The Third Crusade
In 1188, Gerald of Wales travelled through Wales as part of Archbishop Baldwin’s tour, the purpose of which was specifically to find recruits for the Third Crusade. He wrote both his Journey through Wales and On the Education of a Monarch as part of his devotion to the Crusade ideal. http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/whatson/?event_id=3923 Here is the link to the map: http://www.medievaltymes.com/courtyard/images/crusades/third/third_crusade_route_map.jpg The Third Crusade “was led by Frederick I Barbarossa of Germany, Philip II Augustus of France and Richard I the Lionheart of England . . . all of whom were experienced military leaders, although Philip and Richard were already at odds before the crusade began. The crusaders travelled by two separate routes. Barbarossa marched overland from Germany, leaving in the spring of 1189. His march was one of the best organised of any crusade . . . but late in the summer Frederick was Read more…
Medieval Monks
There were a lot of different orders of monks in the Middle Ages (still are, in fact), but the primary monasteries in England consisted of: Dominicans: Dominicans are about preaching and doctrinal conformity. They were (no surprise) the order behind the inquisition, with the intent to rule out any doctrine that didn’t abide strictly by received Catholic theology. “Domingo de Guzman (around 1170-1221), a Spanish priest travelling with his bishop Diego of Osma, encountered by chance Cistercian monks who tried to bring the Cathars of Southern France back to the Catholic Church. He saw the deficiencies of their attempts and decided to do a better job, by walking and dressing humbly, listening to and talking with people, being aware of contemporary developments, and first of all preaching the Gospel. He gathered a band of priests around him. After the Fourth Read more…
The Kingdom of Deheubarth
Deheubarth was a southern Welsh kingdom, arising from the former kingdoms of Dyfed and Seisyllwg in 920 AD, under the rule of Hywel Dda. At various times, it fell under the auspices of Gwynedd, namely, during the rule of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn in 1055 AD. The Norman conquest, as for the Saxons to the east, was not a happy event, however, and Deheubarth fell to them before 1100 AD. These Normans conquered the southern regions of Wales more fully than they ever did the north, including Deheubarth (until 1282, at which point Edward I conquered all of Wales). The Normans accepted a client rule in certain instances and granted Cantref Mawr to Gruffydd ap Rhys in 1116. In time, he passed its rule onto his son, Anarawd. With the help of Owain Gwynedd, Anarawd and Gruffydd successfully revolted against their Norman masters Read more…
Dolwyddelan Castle
The site of Dolwyddelan Castle has been on a major thoroughfare through Wales for millenia. Before the present castle was built by Llywelyn Fawr (Llywelyn ap Iorwerth) early in the 13th century, an older castle sat on a knoll on the valley floor below it. http://www.castlewales.com/dolw.html Before that castle, a major Roman road through Snowdonia passed just to the east, connecting Tomen y Mur with the small fort of Bryn y Gefeilliau and the larger fort of Canovium (Caerhun). (See Roman Roads: https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/roman-roads/) and the Sarn Helen (named also for Elan, the wife of Macsen Wledig or Magnus Maximus, emperor of Rome). https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/sarn-helen/ The present Dolwyddelan Castle has been heavily restored, in keeping with it’s position as the birthplace of Llywelyn Fawr, even if that even really occured a quarter of a mile southeast of the present castle. The newer Read more…
The Quest for Welsh Independence
When the Romans conquered Britain, the people they defeated were the Britons, the ancestors of the Welsh, a Celtic people who themselves had come to the island hundreds of years before. After the Romans marched away in 410 AD, the Saxon invaders overwhelmed the British in successive waves, pushing them west and resulting in a Saxon England and British Wales. When the next conquerors—the Normans—came in 1066 AD, they conquered England but they did not conquer Wales. Not yet. For the next two hundred years, power in Wales ebbed and flowed, split among Welsh kings and princes, Marcher barons (Norman lords who carved out mini-kingdoms for themselves on the border between England and Wales), and the English kings. Through it all, the Welsh maintained their right to independence—to be governed by their own laws and their own kings. The ending came on Read more…
Traveling on Medieval Roads
Traveling on medieval roads meant traveling on surfaces as varied as stone, gravel, grass, and dirt. There have been roads across Britain for as long as people and animals have traversed the landscape. The original roads were tracks, created by years, decades, and millennia of people and wheeled vehicles, wearing a passage through forests, fields, and mountainous terrain. One of the first videos we produced was about Bwlch y Ddeufaen, an ancient road across north Wales marked by two standing stones, dating back thousands of years. Because of the difficult terrain, rather than build a new road entirely, the old one was improved by the Romans and then was in continuous use up until the modern era when a new road along the coast line was blasted through the mountains. One of the most lasting effects of the Roman occupation Read more…
