.[195] He had himself, at one time in the present reign, received those lands which had once been Brihtric’s, which had then been Queen Matilda’s, and which had been afterwards held or claimed by the Ætheling Henry.[196] These made him great in the shires of Gloucester and Somerset, shires from which he might look with a longing eye towards the lands beyond the Severn and the Severn sea. To these, it appears, was added the honour of Gloucester, or rather the lands of Brihtric were made into an honour of Gloucester for his benefit.[197] He married a daughter of Earl Roger, Sibyl by name,[198] and so had the privilege of being brother-in-law to Robert of Bellême. His daughter Mabel, heiress of her uncle as well as of her father,[199] became, as we have often had occasion to notice, the wife of King Henry’s son Robert, with whom Gloucester became an earldom. He founded the abbey of Tewkesbury, one of the line of great religious houses along the Severn, where his work may still be seen in the vast pillars and mysterious front of his still surviving minster.[200] To the older abbey of Gloucester he was a bountiful benefactor. And the nature of his gifts to these two favoured houses would be almost enough of itself to enable us to set down Robert Fitz-hamon as conqueror of Glamorgan. Gloucester and Tewkesbury were enriched at the cost of the churches of Glamorgan, proof enough that he who could thus enrich them had won great possessions in Glamorgan. The holy places of the Briton, Llantwit and Llancarfan, with a crowd of churches of lesser note, supplied the conqueror with an easy means of being bountiful with no cost to himself.[201] So again the mere fact that a man who held such a position as that of Robert Fitz-hamon, one who, though not an earl, ranked by possessions and connexions alongside of earls, plays so small a part as he does in the recorded history of the reign, might almost of itself suggest that he was busy on some enterprise of his own, such as that which legend assigns to him. When the mound by the swift and shallow Taff was crowned by the shell-keep of Cardiff, the progress of invasion was not likely to tarry. The fertile lowlands from the mouth of the Taff to the mouth of the Neath were a natural accession to the lowlands of Gwent which were already won. They were won; they were guarded by a crowd of castles. And the winning of the land, the building of the castles, events about which the genuine local history is strangely silent, were, there is not the slightest reason to doubt, the work of Robert Fitz-hamon and of the men who shared with him in that work.

[Sidenote: Distinction between Morganwg and Glamorgan.]

[Sidenote: Extent of Glamorgan.]

[Sidenote: Cardiff castle.]

[Sidenote: Bishopric of Llandaff.]

[Sidenote: William of London.]

[Sidenote: Kidwelly and Ogmore.]

[Sidenote: Richard Siward.]

[Sidenote: Pagan of Turberville at Coyty.]

[Sidenote: Aberafan held by the children of Jestin.]

In strict geographical accuracy the names _Morganwg_ and _Glamorgan_ do not answer to one another.[202] Morganwg in the wider sense is said to have taken in a vast district from the Severn to the Towy, while Glamorgan, said to be called from a prince named Morgan in the tenth century, was less than the present county, taking in only the vale. The distinction between the two was preserved in the style of the lords of “Morgania and Glamorgania.” But the country with which we have now to deal may be practically looked on as answering to the present county, somewhat cut short to the west and somewhat lengthened to the east. It takes in the present Monmouthshire between Usk and Rhymny; it does not take in the peninsula of Gower. This last, with the town of Swansea on its isthmus, still forms no part of the diocese of Glamorgan or Llandaff; it marks its formerly distinct character by still belonging to the diocese of Saint David’s. Within this district Robert Fitz-hamon and his successors the Earls of Gloucester held a position like that of the Earl of Chester or the Bishop of Durham. Without bearing their lofty titles, the Lord of Glamorgan practically held, like them, a vassal principality of the crown. Like the other lords marchers, he held most of the powers of kingship within his lordship, and the position of his lordship enabled him to carry out those powers more thoroughly than most of his fellows.[203] The chief seat of the lord was at Cardiff on the Taff, where the castle had been, as we have seen, founded in the Conqueror’s day.[204] A little higher up the river was the seat of the bishopric of Glamorgan at Llandaff, with its church, most unlike Le Mans or Durham, nestling by the river at the foot of the hill. Under the chief lord settled several lesser lords, tenants-in-chief, we may almost venture to call them, within Glamorgan, who founded castles and families, and under whom the land was again divided among a crowd of smaller tenants. Some of these lesser lords held within their own lordships powers almost equal to those of the lord of Glamorgan himself. First perhaps among them was the house founded by William of London, better known under the French form of _Londres_.[205] The name suggests some thoughts. Who was a William of London in the days of William Rufus? A Norman doubtless, but hardly a Norman of any very lofty rank in his own land. May we follow the analogy of the great bearer of the same name in the next age, and see in him the son of a Rouen citizen settled in London in the very first days of the Conquest, or even in the days of the Confessor? The house of London spread beyond the bounds of Glamorgan; their chief seat was at Kidwelly; but within the lordship of Fitz-hamon the square keep of Ogmore and the fortified priory of Ewenny, one of the most precious specimens of the Norman minster on the smallest scale, still remain as memorials of their presence. But the name of Siward――its first bearer appears in the legend as Richard Siward――bespeaks English or Danish descent, and we are tempted to see in the colonist of Glamorgan a son or grandson of Thurkill of Warwick.[206] Pagan of Turberville held Coyty, married a Welsh heiress, and became the founder of a house whose feelings became British rather than Norman or English. Aberafan, the fortress at the mouth of the Glamorgan Avon, remained in the hands of the descendants of Jestin, the only native line which, like such Englishmen as Thurkill, Eadward of Salisbury, Coleswegen and Ælfred of Lincoln, abode on its own ground on equal terms with the conquerors. They alone shared the fertile plain with the strangers; the rest of their countrymen, even those who held acknowledged lands and lordships, were confined to the barren hills.[207]

