The Pennal Letter

A rebellion is one thing and a state is another. A rebellion can live on the hills and on the loyalty of farmers and on the memory of an older order. A state must be written down. It must declare its church, its schools, its bishops, its boundary with the world. There comes a morning, in any long war of independence, when the man who has carried the rebellion in his body for years sits down at a table and tries to dictate the country into being.

THE PRINCE

Owain ap Gruffydd of Glyndyfrdwy was a lawyer's son and a soldier of the English crown before he was anything else. He had read law at the Inns of Court in London. He had served Richard II in Scotland under the banner of Henry Bolingbroke, who would later wear the English crown and hunt him through his own mountains. He came to the rising late, at forty, after a quarrel with a neighbour over a strip of common land which the parliament at Westminster refused to hear. By 1400 he had been proclaimed Prince of Wales at Glyndyfrdwy by his own kin. By 1404 he had taken Aberystwyth and Harlech, summoned a parliament at Machynlleth with four men elected from every commote, and been crowned in the presence of envoys from France, Castile and Scotland. By 1405 he had a treaty with Charles VI of France and a French expeditionary force ashore at Milford Haven. By the spring of 1406, six years into the war, the rising had outlived every English prediction of its season. It was time to write the country down.

THE ROAD TO PENNAL

The thirty-first of March, 1406. Cold off the Dyfi estuary, a wind that has crossed the Irish Sea and not warmed on the way. The parsonage at Pennal stands on the road between Machynlleth and the coast at Aberdyfi, a low stone house with an upper room and a fire. A French commissioner has ridden up from the harbour with a small escort, Berenger of the Lance, sent by Charles VI to take back what the Welsh prince has to say. A clerk in a black cassock has set out fine vellum, ink and a quill at the table by the window. Owain Glyndŵr is forty-seven. A long dark blue mantle over a tunic of Powys russet. The gold torc of his father at his throat. He has been Prince of Wales by acclaim for five years, by parliament for two, by treaty with France for one. He has not slept much. The country is around him, in his head, in the room, waiting to be named.

THE UPPER ROOM

The fire mutters. The clerk dips the quill and waits. Glyndŵr stands at the window a moment longer than he needs to, watching the estuary. The country has had enough oral promises. The country needs the things in writing. He turns the matter in his head as he has turned it for months, on horseback between sieges, in the hall at Harlech, in the chapel at Machynlleth. The terms are not radical to him. They are radical only to a king who has not yet had to govern Wales as Wales. Two universities, one in the north and one in the south. A Welsh-speaking church. An archbishop at St Davids, sovereign in Welsh ecclesiastical matters. The lands the English crown took from the Welsh church in the Edwardian conquest, restored. These are practical matters, and they are also the matters by which a country becomes a country. If Charles reads this and sees what we are, Charles will commit men. If we have a French army through next spring we will have Aberystwyth and Harlech for another decade. If we have those two castles for another decade we will have the country for a generation. If we have the country for a generation we will have the universities and the church, and the country will speak its own language to its own scholars in its own halls, which it has not done in four hundred years. He turns from the window. He nods to the clerk. He begins to dictate. The Latin is formal and clean. Owinus Dei gratia Princeps Wallie. He gives the terms one by one, slowly enough for the quill. The Welsh church to withdraw from Roman obedience under Gregory XII and recognise the Avignon pope Benedict XIII, the same as France. The Welsh church to be reorganised under Welsh-speaking bishops. St Davids to be elevated to a metropolitan archdiocese. Two Welsh universities. All clergy with cure of souls in Wales henceforth to speak the Welsh tongue. The Welsh church to recover its alienated patrimony. He pauses. He looks at the French commissioner. The commissioner nods. He gives the last clause without raising his voice. No Englishman to hold a benefice in Wales.

THE SEAL

The clerk writes it down and lets the ink dry. The seal is set in green wax on a strip of vellum at the foot of the page. Glyndŵr presses it himself. The clerk rolls the letter, ties it, hands it to Berenger of the Lance. The Frenchman bows once and goes out to his horse. The letter is on the road for the Channel before noon. By Easter it is in Paris, in the hand of Charles VI's chancery, where it is filed with the diplomatic correspondence of the year and forgotten by the men who file it. It is the most complete statement of a Welsh polity ever set down. No one in France will act on a single clause of it.

IN THE PARIS CHANCERY

The clerks of the French king receive a great deal of correspondence in the year 1406. The Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Orléans are circling each other in the streets of Paris and will be at open war within two years. The English have sacked a French fleet in the Channel. The schism between Avignon and Rome is grinding the church to pieces. A letter from a Welsh prince in a parsonage on an estuary, asking for a metropolitan archdiocese at a place none of them can pronounce, is filed and shelved. No second French expedition is voted. The army that landed at Milford Haven the previous summer has gone home. In Wales, the spring campaign begins without it.

THE LONG WITHDRAWAL

Aberystwyth fell to the future Henry V in 1408. Harlech in 1409. Glyndŵr's wife Margaret, his daughters, and his grandchildren were taken to the Tower of London, where most of them were dead within four years. The Welsh independent church was not constituted. The Welsh universities were not founded. The French alliance brought no second force. Glyndŵr himself was never captured, never betrayed for the price the English crown set on his head. The last firm sighting of him in the record is 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. He is the last native-born Prince of Wales.

THE LETTER IN PARIS

A country that is written down survives the men who wrote it. The Pennal Letter sits today in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, attached to the French diplomatic correspondence of the year of its dictation, in the hand of a clerk whose name is not recorded. It is the most coherent surviving statement of an independent Welsh political and ecclesiastical programme from any pre-modern source. The first of the two universities Glyndŵr asked for, the federal University of Wales, was founded at Aberystwyth in 1893. Four hundred and eighty-seven years late, on the cliff above the harbour his men had held for eight years against the English crown, the lectures began to be given in the Welsh tongue.