Glyndŵr in Powys

The revolt began with a property dispute. Owain Glyndŵr, a landowner of princely descent with an English legal training and a career in English royal service, fell out with Reginald Grey of Ruthin over a piece of land. The courts found against him and parliament declined to hear him, reportedly with the remark that it did not much matter what became of barefoot Welsh dogs.

In September 1400 he was proclaimed Prince of Wales by a small group of supporters. Within four years he controlled most of the country.

Powys in the revolt

This county was fought over harder than most, because it contained exactly what Glyndŵr's forces targeted: the planted boroughs.

Those towns — Montgomery, Knighton, New Radnor, Builth, Hay, Welshpool — had been established at castle gates and settled with English burgesses holding trading privileges that Welshmen did not. Attacking them was not indiscriminate destruction. It was aimed at a specific colonial arrangement that had been resented for two hundred years.

Hay was burned in 1401. New Radnor's castle fell, and tradition holds that the garrison was beheaded. Montgomery, Knighton, Presteigne and Welshpool were all attacked at various points.

Pilleth

On 22 June 1402 an English force under Edmund Mortimer met Glyndŵr's army at Bryn Glas above Pilleth, in the Lugg valley near Presteigne.

The English were badly beaten. Mortimer was captured, and — significantly — was not ransomed by Henry IV, who suspected his loyalty. Mortimer subsequently married Glyndŵr's daughter and joined him.

Contemporary accounts speak of very heavy English losses, and a group of Wellingtonia trees planted on the hillside in the nineteenth century is said to mark a mass grave.

Pilleth church, standing alone on the hillside, is the site's memorial and is worth the visit.

Machynlleth, 1404

Having taken Harlech and Aberystwyth, Glyndŵr summoned a parliament to Machynlleth, four men from every commote, and was crowned Prince of Wales before envoys from France, Scotland and Castile.

The programme that came out of it was a serious one: an independent Welsh church under a Welsh archbishop at St David's, two universities, and a restored Welsh law.

In 1405 came the Tripartite Indenture, an agreement with Mortimer and Henry Percy to divide England and Wales between the three of them. It was never enacted.

The building at Machynlleth traditionally identified as the parliament house is later in its surviving fabric than 1404, though that a parliament was held in the town is not in doubt.

The collapse

From 1406 it unravelled. The French withdrew, the English recovered the castles methodically, Aberystwyth fell in 1408 and Harlech in 1409, and Glyndŵr's wife, daughters and grandchildren were taken and died in captivity in London.

He was still at large in 1412. A pardon offered in 1415 went unanswered.

There is no record of his death, burial or capture.

What came after

Penal laws against the Welsh stayed on the statute book for over a century, though enforcement was patchy.

More visibly, the fifteenth century saw a substantial rebuilding once the country settled: church roofs, rood screens, and a wave of domestic building by Welsh freeholders that gives Radnorshire its extraordinary stock of late medieval timber houses.

On the ground

Glyndŵr's Way, a national trail of 135 miles, runs from Knighton to Machynlleth and back to Welshpool, almost entirely within Powys. It is a commemorative route rather than a historical one — it does not follow any campaign — but it crosses most of the country the revolt was fought over.

Machynlleth, Pilleth, and the castle earthworks at New Radnor and Montgomery are the places where it is most legible.