Cilmeri

A country is rarely lost in the field where its armies stand. More often it is lost in a smaller place, a wood or a ford or a lane, where a single man with a title and a seal turns at the sound of a horse and meets another man who does not know his face. The great houses are not undone by the great battles. They are undone by an accidental afternoon.

THE HOUSE OF ABERFFRAW

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is fifty-nine winters old in December of 1282, and he carries on his belt the sword of the line of Aberffraw, a line that has held Gwynedd since the eighth century, since before the Saxons in the south had agreed amongst themselves what to call their kings. By the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267, sealed in the hand of Henry of Winchester, he is Prince of Wales and lord of Snowdon, and the lesser lords of Powys and Deheubarth do him homage. He is the first of his house to be acknowledged so by the English crown in its own Latin. He knows what such acknowledgements are worth. His grandfather Llywelyn the Great had spent forty years learning the lesson, that a charter from a Plantagenet is good only so long as the Plantagenet who sealed it is short of money or short of soldiers, and that Edward, the new king, is short of neither.

The war began again in March, when his brother Dafydd, restless and ill-used, struck Hawarden Castle without warning and dragged Llywelyn into a rising he had not chosen and could not refuse. By autumn the English had taken Anglesey, the granary, and the harvest with it. The host is wintering at Garth Granog above the Conwy. The country is hungry. And in the first week of December a letter has come south, by a route Llywelyn does not wholly trust, from a Marcher gentleman of Builth: the Mortimer cousins, blood-kin to his own mother's line, will defect to him if he will ride to the Marches in person to receive them.

THE RIDE SOUTH

He goes with a small escort, eighteen men, his clerk, the seal-bag, the standard. To bring an army south would be to announce the meeting; to come alone would be to refuse it. He rides through the Cambrian uplands in the second week of December, the eleventh, a Friday, the sky low and grey over the Irfon valley, the leaves long off the trees, the ground soft with the rain of the preceding nights. The Irfon runs full and brown under the bridge at Aberedw. Beyond the bridge, a wood on a south-facing slope, perhaps two hundred yards across, climbing away from the river toward the open hill. He crosses, leaves the escort on the bridge, rides up into the wood to wait.

He is not where he should be. He knows it. A prince does not ride out from his host with eighteen men in winter to keep an appointment in a wood. He has done it because the war cannot be won by sitting at Garth Granog through to the spring, and because if half of what the letter says is true the Marches will turn and Edward's line of supply through Hereford will fail, and because the seal of Aberffraw has been honoured for five centuries on the strength of princes who showed up in person when they were called.

Then, behind him, down on the Irfon, the sound of horses at the gallop, English horses, more than eighteen of them. A flying column, come up from Builth in the half-hour since he crossed the bridge. The escort engages on the near bank. He hears the shouting carried up the slope through the bare trees.

THE SECOND IN THE WOOD

He is alone in the wood now. The clerk has gone down toward the bridge. The standard is propped against a tree. The sword on his belt is the sword that has been the sword of the line of Aberffraw for two hundred years and he has not yet drawn it. He thinks, in the breath he has, that the letter was either a trap from its first line, or the letter was honest and the trap was laid after it was written, and the Mortimer cousins he came to meet do not yet know what is happening across this bridge. He cannot tell which, and the difference no longer matters to the afternoon. What matters is that if he is taken, his brother Dafydd carries the war, and Dafydd is a good captain but is not the prince and the country will not come to him as it has come to Llywelyn. And if he is killed and not taken, Edward gets the head and not the homage, and Edward will display it, and the old prophecy of the bards, that a Welshman shall yet wear the crown in London, will be answered in Edward's mockery and not in any Welsh hand.