Slavery and Wales
The title says Slavery ‘and’ Wales because the degree to which slavery existed in Wales is difficult to determine. Without a doubt, many Welsh were forced into slavery–evidence points to Welsh captives on the continent of Europe as well as in Anglo-Saxon England. St Patrick himself was Briton/Welsh (born 387 AD) and was captured by the Irish and made a slave. The Celts were well-known slave-keepers, as were the Romans after them. But were the Welsh themselves, after the Romans left? Hard to imagine they weren’t when their neighbors all around were enslaving them. But in all of the 767 pages of John Davies The History of Wales, he doesn’t mention slavery once. However, Ron Wilcox writes in his book Between Romans and Normans: “Living alongside the bondsmen were the slaves who worked as agricultural labourers or artisans. Most were born into slavery but Read more…
Population in Wales
The population estimate for Wales in the early Middle Ages, at the Norman Conquest in 1066, is 150,000. This is squarely in the ‘medieval warming period’ which began around 950 AD, in which Wales experienced a warmer climate than between the 13th and 19th centuries. This site indicates that the population doubled by 1350 to 300,000, but then was cut by 1/3 with the Black Death. It didn’t reach that total again until the 16th century. As of 2008, the population of Wales was roughly 3 million, creeping slowly up from 2.8 million in 1991. Cardiff, the capital, is by far the biggest city, with slightly fewer than 300,000 people. http://www.citypopulation.de/UK-Wales.html. In the Middle Ages, Cardiff’s population was between 1500 and 2000 people–and was one of the few, and certainly one of the largest–towns in Wales. http://www.localhistories.org/Cardiff.html This population is spread over Read more…
A Medieval Siege
A medieval siege was a far more common form of warfare than a fight on an open battlefield. Sieges had the element of surprise and required fewer men than battle too, such that a ruler could beseige a castle with his enemy inside, while freeing other forces to wage war elsewhere. The goal in beseiging a castle was not to destroy it, but to take it, since castles were pawns in the great game of controlling land. They were usually heavily fortified and defended, so a beseiger had several options when he was on the outside looking in: 1) to starve/wait them out 2) harassment and trickery 3) a straight assault Often, attackers employed all three tactics at various times. The defenders, on the other hand, hoped and prayed for relief. As Saladin says in Kingdom of Heaven “One cannot Read more…
Cadwaladr ap Gruffydd, brother to the King
If ever your family gets on your nerves, you can be glad that you don’t have a family like Owain Gwynedd. Cadwaladr ap Gruffydd was Owain Gwynedd’s brother. A royal family in Wales wasn’t the same as in England, where the eldest son inherited most everything. In Wales, upon the death of a king, an entire kingdom was to be split among the brothers, even the illegitimate ones. (yes, the Catholic Church objected to this, but the Welsh didn’t much care). This caused problems for Wales time and again–as the brothers fought over lands among themselves and what had been a united kingdom under the father became divided under the sons. Cadwaladr and Owain were often at odds. Owain became the eldest son when his brother, Cadwallon, died, leaving Owain and Cadwaladr to rule without him. Owain and Cadwaladr seemed Read more…
Better Know a Castle*: Abergavenny
On Christmas Day in 1175, William de Braose, a Marcher lord (the 4th Lord of Bramber), summoned Seisyll ap Dyfnwal, Seisyll’s eldest son, Geoffrey, and a number of other local leading Welshmen from Gwent to Abergavenny Castle to hear a royal proclamation. He then murdered them all. This was justified in William’s mind because of a prior killing of his uncle by Seisyll (or so he suspected, though apparently had no proof). “De Braose and his men then mounted horses and galloped the few miles to Seisyll’s home where they caught and murdered his younger son, Cadwalladr a boy of seven years of age and captured his wife, whose exact fate is uncertain.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seisill_ap_Dyfnwal Other sons, not in attendance that day, got their revenge by burning Abergavenny in 1182. Gerald of Wales “alludes to the horrible event in the history of Abergavenny Read more…
The Wildwood — the lost forest of the UK
Imagine all of the UK covered in a thickly wooded landscape, much like portions of the western United States. I just spent the last 1/2 an hour looking up native plants in Wales, trying to come up with a couple that would have reliably flourished in Gwynedd in the 13th century. My sister-in-law is a botanist, and she agreed that agrimony and juniper would good choices. What has been difficult to determine, as with the Roman and ancient roads, is what the landscape looked like in the Middle Ages. England was mostly denuded of trees by then, but it is possible that wasn’t the case in Wales. So when we see these broad lanscapes in the uplands with no trees, was that what they looked like eight hundred years ago? How do we find that out? According to scientists, only Read more…
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