Llewelyn ap Gruffydd Fychan

Llewelyn ap Gruffyth Fychan (easy for you to say!) is not to be confused with anyone called merely Llewelyn ap Gruffydd or the man called Gruffyth ap Llewelyn. If that makes you feel like a cup of tea and slice of CAKE, please go and indulge before reading on but bear in mind that "ap" in Welsh is a patronymic and tells you the name of the father of the person. Over time is has become reduced to a "p" and appears at the beginning of surnames like "Probert", son of Robert, or "Pugh", son of Huw (clearly the speakers were too out of breath climbing mountains to pronounce their h's.)  As you eat your CAKE you will think of others: Powell etc. Yet do not practise the initial "ll" sound simultaneously with your chocolate sponge - save that till later (the CAKE or the practice). Then put the tip of your tongue up against the hard palate behind your two top front teeth and say "ff" and you will make that genuine clicky sound that the Welsh have used for years to terrorise the English. Shakespeare got away with Fluellen and that was probably a wise move to make the leek-wearing warrior a popular, likeable and pronounceable character.

  My regular and devoted readers (love you all) who are endowed with a sharp acumen and instinctive faff filter will, by now, have concluded that I am flannelling (pronounced normally) and they will be right. We do not know much about him. What we do know is derived from our local and under-exposed hero, the chronicler Adam of Usk, Adda o Frynbuga. The other very tricky thing about Welsh is that the consonants change at the beginning of a word according to obscure grammatical rules intended to keep the English good targets for mockery when they attempt to learn the language. Brynbuga is the Welsh for Usk and the "b" has here become "f" - this cunning dodge makes use of a dictionary a teasing challenge for foreigners.

   Llewelyn ap Gruffydd Fychan (Vaughan) of Cayo in Cardigan, lived from 1341 to 9 October 1401 and joined the revolt against Henry IV, led by Owain Glyn Dwr. Adam calls him a "man of gentle birth and bountiful, who yearly used sixteen tuns of wine in his household". Because he was "well disposed" towards the rebel cause, he was executed in Llandovery on the feast of St. Denis, October 9th, "in the presence of the king and his eldest son, and by his command, drawn, hanged, and beheaded, and quartered." It is not crystal clear whether the son was Hal, the future Henry V of Monmouth, or Llewelyn's.  (He probably had 2 sons fighting in the rebel forces.) By the standards of the period, he was quite elderly when tortured in this way. It must be noted that 16 tuns is a remarkable amount of wine and suggests that much generous tippling with guests went on annually on the rich household. Another story tells that Llewelyn deliberately led the English forces the wrong way whilst pretending to take them to Glyn Dwr but Adam merely states that he "willingly preferred death to treachery."

   In 1998 a campaign was started in Llandovery to construct a memorial to this rebel, sometimes called the "Welsh Braveheart". Money was raised locally and from the Arts Council of Wales and, after an exhibition of proposed designs in 2000, a public vote secured the commission for Toby and Gideon Peterson of St. Clears (pronounced "Clares"). I do not know what the others in the competition would have been like but this is the most impressive statue I have ever seen as it stands on the motte of the ruinous castle overlooking the car park. It is 16 ft tall and made of stainless steel which glows in the sun and glowers in cloud: on its base of Cayo stone, it is a figure with empty cloak, helmet and armour representing both the universal nature of Llewelyn's actions and the violence of the mutilation of his body. You will have noted that the drawing of the entrails was the first torture, during which he would have been alive. The artist described it as depicting a "brave nobody."
  Even I, tireless devotee of public transport, would not really suggest a pilgrimage from the east especially but, if you are going to Pembrokeshire on the A40, do stop in Llandovery car park and eat your sarnies gazing at the statue and climb up afterwards to admire it in detail. It is simply stunning.

I have written about Owain Gly Dwr and his rebellion (as has Shakespeare!) and about Adam of Usk who seems little recognised as an important Medieval chronicler, though I am delighted that my blog post has received hundreds of hits. Henry V and Monmouth Castle are the subjects of other articles here. "Llan" at the beginning of Welsh place names means "church" or parish usually of a particular saint (Llandeilo, just down the road and very pretty, means "parish of St. Teilo") but here refers to the meeting of 2 rivers. It is twinned with Pluguffan in Brittany (finish your CAKE before embarking on that one.)

