Land of my Fathers: A (Very) Short History of Wales
Leaving aside the 300-year occupation by Rome, the first major battle to involve Wales was the Battle of Chester, in 616 AD (there are sources who give other dates, but **** them: I’m sticking with this one. Who cares anyway? Bloody historians!) when the invading Angles and Saxons under Aethelfrith, one of the kings of half of Northumbria (as detailed previously) - he was the one who had all those priests killed, as they were praying for victory - faced the "wild" Welsh.* Chester being close to the Welsh border, it was a force of men from Powys, Rhôs and possibly Mercia too which met Aethelfrith and whose leaders were killed in the battle. Wales was broken into two main kingdoms, Powys and Gwynedd, but the first man to rule over the entire country was Rhodri Mawr in the 9th century. Of course, this then became the period in which the Viking raids on Britain began, and the Welsh were no exception to the depredations of the Danes.
Wales was, like Ireland, overwhelmingly Christian, some of this being due perhaps to the influx of Irish settlers who arrived around the fourth century, and like Ireland (and indeed England, before the ascension of Henry VIII) there were monasteries and abbeys dotted across the country, and monks, abbots and friars administering to the spiritual needs of the people. Over time, parts of what were Wales and the northern kingdoms were taken and absorbed into both Scotland and England, leaving Wales more or less as it is today. Although Rhodri Mawr ruled over Wales, the first man to do so effectively came a century after him, but would die before William even set sail for England and his new realm.
Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (c. 1010 - 1063)
Originally king of Gwynedd in 1039 on the death of* the previous ruler, Iago, supposedly his grandfather, he killed the brother of the Earl of Mercia and then attacked Dyffed, where he defeated Hywel ab Edwin (no relation, I don’t think) who had Irish support. Gruffydd drove them out but they returned again two years later, in 1044. Again Gruffydd routed the new Irish army and this time ended Hywel’s threat by the simple expedient of ending his life. He then linked up with Aelfgar, a disgruntled son of the Earl of Mercia who had a bone to pick with Harold, and together they attacked Hereford. Look, when the leader of the defenders is called Ralph the Timid, you’re not exactly going to be expecting a hard time, are you?
And they didn’t, leaving the town ablaze as they left. Soon after, Aelfgar got the earldom of East Anglia and was as happy as a pig in ****, so this time Gruffydd attacked Hereford on his own. Maybe he thought it hadn’t been burned enough so he wanted to finish the job. Taking territory after territory and kingdom after kingdom, he seemed unstoppable, and in 1057 was recognised as King of Wales. It should be made clear that he had to swear fealty to Edward the Confessor, as did the King of Scotland, and rule as a kind of “under-king”, so that he had Edward’s blessing, meaning peace with England. As long, of course, as Edward felt like maintaining that peace.
He is recorded as being the only true King of Wales, and he reigned for seven years. Whether he was a brutal ruler or a just one I don’t know, but the fact is that there was peace in his reign, enforced or not who can tell. In 1062 Harold rode against him, sent by the then-king, Edward the Confessor, and put him to flight. The next spring Tostig joined up with Harold and together they encircled Gruffydd’s position, cutting him off and then literally cutting him off as they took his head to the king. In fact, it was Gruffydd’s own men, desperate for peace with England, who agreed to kill him and send his head on to the king. Wales was again divided into the three traditional kingdoms, Harold reached an agreement with two Welsh kings and they were set up each to rule one of the kingdoms. Not sure who ruled over the third.
From around 1070 to 1081 Wales was again at war, as king fought king and territory changed hands, and internal strife tore the country apart, but by and large the new Norman monarchy left them to it, other things on William’s mind. I suppose the prevailing wisdom was that as long as the Welsh were fighting amongst themselves they were never going to be united, and therefore no threat of attack from Wales existed. However in 1081 William decided that Wales was becoming just a little too united for his tastes: Gruffudd ap Cynan had managed to regain control of Gwynedd, and had an army of Irish mercenaries at his side. That didn’t look good, and the old adage held true that when an under-king gets less under than you want him to be, time to teach him his place.
So William sent the Earl of Chester, Hugh D’Avranches, to parley with him but it was a trap and he was captured at Rug (you could say he had the rug pulled out from under him, ho ho) and nicked his lands. He then tried to install bishops and priests loyal to the Normans in place of the traditional native Welsh ones, but this did not go well, leading to the bishop having to carry a sword and go around with a bodyguard when he went out. Shades of The Simpsons: “Bishop carries less than fifty dollars” huh? In the end, Gruffudd escaped from Chester and returned to lead a revolt in 1094, but we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, so that’s where we’ll leave the history of Wales for now.
