Glyndŵr · 1406
The Pennal Letter
From the parliament at Machynlleth in 1406, Glyndŵr wrote to Charles VI of France setting out his programme — an independent Welsh church, two universities, and a sovereign Welsh polity.
By the spring of 1406 Owain Glyndŵr had been Prince of Wales in fact for six years. He had held a parliament at Machynlleth in 1404, with four representatives from each commote of Wales, and another at Harlech in 1405. The French alliance was three years old and reinforced by a landing of French troops at Milford Haven the previous summer.
From the village of Pennal near Machynlleth, on 31 March 1406, Glyndŵr wrote to Charles VI of France a programme document that has come down to us as the Pennal Letter. Its terms: that Wales should withdraw its obedience from the Roman pope (then Gregory XII) and recognise the Avignon pope Benedict XIII, the same as France; that the church in Wales should be reorganised under Welsh-speaking bishops, with St Davids elevated to a metropolitan archdiocese sovereign in Welsh ecclesiastical matters; that two Welsh universities should be founded, one in the north and one in the south; that all clergy with cure of souls in Wales should henceforth speak Welsh; that the Welsh church should recover its alienated patrimony.
Most of this never came to pass. Aberystwyth fell to the future Henry V in 1408; Harlech in 1409; Glyndŵr's wife, daughters and grandchildren were taken to the Tower of London where most of them died within four years. The Pennal Letter survives in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, attached to the French diplomatic correspondence of the year. It is the most coherent surviving statement of an independent Welsh political and ecclesiastical programme from any pre-modern source. The first Welsh university — the federal University of Wales — was founded in 1893, four hundred and eighty-seven years late.