Hyddgen

A nation does not always declare itself in a parliament or a treaty. Sometimes it declares itself on a hillside, in the cold light of a mountain morning, when a man with too few followers chooses to stand in the path of a column with too many, and trusts the ground beneath his feet to do the arithmetic the chronicles cannot.

THE LORD OF GLYNDYFRDWY

Owain ap Gruffydd, lord of Glyndyfrdwy and Sycharth, was forty-two years old in the summer of 1401, and he had been, until very recently, the kind of Welsh magnate the English crown found convenient. Inns of Court training, service under Richard II in the Scottish campaigns, a hall at Sycharth praised by the bard Iolo Goch for its tiled roof and its orchard and its weir of fish. He carried the blood of the princes of Powys Fadog and, through his mother, of Deheubarth; on parchment he was already, in the old reckoning, a claimant to the lost principality of Wales. On the sixteenth of September 1400 he had been proclaimed Prince of Wales by his own kin at Glyndyfrdwy, and within a week the towns of north-east Wales were burning. Eight months on, the rebellion was still, in the eyes of Westminster, a border quarrel between a Welsh lord and his English neighbour Reginald de Grey of Ruthin. It had not yet become a war. It had not yet become a country.

THE MARCH ON PUMLUMON

June, 1401. Word had come up from Aberystwyth that a column was moving inland: Flemings out of the Pembrokeshire settlements stiffened with English foot and Marcher horse, perhaps fifteen hundred in all, sent to scour the Pumlumon country and to put an end to the upland gathering before it grew. The captain at their head was, by the hard arithmetic of Welsh kinship, a cousin: a man of the Tudor line of Anglesey who had taken the king's pay. The column climbed slowly through the cwms, encumbered by horse on ground meant for sheep. Glyndŵr's scouts watched it from the ridges and let it pass, mile after mile, drawing it east towards the high boggy saddle where the Hyddgen brook runs north and the infant Wye runs south from the same wet ground. He had a hundred and twenty men with him, no more: bowmen of the Powys cantrefs in woollen cloak and leather doublet, with the recurved yew of the upland country and the short broadsword at the hip. Twelve to one against. The mountain was the thirteenth.

A QUARTER PAST NINE

From the lip of the declivity on the eastern flank of the col he watches the column thread out below him, a half-mile of mail and pennon shrunken to a dark seam against the pale moor. The mist off Cardigan Bay is lifting in slow rags. The marsh between him and the column is the colour of old bronze. He knows the ground because he has hunted it; he knows that a horse at the canter on this ground will be a horse on its knees inside a hundred yards. He knows the column has been awake since before first light, and that men awake since first light, climbing, do not look uphill. He thinks, with the cold clarity that has been with him since the Sycharth proclamation, that twelve to one is the figure on the page and not the figure on the hill: the hill divides it, the bog divides it again, the surprise divides it a third time, and what is left is a fight between equals. He thinks of his cousin down there in the column, of how the Tudor name and the Glyndŵr name were once read out together in the same genealogies, and he thinks, without sentiment, that today one of those names will go into the chronicle as the victor and the other will not. He thinks of the bards. Iolo Goch, old now, will hear of this by midsummer if it goes well; will hear of it by midsummer if it goes badly. There is no version of this morning in which the bards do not sing. The only question is what they sing. He raises his hand. He has been waiting, by the count of the breath in his throat, perhaps four minutes. It has been the longest four minutes of his life and it will be the shortest four minutes in the history he is about to make.

THE VOLLEY

At twenty past nine the bowmen loose at thirty yards into the column's right flank. The first volley takes the mounted men in the saddle and the foot in the throat; the second volley is already in the air before the first has fallen. The column buckles inward on itself, horses screaming on the wet ground, the Flemish pikemen turning to face an enemy they cannot see for the slope. The Welsh foot come down off the ridge at the broadsword and close the distance the bow has opened. The pursuit runs two hours through the marsh. The Tudor horse founder where the ground gives. By midday two hundred of the column lie dead on the moor between the Hyddgen brook and the Wye-head; twelve of the Welsh. The captain himself rides clear on a fresh horse and is back at Aberystwyth by nightfall with the news he has been sent to prevent.

THE WORD GOES OUT

That evening in a hall at Aberystwyth a clerk takes down what the surviving officers can be brought to say, and the account is unsatisfactory in the way such accounts always are: the numbers do not add, the ground is described wrongly, the captain's despatch to the Council is brief. But in the upland farmsteads of Ceredigion and Meirionnydd and the cantrefs of Gwynedd, the news travels by another road altogether, the road of the harper and the drover and the priest at the parish boundary. By the end of June every Welshman west of Offa's Dyke knows that a hundred and twenty men of the Powys country, on a hill above Pumlumon, broke a column of fifteen hundred. The figure may be wrong. The figure does not need to be right. What it carries is the only thing that matters, which is that the rebellion is no longer a quarrel; it is a war, and the war is winnable.

THE PRINCIPALITY

The cantrefs come in through the autumn, as he had calculated on the hill they would. Aberffraw, Gwynedd, the uplands of Cardiganshire. By the spring of 1402 the writ of the English crown does not run west of the Dyke in any practical sense. Conwy is taken, Reginald de Grey is captured and ransomed for ten thousand marks, Edmund Mortimer is taken at Bryn Glas and married into the Glyndŵr line. In 1404 a parliament sits at Machynlleth and another at Harlech, and the Pennal Letter goes to Charles VI of France over the seal of Owinus dei gratia princeps Walliae, by the grace of God Prince of Wales. For a moment that lasts the better part of a decade, Wales is a country in the European sense: with its own prince, its own parliament, its own foreign policy, its own intended universities at Bangor and Caernarfon, its own church owing obedience to Avignon and not to Canterbury. Everything that follows from Hyddgen, follows from the four minutes on the ridge.

WHAT THE MOUNTAIN KEPT

The decade closed as such decades close. Henry of Monmouth came north with the longbow and the cannon; Aberystwyth fell in 1408, Harlech in 1409. Glyndŵr's wife and daughters were taken to the Tower, where they died. He himself was never taken, never bought, never betrayed. He went into the hills of his own country and out of the record, and the last reliable notice of him is a refused pardon in 1416. No grave is known. The Welsh did not give him one and the English could not. What survived was not the principality, which the Tudors his cousins would in their own way restore, but the demonstration: that on a given morning, on a given hill, the arithmetic of empire could be made to fail. On the eastern flank of Pumlumon, where the Hyddgen brook runs down through the Hafren Forest, a small bronze plaque set into the turf by the walking-path carries an inscription in Welsh, put there on the six-hundredth anniversary, that says he broke a column here and set the sovereignty of Wales upon the road it travelled for the next twelve years. The path is wet most of the year. Sheep crop the ground around the plaque. The wind off Cardigan Bay still lifts the mist off the col at about a quarter past nine on a June morning, exactly as it did.