The Monmouthshire Warrior in the Middle Ages

 The medieval fighters of Gwent/Monmouthshire
  We know a certain amount from various sources but one seminal writer on the topic is Giraldus Cambrensis who toured Wales with Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1188. He kept a kind of diary (I have no doubt that today he would have been an enthusiastic and diligent blogger) and, as one of his motives was to drum up support for the Third Crusade, his notings of military matters are crucial to our understanding.
  He commented that the men of Gwent "have much more experience of warfare, are more famous for their martial exploits and, in particular, are more skilled with the bow and arrow than those who come from other parts of Wales." He quotes events from the capture of Abergavenny castle where the arrows penetrated the oak doorway of the tower, almost as thick as a man's palm, and where the infamous William de Braose told a riveting (pun intended) tale. In this account a Welsh bowman shot an arrow through a rider's thigh despite protection by cuishes, then though his leather tunic, part of the saddle and deeply into the horse, killing it. Another fighter, similarly pierced, wheeled his mount round and was impaled on the other side, pinning him twice to the animal.
   Giraldus sums this up: "It is difficult to see what more you could do, even if you had a ballista". Quite so, Gerald of Wales. These bows were carved out of dwarf elm trees, not very large but sturdy, and left unpolished: in his view they were particularly useful at close quarters. In general, the archers were usually, as John Keegan states, "from remote and rustic areas ... with time on their hands." They were often not considered worth a ransom.

The longbow
   It is generally accepted that the English longbow was borrowed from Wales and evolved to become a formidable weapon, by the 13th century coming to measure around 6ft. It had a complex construction of different woods and required great strength and skill to manipulate. A shorter bow drawn back as far as the nearside of the chest had some force but the taller one taken further back as far as the ear was a winner - this change dates from the first decades of the 14th century. The yard-long arrows took 3 times as long to make as the bow, needed goose feathers from the same wing of the bird for even flight and were tipped with metal bodkins. This explains why they were frequently retrieved from the dead on the battle field.
  It was Edward I who was mainly responsible for recognising the potential of the longbow, ironically largely because of his encounters with it in the hands of his enemy, The rise of the English infantry to be a real power in Europe depended on the longbow drawn to the ear and he developed such trust in it that he had an archers-only corps of 800 men in 1277 from Gwent and Crickhowell who gained, as mercenaries, an unusual 3d per day. The arrows could penetrate chain mail and chroniclers report victims looking like hedgehogs with bristling spikes - bowmen were more often combined with other forms of infantry or even cavalry. A rain of arrows caused a "funk" sending a soldier into a kind of distraught madness even if he were not hit.

It could take 10 years to train an archer and they developed enlarged pulling arms and shoulders as has been seen on skeletons. Edward III issued a declaration in 1363 that "every man in the ... country, if he be able-bodied, shall, upon holidays, make use, in his games, of bows and arrows ... and so learn and practise archery." He recognised that this would give him a pool of skilled men for recruitment in war. By contrast, the French rulers discouraged such training for fear that the plebs would use their proficiency to rise up in revolt against them. They perhaps regretted this after their defeats in the great battles of the Hundred Years' War. It should be noted that archers were also used on ships and stood on the "castles" to fire.

England/Wales v France
  Crécy was perhaps the battle of the non-Hundred Years' War (I was baffled by the arithmetic when I was at school) most affected by the longbowmen. 2000 of them were taken from South Wales to a resounding victory over the French who were blinded by the sun: at least 10000 of the enemy died, many of them noblemen. We will skip over Poitiers where the bowmen committed atrocities and move on to Agincourt where the arrow-scarred Henry V (injured by a Welsh shot at the Battle of Shrewsbury and captured in his portrait in profile to hide this) won another round of the contest. Again French losses vastly outnumbered the English. In a conversation with Fluellen after the battle, the Welshman refers to Henry's great-uncle "Edward the Plack, Prince of Wales" fighting a "most prave pattle here in France" in which the Welshman did good service ... wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps" as the King does on "Saint Tavy's day" because he is, as he acknowledges, Welsh himself.
 On a sourer note, we can infer that some regarded as treachery, Welsh service to the English cause.

Henry V was born in Monmouth Castle and, if you are interested in the ballista, there is also a post on this blog about such Medieval weapons. I am indebted to Reginald Bosanquet for the detail about goose feathers which, at first, seemed rather like the tale I once believed that it was best to buy a left leg of Welsh lamb because they built up flesh on that side by circling the mountains clockwise.