House of Aberffraw · 1282
Cilmeri
On 11 December 1282, in a wood near Builth Wells, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was killed in a small engagement away from his army — and the principality of Wales died with him.
By the autumn of 1282 the second war with Edward I had run for seven months. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had refused homage in the spring after his brother Dafydd's surprise attack on Hawarden Castle on Palm Sunday opened the rising. Edward had committed the full machinery of the English crown — castle-building under Master James of St George, the Welsh-marcher levies, ships from the Cinque Ports — and by November had pinned Llywelyn's main forces in the mountains of Gwynedd.
On 11 December 1282 Llywelyn rode south from Garth Granog with a small escort, perhaps eighteen men, to receive the homage of the Marcher gentry of Builth, who had sent word that they would defect to him. The meeting was a trap or it failed; the chronicles disagree. He was separated from the rest of his small force in a wood near Cilmeri, killed by a single English man-at-arms named Stephen de Frankton in a one-on-one encounter — neither party recognising the other in the moment. His body was identified afterwards by the seal-bag and the standard.
His head was carried to Edward at Rhuddlan, then on to London, where it was displayed crowned with ivy on a stake at the Tower — Welsh tradition had long carried a prophecy that a Welsh king would one day be crowned in London, and the placement was a deliberate cruelty. His infant daughter Gwenllian was placed in the Gilbertine convent of Sempringham in Lincolnshire and held there for fifty-four years until her death; she never saw Wales again.
A standing stone was placed at Cilmeri in the 19th century. The annual gathering on 11 December — Cofiwn Cilmeri, 'we remember Cilmeri' — has been observed since 1956. The Statute of Rhuddlan formally annexed the principality two years after the killing. The line of Aberffraw, in the male line, was extinguished within a generation.