A horse, then, behind him in the wood, coming up at a walk through the leaf-mould. One rider, no more. He turns in the saddle. The man is an English knight in a mail hauberk under a plain surcoat without a device, breathing hard from the chase, lance already levelled, thirty paces off. Neither man knows the other's face. The English knight is Stephen de Frankton, a freelance out of Shropshire riding on the Mortimer levy, sent up into the wood to scour for stragglers from the engagement at the bridge. He sees a Welshman in a russet cloak with a sword. He does not see the seal-bag. He charges.

Llywelyn puts his hand to the hilt. He gets the hilt half out of the scabbard. The lance takes him in the chest, under the collarbone, on the right side. He goes off the horse into the wet leaves. He is alive perhaps half a minute. He hears, before anything else, the breathing of the horse standing over him. Frankton dismounts, draws his dagger, and finishes the work without looking at the belt of the man he has killed. It is somewhere between two and three in the afternoon. The leaves continue to fall.

THE BRIDGE AT ABEREDW

Down on the Irfon the escort is broken inside the hour. The clerk is taken alive and questioned and gives, in the end, the name of the man who rode up into the wood. A search party is sent. The body is found by the seal-bag and the standard, identified by men who had seen the prince at Montgomery fifteen years before, and brought back across the bridge in the dusk to the English camp. A messenger goes south that night to Roger Lestrange, the king's captain in mid-Wales, who writes at once to Edward at Rhuddlan in the careful Latin of a man reporting unlikely news: sciatis quod Lewelinus filius Griffini est mortuus, know you that Llywelyn son of Gruffudd is dead, and his army defeated, and all the flower of his men slain, as the bearer of this letter will tell you. The letter is dated the day after.

RHUDDLAN, AND LONDON

Edward at Rhuddlan reads the dispatch and orders the head sent on. It travels by escort through the Marches and through the home counties and is brought to London in the week before Christmas. There it is set on a stake above the gate of the Tower, and a circlet of ivy is bound around the temples in mockery of the prophecy that a king of the Britons would yet be crowned in the city. The bards' word and Edward's joke meet at the spike and the ivy. The court takes the point. The chronicler at Waverley writes that with the head of this Llywelyn fell the glory of the Welsh, cecidit gloria Wallensium. The phrase travels.

Nine months later, in October of 1283, Dafydd ap Gruffudd, who has carried the war alone through the spring and summer in the high country above Dolwyddelan, is taken and dragged through the streets of Shrewsbury at a horse's tail, and hanged, and cut down living, and disembowelled, and quartered, the first man of rank in these islands to be put to death in the full ceremony that the English law of treason would afterwards reserve for its enemies. The Statute of Rhuddlan, in the following year, dissolves the principality into shire ground under the English crown. Llywelyn's infant daughter Gwenllian, eighteen months old at her father's death, is taken to the Gilbertine house at Sempringham in Lincolnshire and kept there fifty-four years until she dies, never having seen Wales again, never having spoken Welsh past the age of two, never having known her own father's name in her own tongue. In the male line, the house of Aberffraw is finished within a generation.

THE STONE ABOVE THE IRFON

The wood at Cilmeri is no longer there. The slope is open pasture above the river, and in a field above the Irfon a standing stone of Caernarfon granite was set in 1956, dressed roughly, inscribed in Welsh and unadorned. On the eleventh of December each year a gathering comes to the stone, in any weather, and reads the names and the elegy of Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch, who wrote in the winter of 1282 that the heart of every Welshman was cold beneath his breast, that the wind and the rain wept for Llywelyn's killing, that the oak trees crashed together in fury. The bards' word travels too. The broadcaster S4C carries the gathering live. Cofiwn Cilmeri, the gathering is called: we remember Cilmeri.

A country is rarely lost in the field where its armies stand. It is lost in a wood on an overcast afternoon, in the time it takes a man to get a sword half out of its scabbard. And it is held, afterwards, in the time it takes a country to keep saying the name of the man who fell there. Eight hundred and forty-three Decembers have come and gone above the Irfon. The stone in the field is wet most of the year. The names are still read.