Part 38 (1/2)

Harold set up a pillar with the inscription, ”Here Harold conquered;”

and the Welsh gave hostages, and promised to pay tribute, while Harold erected a hunting-seat in Monmouths.h.i.+re, and made an ordinance that any Welshman seen bearing weapons beyond Offa's d.y.k.e should lose his right hand. Welshwomen might marry Englishmen, but none of the highborn Cymry might aspire to wed an Englishwoman. Hating the prince under whom they had come to so much disgrace, the Welsh themselves captured poor Gryffyth, and sent his head, his hands, and the beak of his s.h.i.+p, to Edward the Confessor, from whom they accepted the appointment of three of their native princes to the three provinces.

Thus the strength of Wales was so far broken, that William the Conqueror had only to bring a force with him, under pretext of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. David, to obtain the submission of the princes; and, in fact, the Cymry found the Norman n.o.bles far more aggressive neighbors than the Angles had been since their first arrival in Britain.

The mark, or frontier, once the kingdom of Mercia, was now called the March of Wales, where the Norman knights began to effect settlements, by the right of the strongest, setting up their impregnable castles, round which the utmost efforts of the Welsh were lost. Martin de Tours was one of the first, and his glittering host of mail-clad men so overawed the inhabitants of Whitchurch that they readily submitted, and he quietly established himself in their bounds, treating them, as it appears, with more fairness and friendliness than was then usual. He was a great chess-player, and the sport descended from father to son, even among the peasantry of Whitchurch, who long after were most skilful in the game.

Hugh Lupus, the fierce old Earl of Chester, was likewise a Lord Marcher, and had, like the Bishop of Durham, the almost royal powers of a Count Palatine, because, dwelling on the frontier, it was necessary that the executive power should be prompt and absolute. Indeed, the Lords Marchers, as these border barons were called, lived necessarily in a state of warfare, which made it needful to entrust them with greater powers than their neighbors, around whom they formed a sort of _cordon_, to protect them from the forays of the half-savage Welsh.

Twenty-one baronies were formed in this manner along the March of Wales, which constantly travelled toward the west. Robert Fitzaymon, by an alliance with one Welsh chief, dispossessed another of Glamorgan, which he left to his daughter Amabel, the wife of Earl Robert of Gloucester; and Gilbert de Clare, commonly called Strongbow (the father of the Irish Conqueror), obtained a grant from Henry I. of Chepstow and Pembroke, but had to fight hard for the lands which had more lawful owners. In and out among these Lords Marchers, and making common cause with them, were settlements of Flemings. Flanders, that commercial state where cloth-weaving first flourished as a manufacture, had suffered greatly from the inundations of the sea, and the near connection subsisting between the native princes and the sons of the Conqueror had led to an intercourse, which ended in the weavers, who had lost their all, being invited by Henry I. to take up their abode in Pembrokes.h.i.+re, where they carried on their trade while defending themselves against the Welsh, and thus first commenced the manufactures of England. Resolute in resistance, though not rash nor aggressive, and of industrious habits, they acted as a great protection to the English counties, and down even to the time of Charles I. they had a language of their own.

Owayn ap Gwynned, King of Aberfraw, or North Wales, had many wars with Henry II.; and, uniting with the bard king, Owayn Cyvelioc, of Powysland, did fearful damage to the English, which Henry attempted to revenge by an incursion into Merioneths.h.i.+re; but though he gained a battle at Ceiroc, he was forced to retreat through the inhospitable country, his troops hara.s.sed by the weather, and cut off by the Welsh, who swarmed on the mountains, so that his army arrived at Chester in a miserable state. He had many unfortunate hostages in his hands, the children of the n.o.blest families, and on these he wreaked a cowardly vengeance, cutting off the noses and ears of the maidens, and putting out the eyes of the boys.

Well might Becket, in his banishment, exclaim, on hearing such tidings, ”His wise men are become fools; England reels and stagers like a drunken man.”

”You will never subdue Wales, unless Heaven be against them,” said an old hermit to the King.

However, Henry had been carried by a frightened horse over a ford, of which the old prophecies declared that, when it should be crossed by a freckled king, the power of the Cymry should fall, and this superst.i.tion took away greatly from satisfaction in the victory. The Welsh princes were becoming habituated to the tribute, and in 1188, under pretext of preaching a Crusade, Archbishop Baldwin came into Wales, and a.s.serted the long-disputed supremacy of Canterbury over the Welsh bishopries.

He was attended by Gerald Barry, or Giraldus Cambrensis, a half-Norman half-Welsh ecclesiastic, who was one of the chief historians of the period, and had the ungracious office of tutor to Prince John.

When Owayn ap Gwynned died, in 1169, the kingdom of Aberfraw, or North Wales, was reduced to the isle of Anglesea and the counties of Merioneth and Caernarvon, with parts of Denbigh and Cardigan. A great dispute broke out for the succession. Jorwarth, the oldest son, was set aside because he had a broken nose; and Davydd, the eldest son by a second wife, seized the inheritance, and slew all the brethren save one, named Madoc, who sailed away to the West in search of new regions. Several years after, he again made his appearance in Aberfraw, declaring that he had found a pleasant country, and was come to collect colonists, with whom, accordingly, he departed, and returned no more. Many have believed that his Western Land was no other than America, and on this supposition Drayton speaks of him, in the ”Polyolbion,” as having reached the great continent ”Ere the Iberian powers had found her long-sought bay, or any western ear had heard the sound of Florida.”

Southey has, in his poem, made Madoc combine with the Aztecs in the settlement of Mexico, but traces were said to be found of habits and countenances resembling those of the Welsh among the Indians of the Missouri; and, in our own days, the traveller Mr. Buxton was struck by finding the Indians of the Rocky Mountains weaving a fabric resembling the old Welsh blanket. If this be so, Christianity and civilization must have died out among Madoc's descendants: but the story is one of the exciting riddles of history, such as the similar one of the early Norwegian discovery of America.

CAMEO x.x.xIII. THE ENGLISH JUSTINIAN. (1272-1292.)

_King of England_.

1272. Edward I.

_Kings of Scotland_.

1249. Alexander III.

1285. Margaret.

_Kings of France_.

1270. Philippe III.

1235. Philippe IV.

_Emperor of Germany_.

1273. Rodolph I.

_Popes_.

1271. Gregory X.

1276. Innocent V.

1277. John XXI.