The Royal Line of Gwynedd

GRUFFUDD AP CYNAN (died 1137)

 l

OWAIN GWYNEDD (died 1170)

 l

Iorwerth Drwyndwn

 l

LLYWELYN FAWR (died 1240)

 l_____________

 l                          l

Gruffudd             DAFYDD (died without heir 1246)

l

____________________________________________

l                       l                                      l                        l

Owain Goch   LLYWELYN                 Rhodri           DAFYDD

                     (murdered Dec 1282)                        (executed 1283)               

LLYWELYN AP GRUFFUDD   =   Eleanor de Montfort, daughter of Earl Simon

                                                    l          (died in childbirth at Garth Celyn, June 1282)

                                           GWENLLIAN

                                                   (died 1337)

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales

On 11 December 1282, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the first Prince of Wales, having been lured into a deliberately laid trap, was murdered.   

The correspondence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, preserved in Lambeth Palace Archives, London, provides details of the events surrounding the death that the history books have ignored.

In November 1282 Prince Llywelyn had been offered a secret bribe by the English crown; the sum of one thousand pounds a year and an estate in England if he would surrender his nation state unreservedly to the king of England.

From his home, Garth Celyn, overlooking the Menai Strait, Prince Llywelyn wrote his response, a total refusal of the offer and a clear statement of his duty towards his inheritance. Within a month, on the instructions of Edward Longshanks, he was murdered.

Edward’s army closed the net and captured the royal court and with it independent Wales.

Arglwydd neud maendo ymandaw Cymry.

                        ‘The Lord who was the keystone where the Welsh congregated.’

                                                            Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch                 

After the Conquest the name Garth Celyn was eliminated from the record books, part of the Edwardian policy of consigning relics of the Old Order to oblivion. The name, though it continued in local use, was never used in any document of the English administration.

The settlement Aber Garth Celyn adjacent to the royal home became officially known by the English conquerors simply as Aber, ‘Estuary’ with its identity removed; later more descriptively as Aber Gwyn Gregyn, ‘Estuary of the White Shells’.

The invasion of Wales was accompanied by savage reprisals against those who had stood in the way of the will of the king of England. Any attempts at resistance were crushed with the utmost brutality.

On 18 January 1283, Dolwyddelan Castle was occupied by the army of invasion and immediately munitioned to provide a base in the Lledr valley. At Edward’s command raiding parties were sent out into the mountains of Snowdonia to search for booty. The troops were informed that they could claim one shilling as the king’s gift for the head of every Welshman that they brought back to camp; they were encouraged to rape any Welshwoman that they found.

On 22nd June Prince Dafydd ap Gruffudd, heir to the Principality, was captured, his hiding place at the foot of Bera in the uplands above Aber Garth Celyn, betrayed. Dafydd, seriously wounded ‘graviter vulneratus’ in the struggle was taken that same night to Edward at Rhuddlan.

Wales was plundered, and Edward’s trophies taken across the border into England.

The matrices of the personal seals of Prince Llywelyn, his wife Eleanor de Montfort, daughter of Earl Simon, and his brother Prince Dafydd were seized and placed in the royal Wardrobe. Edward ordered that these also were to be melted down and the silver used to craft a chalice, which he intended to present to the new Cistercian foundation of Vale Royal abbey in Cheshire. 

The Welsh royal children were locked away, and never released.

October 1305

As the King wills that Owain son of Dafydd ap Gruffudd, who is in the Constable’s custody in the castle, should be kept more securely than he has been previously, he orders the Constable to cause a strong house within the castle to be repaired as soon as possible, and to make a wooden cage bound with iron in that house in which Owain might be enclosed at night.

                        Order from King Edward I to the Constable of Bristol Castle

Wales became England’s first colony.

1283 -1553 Garth Celyn between Bangor and Conwy was held by the Crown of England.  The buildings that had formed the royal home on the promontory of land were not repaired and over the decades became derelict.

