Glyndŵr
also Glendower, Owain Glyndŵr
The last native-born Prince of Wales, and the longest revolt the Welsh would ever raise.
- Origin
- Powys, Wales
- Famous bearer
- Owain Glyndŵr (c.1359–c.1415), last native-born Prince of Wales
- Register
- Welsh family
Ranked of all time
The 10 Most Powerful Welsh Houses of All Time
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Glyndŵr
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Glyndŵr community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Glyndŵr has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Glyndŵr clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the Glyndŵr clan →What does the Glyndŵr name mean?
From Glyndyfrdwy, 'the valley of the Dee water', Owain ap Gruffydd's lordship in Merionethshire, by which he was distinguished from other Owains and through which his descendants took the byname. The form Glyndŵr is the contracted Welsh; Glendower is Shakespeare's English approximation. As a hereditary surname it is rare; as a name carried with intent it is the most resonant in modern Welsh political memory.
The history of Glyndŵr
Owain ap Gruffydd of Glyndyfrdwy and Sycharth (c.1359–c.1415) descended from the princely lines of both Powys Fadog and Deheubarth. He was educated at the Inns of Court in London, served the English crown in arms in Scotland and Flanders in the 1380s, and lived as a Welsh gentleman of substantial at his hall at Sycharth in northern Powys until 1400.
The dispute that triggered the revolt was a boundary quarrel with his English-baron neighbour Reginald Grey of Ruthin, mishandled by Henry IV's parliament in 1399. On 16 September 1400 Glyndŵr was proclaimed Prince of Wales by his own retinue at Glyndyfrdwy. Within five years his authority extended over almost the whole of Wales. He held parliaments at Machynlleth in 1404 and Harlech in 1405. He proposed an independent Welsh church under Rome, two Welsh universities, and an alliance with Charles VI of France, sealed by treaty in 1404 and reinforced by a French expeditionary force that landed at Milford Haven in 1405.
By 1409 Henry IV's son, the future Henry V, had broken the field force. Aberystwyth fell, Harlech fell, the prince's family was taken to the Tower of London. Glyndŵr himself was never captured. The last sighting was in 1412. Where and when he died, no English chronicle records and no Welsh source claims to know, by tradition under his own name in the borderlands of Herefordshire, around 1415. The revolt was the last attempt to restore an independent Welsh principality, and the longest sustained native rising against the English crown anywhere in the British Isles.
Champions of the Glyndŵr name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Step Into History
Walk the streets and seats the Glyndŵr name knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.
Step Into History · New
Owain Glyndŵr's mountain fortress and court at the high tide of Welsh independence, the English siege lines gathering below.
Step Into History · New
Edward I's walled bastide and mighty castle in North Wales, a generation after the conquest — the banded towers still rising.
Notable bearers of the Glyndŵr name
- Owain Glyndŵr (c.1359–c.1415), last native-born Prince of Wales
- Iolo Goch, court poet to Glyndŵr at Sycharth
Stories of Glyndŵr
The Pennal Letter
1406By the spring of 1406 Owain Glyndŵr had been Prince of Wales in fact for six years. He had held parliaments at Machynlleth in 1404 and Harlech in 1405, with elected representatives from every commote of Wales. He had a French alliance with Charles VI sealed by treaty and reinforced the previous summer by a French expeditionary force that had landed at Milford Haven. From the village of Pennal near Machynlleth on the thirty-first of March 1406, Glyndŵr dictated to his clerk a letter to the king of France. It set out a complete programme for an independent Welsh state: two universities, a Welsh-speaking church, an archdiocese at St Davids, a sovereign Welsh polity. The letter survives in Paris. It is the most coherent vision of Welsh sovereignty ever written, and it is what the country would not have for another five hundred years.
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Hyddgen
1401In the middle of June 1401, on the eastern flank of Plynlimon (Pumlumon) in the mid-Wales uplands, about ten miles east of the village of Machynlleth, Owain Glyndŵr, then forty-two years old, with a Welsh force of about a hundred and twenty mounted-and-foot men of the northern Powys-and-Gwynedd cantrefs, ambushed and broke a Flemish-English military expedition of about a thousand five hundred men under the Marcher captain Sir Edward Tudor (a distant Welsh cousin of Glyndŵr's by the Tudor-Anglesey line). The Hyddgen ambush, fought on a high marsh-pasture between the Hyddgen Brook and the source of the Wye, was the first major military victory of the Glyndŵr rebellion since the Sycharth proclamation of September 1400, and is, by every careful judgment of Welsh-medieval historiography (R. R. Davies, Gwyn A. Williams), the tactical engagement that converted the Glyndŵr rebellion from a localised Powys boundary-dispute into a national Welsh military movement. Within twelve months of Hyddgen, the Glyndŵr rebellion controlled most of Wales west of Offa's Dyke.
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Frequently asked
What does the surname Glyndŵr mean?
Where does the Glyndŵr family come from?
Where did the Glyndŵr family historically hold territory?
Is Glyndŵr a Wales surname?
How old is the Glyndŵr surname?
What is the Glyndŵr family known for?
Who is the most famous Glyndŵr?
Who are some famous Glyndŵrs?
What stories are told about the Glyndŵr family?
What is the story of the Pennal Letter?
Is Glendower the same family as Glyndŵr?
Is Owain Glyndŵr the same family as Glyndŵr?
Where is the Glyndŵr surname found today?
What does the Clan Rising page for the Glyndŵr family cover?
Who is the head of the Glyndŵr family today?
Neighbouring clans
- EvansSon of John, by the Welsh road, the cousin name of Jones.
- LewisLlywelyn anglicised, a princely name carried into common use across the Marches and the south.
- OwenThe princely name, Owain in Welsh, the surname of the last revolt and the first Tudor.
- EdwardsSon of Edward, densest along the eastern marches where the name first crossed.