Madog ap Maredudd(c. 1100–1160)

Madog ap Maredudd was born around 1100 at the royal court of Mathrafal in the Vyrnwy valley of central Powys, eldest son of Maredudd ap Bleddyn, King of Powys, and Hunydd ferch Eunydd of Dyffryn Clwyd. He was raised at the Mathrafal court and at the Pen-y-mynydd hunting-lodge in the upper Tanat valley, succeeded his father as undisputed sole ruler of Powys in 1132 in his thirty-second year, and held the kingdom in the unified form he had inherited it from his father for the next twenty-eight years, the longest tenure of any king of Powys.

He pursued through his reign a diplomatic policy unusual among the Welsh princes of his age: rather than oppose the Norman Marcher advance into the Welsh border country, he allied himself with the Marcher lords against the growing power of Gwynedd under Owain Gwynedd to his west, and through that alliance secured the territorial integrity of Powys against both the Normans and the Aberffraw line. He held the personal friendship of Henry I of England (the king who had been Madog's father's overlord in the early decades of the century), supported the empress Matilda's claim during the Anarchy of Stephen's reign (the Anarchy of 1135 to 1153), and emerged in the 1150s as one of the central diplomatic figures of the western frontier of the Angevin Empire under Henry II.

His court at Mathrafal in the Vyrnwy valley was the cultural centre of mid-twelfth-century Powys. He patronised the great court poets Gwalchmai ap Meilyr (whose Triad of Madog and the long elegy on Madog's death survive in the Black Book of Carmarthen) and Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr (the Great Poet, whose corpus of court poetry to Madog and his sons is one of the largest surviving bodies of twelfth-century Welsh verse). The Mabinogion narrative The Dream of Rhonabwy opens at the Mathrafal court of Madog ap Maredudd, with the famous description of Madog as the most generous of Welsh princes. The cultural production of his court is the foundation of the gogynfeirdd (early-court-poet) tradition that runs through the next century of Welsh literature.

He died at Mathrafal in February 1160 in his sixtieth year and was buried at the family abbey of Meifod. The kingdom of Powys was divided at his death between his sons into Powys Fadog (the northern half, around Wrexham and the upper Dee) and Powys Wenwynwyn (the southern half, around Welshpool and Montgomery); neither half ever reunified, and Powys never again held its high-medieval territorial position. The senior Mathrafal claim passed in the male line through Powys Fadog to Madog's great-grandson the Lord Glyndyfrdwy and onward to Owain Glyndŵr, who in 1400 raised the standard of the last Welsh sovereign claim on the strength of his descent from Madog ap Maredudd. The Mathrafal name in modern Welsh memory carries the weight of his thirty-eight-year reign as the last king of an undivided Powys.