John Leland, Henry Vlll’s surveyor noted, ‘the palace on the hille still in part stondeth.’

On June 14, 1551, Rhys Thomas of Aberglasney, appointed by Roger Williams, the surveyor of crown lands in north Wales, to be the deputy surveyor, obtained a lease for himself of the royal manors of Aber [Aber Garth Celyn] in Caernarfonshire and Cemais in Anglesey.                           

In October 1551, William Herbert was made Baron Herbert of Cardiff and then Earl of Pembroke.

On 27 April 1553 the king, seriously ill with tuberculosis, granted the royal manors of Aber and Cemais to William Herbert, earl of Pembroke and William Clerke.

On 8 June William Herbert, earl of Pembroke and William Clerke obtained a licence from the king to sell Aber and Cemais to Rhys Thomas and his wife Jane.

7 Edward VI

The like, for 3L 14s. 1/2d., to William earl of Pembroke, K.G., president of

the Council of Wales and William Clerke of Punsborne, Herts, to grant their manor of Aber, in co. Carnarvon, and their manor of Kenneys in co. Anglesey, late parcel of the principality of North Wales;- to Rees Thomas of Lanveyer, co. Carnarvon, esquire, and Jane his wife, and the heirs and assigns of the said Rees.

                                                                               Calendar of Patent Rolls

Garth Celyn passed from Crown of England ownership, to the Thomas family.

King Edward VI died on 5 July 1553.

The Thomas’s according to family tradition ‘built a manor house amongst the palace ruins on Garth Celyn, using the palace ruins.’

Garth Celyn was also known locally as Bryn Llywelyn, Llywelyn’s Hill.

The Elizabethan Manor house, incorporating a watch tower built c. 1200, was known as Pen y Bryn, simply top of the hill. The watchtower was known as Twr Llywelyn, Llywelyn’s Tower: the small building to the east of the main house as Hen Gapel, the Old Chapel.

Aber Village August 1874                                        

The castle of Llywelyn is but a few minutes walk from the centre of the village.

To reach it by the quickest and most picturesque road you have to traverse the nook at the back of the mill and to scramble over the loose stones that rise about the surface of the widespread stream. Once over the somewhat perilous brook, you have to pass a gate, then a field, still following the side of the watercourse. Mounting a steep rustic ascent you find yourself a few minutes more before a huge barbaric Round Tower, the principal and almost only vestige of Llywelyn’s Castle at the present day. Attached to this Tower is an interesting looking structure built entirely we are told of the ruins of the ancient palace. It is at present used as a farmhouse. This most picturesque house is well worth a visit, though from its private isolated character it is known to few out of its immediate neighbourhood.

The farmer’s wife, though little prepared for the intrusion, nevertheless kindly allowed us to traverse the house, contenting herself with showing us alone one particular room in the tower, a clothes press and four chairs, evidently as old as the building itself and quite as primitive.

She also favoured me with a bit of lighted candle and led me to the steps of a vast cellar or dungeon under the tower, telling me to inspect it if I wished, which I hastened to do - I beg pardon, I did not hasten, for the steps down to it were so slimy, damp, and shaky, that any over haste would have been accompanied with serious bodily harm, so needs was to be slow and cautious.

On descending into this cavern, as well as the faint light of the candle would permit of, I noticed several contiguous cells with prison - like apertures. Could these possibly have been dungeons? At least there were good reasons for the conjecture. At the further end of the cavern, or cellar, or prison, or whatever it was and had been, I could perceive the commencement of a subterranean passage, which led, I was afterwards informed, to some solitary spot in the glen - for what purpose, must be left to the imagination, for there are no printed memorials to the spot, nor any written ones, unless Lord Penrhyn, the owner of the property, happens to have any such in the archives of his Castle.

                                                                                               Tracy Turnerelli

The Lost Palace           Sunday Telegraph 1989  

Byron Rogers

This turns on the purest elements of old romance; a lost palace, the last prince of a ruined dynasty, and they rise like Schliemann’s Troy, out of what should not have been, for the palace is where tradition and the old always said it was, except that in the archives they did not listen. But also it is the story of a family who bought a chicken farm in north Wales.

