Hyddgen

It is twenty past nine on the morning of an unrecorded day in the middle of June 1401, on a high-marsh pasture in the Pumlumon uplands, about a thousand feet above sea level, in the pale Welsh-mountain summer light off the mist of the Cardigan Bay to the west. He is forty-two years old. He is Owain ap Gruffydd, lord of Glyndyfrdwy and Sycharth, called Owain Glyndŵr by his Welsh subjects, eight months into the formal rebellion against the English crown of Henry IV that he had proclaimed at his Sycharth manor-hall on the sixteenth of September 1400.

On the marsh-pasture below him are about a hundred and twenty Welshmen, mostly the cantref of Cwmwd Deuddwr men of the Powys-and-Plynlimon country, in mountain dress (woollen cloak, leather doublet, short broadsword, the Powys recurved longbow). They are in cover on the eastern flank of the Plynlimon col, in a shallow declivity that the Plynlimon stream-cutting has worn into the east-facing slope, invisible from the marshy ground at the bottom of the hollow until the attacker is within about thirty yards.

On the marsh ground below the hollow, at about a half-mile distance, is a marching column of about fifteen hundred Flemish-English foot-and-horse-mixed troops under the Marcher captain Sir Edward Tudor (a Anglesey-Tudor cousin of Glyndŵr's whose family had taken the Crown side at the September 1400 proclamation). The column is on a punitive expedition into the Pumlumon country to suppress the Welsh rebels who had taken Aberystwyth Castle in May.

Glyndŵr thinks: the Tudor column has been marching since first light. The column has had no engagement with my scouts in the eight miles between Aberystwyth and Hyddgen because my scouts have been letting it through. The column is on the pre-arranged ambush ground.

He thinks: the Tudor column has about fifteen hundred men. I have a hundred and twenty. The numerical-balance is twelve to one against me. The ambush-position gives me the thirty-yard surprise on the column's flank, and the Pumlumon-marsh ground will bog the Tudor horse on the pursuit. The numerical-balance, on the engagement-conditions, becomes about even.

He thinks: if I take the column today, the news of the Hyddgen ambush will be on the Welsh public-record by the end of the month. The rebellion will, on the public-record of the Hyddgen victory, convert from a Powys-boundary-dispute into a national Welsh-political movement. The Aberffraw-and-Gwynedd cantrefs will, on the public-record, come out for the rebellion within the autumn.

He gives the signal at twenty past nine. The Welsh archers loose at thirty yards into the Tudor column's right flank. The Tudor column breaks under the archer-volley within about ten minutes. The Welsh foot close at the broadsword, the Tudor horse bog on the marsh in the pursuit, and the engagement runs about two hours through the Pumlumon marsh-ground.

About two hundred Flemish-English dead by the end of the action; about twelve Welsh dead. Sir Edward Tudor escaped on a fresh horse to Aberystwyth. The news of the Hyddgen ambush was on the Welsh public-record by the end of June 1401. The Welsh cantrefs of Aberffraw, Gwynedd, and the Cardiganshire uplands declared for Glyndŵr through the autumn of 1401. By the spring of 1402, the Glyndŵr rebellion controlled most of Wales west of Offa's Dyke. The Pennal Letter to Charles VI of France (the foundational political document of the Glyndŵr programme, told on this page) was the direct political-consequence of the Hyddgen tactical victory.

The Hyddgen ambush-site is in 2025 in the Hafren Forest of mid-Wales, in the care of Natural Resources Wales. A small bronze plaque on the Plynlimon walking-path, put up by the Plaid Cymru National Committee on the six-hundredth anniversary in June 2001, marks the spot. The Welsh-language inscription on the plaque is, in translation: here at Hyddgen, in the middle of June 1401, Owain Glyndŵr broke an English-Flemish column and set Welsh sovereignty on the path that ran through the next twelve years.