[Sidenote: The lords and their castles.]

[Sidenote: The South-Welsh churches.]

These few families have each something in their name and history which entitles them to special notice. A few others were of really equal eminence from the first, and the legend, to make up the full tale of twelve peers, adds on several names of later date. These great lords, and a crowd of smaller land-owners as well, built each man his castle; in Glamorgan the peaceful manor-house, soon to become the rule in England, seems to have been the reform of a much later day. The castles with which we are to deal are of course for the most part castles of the older and simpler type; it was not till long after the times with which we are dealing that Caerphilly, with its mighty gateway-towers, its princely hall, its lake wrought by the hand of man, became the proudest of South-Welsh fortresses, the peer of Caernarvon itself. Caerphilly lies indeed beyond our immediate range, in the land still left to the natives, parted off by hills from Cardiff and from the rich plain which the conquerors kept for themselves. Not a few others of the famous castles of the district belong to times far too late for us. From the castles the churches also caught a military air, and kept it during the whole time of mediæval architecture. The fortified towers of Glamorgan have the military character less strongly marked than the towers of Pembrokeshire; but it is marked quite strongly enough to strike the English visitor as something altogether in harmony with the endless traces of castles which meet him at every step. He sees at once that a state of things which in England existed only during the first years of the Conquest, or which more truly, unless during the nineteen years of anarchy, never existed at all, went on in the half conquered British land for ages.

[Sidenote: Saxon settlements in South-Wales.]

[Sidenote: The Flemings in Pembrokeshire.]

[Sidenote: Foundation of boroughs.]

The leaders in the settlement were of course mainly Norman. It has been acutely remarked that they mostly came, as followers of Robert Fitz-hamon most naturally would come, from the old lands of Brihtric in Gloucestershire and Somerset. They doubtless brought with them an English following, a strictly Saxon invasion of South Wales. Among the Teutonic settlers in this district, it is not easy to distinguish the Saxon from the Fleming. It must always be remembered that, while the Flemish settlement in Pembrokeshire is matter of history, the Flemish settlements in Gower and Glamorgan are merely matters of inference.[208] The English and Flemish settlers were doubtless the chief inhabitants of the boroughs which now began to arise under the shadow of the castles. Cardiff, Kenfig, Aberafan, and Neath, arose on the coast or on the rivers from which some of them took their names. Cowbridge and Llantrissant lay in the inland part of the vale; the last, a borough mainly British, was the only one which held at all a commanding site among the hills. In later times these towns sank into insignificance――Kenfig indeed well nigh perished under heaps of sand. But some of them have in later times been called up to a new life by the wonderful development of mineral wealth which has changed the barren hills which were left to the Briton into one of the busiest regions of our whole island.

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical affairs.]

[Sidenote: Llandaff.]

[Sidenote: Ewenny.]

[Sidenote: Cistercian foundations.]

[Sidenote: Neath. 1130.]

[Sidenote: Margam. 1147.]

In ecclesiastical matters the conquest of this district was for awhile chiefly marked, as has been mentioned, by the spoliation of the ancient British foundations, to the behoof of the conqueror’s favourite monasteries at Gloucester and Tewkesbury. The bishopric of Llandaff or Glamorgan kept its place, though it never became, either in the extent of its possessions or in the fabric of its church, at all the peer of Saint David’s. Ewenny arose, if not in the very first days of the conquest, yet within the first or second generation. The Cistercian movement reached this district early. The abbey of Neath arose in King Henry’s time, under the patronage of Earl Robert;[209] and in the last year of his life, while the anarchy still raged, the same earl, the most renowned of the lords of Glamorgan, found means to found the more famous abbey of Margam.[210]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Conquest of Brecknock.]

