Owain Glyndŵr(c. 1359–c. 1415)

Owain ap Gruffudd of Glyndyfrdwy was born around 1359, the senior heir of the princely lines of Powys Fadog and of Deheubarth: his father's house descended from the twelfth-century Madog ap Maredudd, last prince of an undivided Powys, and his mother's from the Lord Rhys of Dinefwr through the great Deheubarth dynasty. He held the small but ancient lordships of Glyndyfrdwy on the upper Dee in north-east Wales and of Cynllaith Owain on the upper Tanat, the two seats of the senior surviving Welsh princely blood after the Edwardian conquest of 1282. He was educated at the Inns of Court in London, served as a squire in the household of Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry the Fourth), and saw active military service in the Scottish campaign of Richard the Second of 1385 at Berwick. He was, by every contemporary account, a fully Anglicised Welsh gentleman of the Marcher establishment until his fortieth year.

The provocation that opened the long war was a local one. His Marcher neighbour Reginald Grey of Ruthin seized in 1399 a strip of common land between their estates and held it against Owain's appeals to the Westminster courts. Owain rode to London to plead his case in person, was rebuffed, and on the sixteenth of September 1400, with a small assembly of his Welsh cousins and tenants at Glyndyfrdwy, was proclaimed Prince of Wales (Tywysog Cymru) by his own kindred. The proclamation was the first sovereign Welsh claim to the title in a hundred and eighteen years, since the death of Llywelyn the Last at Cilmeri in December 1282. Within a week he had stormed Ruthin and burnt the Grey estates; within a month he had taken Denbigh, Rhuthun, Hawarden, Holt, Oswestry and Welshpool, and the rising had spread across north Wales.

He held the principality for the next ten years against the full military and financial resources of the Plantagenet state. He took Conwy Castle in March 1401 in a Good Friday raid by Rhys and Gwilym ap Tudur of Penmynydd in Anglesey (cousins of the rising's leadership and the great-grandfathers of the Tudor dynasty), defeated Henry the Fourth in person on the slopes of Plynlimon at the Battle of Hyddgen in June 1401, took Harlech Castle in 1404 and made it his royal seat, took Aberystwyth Castle in 1404, and through 1404 and 1405 controlled the whole of Wales from Anglesey to the Severn except the great Marcher castles of the south-east. He convened the first Welsh parliament at Machynlleth in 1404, was crowned Prince of Wales in the presence of envoys from France, Castile and Scotland, and issued the Pennal Letter of the thirty-first of March 1406 to Charles the Sixth of France, setting out the constitutional programme of an independent Welsh principality: a Welsh church under its own archbishop at St David's, two Welsh universities (one in north Wales, one in south), and full international recognition of the Welsh principality as a sovereign state in alliance with France.

He fought through the 1405 invasion of the French expeditionary force of two thousand five hundred men under Jean de Rieux that landed at Milford Haven in August, marched with him to Worcester and to within eight miles of the English Midlands border, and engaged a Plantagenet army under Henry the Fourth in what would have been the deciding battle of the war but for the stand-off and the French withdrawal. The Tripartite Indenture of February 1405, signed with Edmund Mortimer and the Percys of Northumberland, divided England and Wales into three sovereign realms with Owain's Wales running to the Severn and the Trent. Through 1405 and 1406 he held the principality at its full territorial high-water mark. From 1407, after the recovery of Aberystwyth by Prince Hal in 1408 and of Harlech in 1409, his territorial control contracted; his wife Margaret and four of his daughters were captured at Harlech and taken to the Tower of London, and from 1410 he was reduced to a small mountain war in the Carneddau and the Berwyn hills.

He vanished from the historical record after a final raid in Shropshire in 1412 and is presumed to have died around 1415, in his fifty-sixth year, somewhere among the hill-tenants of Herefordshire or southern Powys. The place of his death and the place of his grave have never been certainly identified; the tradition associates him with the hill-country around Monnington-on-Wye and the small church at Kentchurch. He was offered a royal pardon by Henry the Fifth in 1415 and declined it. The Glyndŵr rising of 1400 to 1415 was the last sustained Welsh sovereign claim to the principality. His Pennal Letter of 1406 is the founding constitutional document of modern Welsh national identity, the Glyndŵr Way long-distance footpath crosses the central Welsh hills from Knighton to Welshpool, and the title Owain Glyndŵr, Prince of Wales, is on every Welsh national platform of the modern era. His grandson on the Tudor side, the great-grandson of Maredudd ap Tudur of Penmynydd who had raided Conwy Castle with him on Good Friday 1401, took the throne of England as Henry the Seventh at the Battle of Bosworth on the twenty-second of August 1485, three generations after his death, and the principality became from that date the constitutional inheritance of the Crown of England under a Welsh-descended dynasty. The Glyndŵr name in modern Welsh political memory carries the weight of the rising of 1400.