The Lord Rhys(c. 1132–1197)

Rhys ap Gruffydd was born at Dinefwr Castle, the rock fortress above the river Tywi in Carmarthenshire, around 1132, fourth and youngest son of Gruffydd ap Rhys, Prince of Deheubarth, and Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd ap Cynan of the Aberffraw line of Gwynedd. His father died in 1137 when Rhys was five; his elder brothers fought through the disputed succession of the 1140s, and Rhys succeeded as undisputed sole ruler of Deheubarth on the death of his elder brother Maredudd in 1155 in his twenty-third year. He held the principality for the next forty-two years, the longest tenure of any medieval Welsh ruler.

He took up the southern Welsh resistance to the Norman advance with a sustained military and diplomatic competence the Welsh kingdoms had not previously commanded. He fought through the 1150s and 1160s against the Marcher Norman incursions in West Wales, won back from the Normans the territories of Ceredigion (1158) and the lower Tywi (1162), and built around himself the diplomatic alliance with Owain Gwynedd of the Aberffraw line that produced the joint Welsh victory at the Battle of Crogen in 1165 against Henry II of England. After Henry's failed Welsh expedition of 1165 the king sought a settled peace with Rhys, and at the Council of Gloucester in March 1175 Henry formally recognised Rhys as Princeps Sudwallie (Prince of South Wales) and as Justiciar of South Wales, the highest acknowledgement of Welsh sovereignty given by an English king to that date.

In Christmas 1176 in his forty-fourth year, in his rebuilt great hall at Cardigan Castle on the Teifi estuary, Rhys hosted the festival that has been remembered ever since as the first eisteddfod. The contemporary Brut y Tywysogion chronicle records that Rhys ap Gruffydd held a great feast at the castle of Aberteifi, before which feast he had proclamation made throughout all Britain, and to many other countries, inviting all the bards and minstrels to it, and gave them all chairs and gifts according to their condition. The two competitions were held: one for poetry (won by the poets of Gwynedd) and one for instrumental music (won by the musicians of South Wales). The eisteddfod tradition has been continuously revived in Welsh cultural memory ever since, and the modern National Eisteddfod of Wales (revived 1860 and held annually since) traces its direct cultural descent to Rhys's Christmas festival of 1176.

He continued through the 1180s and 1190s as the central political figure of southern Wales, founded the Cistercian abbeys of Strata Florida (1184, in Ceredigion) and Talley (1185, in Carmarthenshire), and across the 1190s after Henry II's death in 1189 sustained the increasingly unequal pressure of the Marcher advance under Richard I and John. He died at Dinefwr on the twenty-eighth of April 1197 in his sixty-fifth year and was buried at St Davids Cathedral; his effigy in the south choir aisle is one of the finest surviving examples of late twelfth-century Welsh sculpture. The Dinefwr name in modern Welsh memory carries the weight of his forty-two-year reign and the Cardigan eisteddfod of 1176.