[Sidenote: Bernard Newmarch.]

[Sidenote: The castle of Brecknock.]

[Sidenote: Bernard’s gifts to Battle Abbey.]

[Sidenote: His wife Nest.]

[Sidenote: Defeat and death of Rhys at Brecknock. 1093.]

[Sidenote: End of “the kingdom of the Britons.”]

[Sidenote: Effect of the death of Rhys.]

[Sidenote: Cadwgan harries Dyfed. April 30, 1093.]

[Sidenote: Norman conquest of Ceredigion and Dyfed. July 1, 1093.]

The conquest of Glamorgan thus stands out as an event which is altogether unrecorded in authentic history, but of which it is not hard to put together a picture from its results. Other parts of the conquest of South Wales are more clearly entered in both British and English annals. The mountain land of Brecheiniog must have been occupied early in the reign of Rufus, if not earlier still. Its conqueror, Bernard of Neufmarché, better known in the English form of _Newmarch_, has already figured in our story;[211] and he was clearly in possession when William Rufus lay sick and penitent at Gloucester. His followers are then spoken of as the French who inhabited Brecheiniog. By that time then the upper valley of the Usk, from Abergavenny westward, must have been already subdued. The rich land of the holy King Brychan, with his twenty-four sainted daughters――the church where the worship of one of them turned the people of the land into frenzies which offended the soberer devotion of the Norman[212]――the rivers full of fish, the lake of marvels, the whole pleasant valley cut off by its hills from the extremes of heat and cold[213]――all had passed away from British rule. Bernard had doubtless by this time reared on the hill of Aberhonwy at least some rude forerunner of the castle of Brecknock, the fragments of which still stand, facing the southern mountains, alongside of the massive church of his own priory, the church which he made his far-off offering to Saint Martin of the Place of Battle.[214] We know not whether Bernard had by this time striven to confirm his power on British soil by a marriage which connected him with the noblest blood, alike British and English. His wife Nest united the blood of Gruffydd with the blood of Ælfgar. We are not told the name or race of her father;[215] but her mother was Nest the daughter of Gruffydd and Ealdgyth, the stepdaughter of Harold, the half-sister of his twin wanderers, the granddaughter of Ælfgar and his perhaps Norman Ælfgifu.[216] Nest thus came on the spindle-side from Godgifu the mirror of English matronhood; but the woman who shamelessly avowed to King Henry that her son was not the son of her husband Bernard hardly walked in the steps of her renowned ancestress.[217] During that memorable Lent, while King William lay sick at Gloucester, the new lord of Brecknock found it needful to gather his strength to withstand an attack from the people whom he had despoiled. The Britons came together under Rhys the son of Tewdwr, the king of whom we have often heard, and who must have been at this time the most powerful prince of South Wales.[218] He invaded the invaders; and in the very Easter week, while matters were busy between William and Anselm on the one hand, between William and Malcolm on the other hand, a battle took place near Brecknock. There Rhys was killed, by the help, according to the Glamorgan legend, of Robert Fitz-hamon. According to the same legend, Rhys did not fall in open fight, but as a prisoner to whom quarter was refused. Another account describes him as being slain by the treachery of his own men. His death was marked as an epoch in the history of Wales. With him, the native historian writes, fell the kingdom of the Britons, a phrase which an English writer seems to have misunderstood as meaning that after him no Welsh prince bore the kingly title.[219] The overthrow of Rhys led to great movements in other parts of South Wales. We can hardly doubt that, whether Robert Fitz-hamon had a hand in the fight at Brecknock or not, his settlement in Glamorgan was at any rate already begun. But the fall of Rhys laid the lands to the south-west, the lands of Ceredigion and Dyfed, open to invasion; and two sets of invaders were equally ready to make the most of the chance which was now laid open to them. The British enemy came first. Cadwgan son of Bleddyn, who had once before driven Rhys from his throne,[220] seized the moment of his death to carry a wasting inroad into Dyfed.[221] He was presently followed by invaders who were to do something more than make a wasting inroad. “About the kalends of July the French for the first time held Dyfed and Ceredigion, and set castles in them, and thence occupied the whole land.”[222]

[Sidenote: Pembrokeshire.]

[Sidenote: Tale of Rufus’ threats against Ireland.]