I wonder if it was a mistake for William to keep shuttling back and forth between France and England? In his absence something always seemed to happen, and it must have been hard to keep control when you’re constantly moving between the two countries. But then he had holdings a-plenty in Normandy which he had to watch over, and England in general wasn’t exactly being welcoming to him, so maybe he preferred being back in the homeland whenever he could. His method of land control amounted to a feudal system, as practised by the Normans, where the king basically held all the land and distributed it to those he saw fit to receive it, and took it from those he did not. This resulted in many English lords losing their lands and castles for having stood against him, and also the often forced marriage of English women to Norman lords, in order that the property would remain in, or pass into, Norman hands. As usual, the king retained control by the usage of castles, more and more built throughout England as William consolidated his power.
However, somewhat in comparison, in a strange way, to the Ascendancy landlords in Ireland in the nineteenth century, William spent very little time in England, preferring to administer his new kingdom through intermediaries. This had several consequences, the first of which was of course the rise to unprecedented power of lower lords, who were left to look after areas of England, though still directly under the control of the absentee king. The next was the all but elimination of the English aristocracy, as Normans became the dominant power in England and Englishmen, all now seen as “Saxons”, were relegated to a second class status, again somewhat like Catholics in Ireland some hundreds of years later. Englishmen could no longer hold posts in the Church, or if they had lifetime appointments, were replaced on their death (and who is to say, with not a shred of evidence but you know, that some of these troublesome natives were not assisted out of this world early?) by Normans.
Another consequence was the “**** this I’m out of here” syndrome, or to put it more mildly and* politely, the exodus of English to other countries not controlled by the Norman king: Scotland, Ireland and even Scandinavia - well, not surprising, considering how many Vikings still remained in England - as well as the Byzantine Empire, which was crying out for good mercenaries, and where a seasoned English soldier or commander could make good money. Back home, even the language was changing, as the Norman overlords forced the use of their Anglo-Norman tongue, and Old English - the dominant language before Hastings - began to undergo the same fate as Gaelic would in Ireland with the later arrival of the English, technically the Normans really. Administrative documents were now written in Latin, not English, and the Forest Laws were enacted, designating certain areas of England as belonging to the king, royal forests wherein no commoner may tread or hunt. This would of course in a few hundred years give rise to the legend of the one man who dared not only hunt in the forest, but live there and strike from it as his base to harry the occupying Normans.
(Did he exist, or was he just a myth, put about to bolster Saxon courage and provide a figure of resistance? Was he based on a real-life figure? I don't know, and we'll examine the legend of Robin Hood when we get to the era in which he supposedly lived. One thing I do know pretty much for sure, and that is that he was not a fox.)
It might seem odd that all of these changes came about not due to a mass immigration of Normans to England, but a relatively small number. It’s estimated that the population of Normans at the time of William the Conqueror only amounted to about 8,000 - that’s about a thousandth of the population of London alone today, and less than half of its population at the time. In all of England. So it’s not like the Normans outnumbered the English. Far from it; they were very much the minority. But then, once you’re in power and have all the major institutions, including the army of course, under your control then it kind of really doesn’t matter how inferior your numbers are.
While there were definitely advantages to the Norman conquest (not if you were there at the time, and English, of course), such as the abolition in short order (well, two hundred years, but lightning fast in terms of history) of slavery, this in a way didn’t matter for England, as almost all of the peasant or serf working class English were relegated ot the position of all but slaves. They had few rights, taxes of increasing cruelty were levied on them to pay for foreign wars, and they had no representation in the country. Not as if anyone could have voted or anything in the time of the House of Wessex, but at least you could expect that the king would, generally, have your best interests at heart. Not so under the Normans. It would probably be fair to say that English Saxons were looked upon by the new occupier ruling class as about as favourably as Jews were in Germany in the 1930s, or blacks in the Deep South in the nineteenth century, or the tenant farmers in Ireland by the Ascendancy landlords. In other words, in the eyes of the Normans, they had no rights, and this would continue for centuries until, eventually, as always happens, the invaders were not defeated by force but by inevitable circumstances.
As they began to intermarry with Saxon women, Norman men would acclimatise to the English ways, and the two peoples would more or less mingle to become one, as had happened to the Vikings in Ireland and indeed in France, where the Normans had become about as French as you could be. Now they would, slowly and not without bitter contest and bloodshed over the next few hundred years, almost against their will be turned from French into Englishmen, and England would be ruled by a sort of hybrid of both for the foreseeable future.
But to the native English, for a very long time, the Normans would be French, the enemy who came across the sea and killed their king, and then set about changing their land till it was virtually unrecognisable, a brutal, occupying force that frequently burned villages and towns, either in reprisal for rebellions or just because they were bored, and the Saxon scum had to be taught their place, and kept there. The huge, frowning Norman castles which would rise all over England, and remain there to this day, would be, and are, a lasting reminder of the huge and all-but world-changing effect these people would have on England, Ireland, Europe and further afield.
The time of the Normans had begun.