In 1988 the 36-acre farm at Aber, on the coastal highway between Bangor and Conwy, came onto the market. The A55 is straight at that point, and fast, so you may not have noticed the hamlet of Aber that the road sweeps by. You will certainly not have seen the house built of grey-green stone on a hill to the east of this.

Stop for a moment. It is a large house, quite grand, and as you stare you will find yourself wondering why you have not seen it up there before. For there are strange features: a porch with a room above it and a round tower tacked onto one wing.

Many people from outside the area were interested in buying the farm which had planning permission to convert the barn and farm buildings into holiday units. Remember that barn: it is now one of the most mysterious buildings in modern archaeology, which might so easily have become three cottages complete with plastic windows.

The farm was sold to Kathryn and Brian Gibson largely because the widowed owner wanted a quick sale and the Gibsons had not insisted on a professional survey of the buildings. You do not need such things when you buy a view, and the family wanted

Pen y Bryn because of the panorama of sea and island opening like a fan beneath them. Anglesey and the Menai Strait on one side: the mountains of Snowdonia on the other.

They knew the house was old (in 1956 the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments had decided that most of it was Elizabethan, the tower a little later), but from the start the curiousity of the Gibsons was aroused. Nothing made sense, especially not the tower which looked even to an untrained eye to have been built before, not after the house. 

‘How long ago it all seems now’, says Kathryn Gibson. ‘I had time to sit and relax then and talk to my daughters.’

Ever since the family moved in, people constantly come uninvited up the drive to stare at the walls. A friend of mine working for CADW, the Welsh equivalent of English Heritage, described a colleague’s reaction after such a visit. ‘He came into the office in a sort of daze. Now this is a man who spends his life looking at old buildings, but all he would say was: “I’ve touched the arch through which Llywelyn walked.”’

Those of you with a weakness for such things will remember Schliemann’s telegram to the King of Greece: ‘Today I looked upon the face of Agamemnon.’

In 1989 in three months alone, fifty experts of one kind or another called at Pen y Bryn so that Kathryn Gibson’s life, like that of royalty, suddenly and unexpectedly became full of strangers.

Many call like I did, unannounced, but do not get turned away, for they know, and she knows, what her responsibilities are now. A woman who thought that she had bought an idillic home with a spectacular view for her family had in fact moved into the lost palace of the last Welsh Prince of Wales.

Despite the false image mischievously portrayed of the two Llywelyn’s, Llywelyn the Great and his grandson the Prince of Wales, wandering from place with their war-bands, moving like giant weevils from hall to hall to eat up all the produce of the people, the most important personal events of the dynasty in the thirteenth century all took place at Aber.  And it was here in November 1282 that the aged Archbishop of Canterbury came to negotiate in something that was about to pass out of history: the home and court of a sovereign Welsh prince.

So Aber had a significance that the Welsh historian Professor T. Jones Pierce was only just beginning to investigate before his death. He found, using the inventory prepared for Edward after the Conquest, that there was something unique about it. Here, argued Jones Pierce, was the centre of the Welsh state, the place that symbolised in the Welsh psyche the resistance to conquest and domination.

Tread softly for you tread on my dreams.

It is late summer 1988 now and, newly moved into Pen y Bryn Kathryn Gibson is welcomed by local people who call on her and who ask in the conversation does she know where she is living? Kathryn, who has just spent a week unpacking, is told, to her total amazement, that Pen y Bryn, her new home, is in fact the Aber of the Princes.

Looking around it all began to fall into place. The Roman road at the foot of Bryn Llywelyn, the bolt hole into Snowdonia behind, Llanfaes on the opposite shore of the Menai which was then a port to which the luxuries of Europe would have come to the princes and their Norman-French wives, with, in its Franciscan friary, the men who would have formed part of a prince’s secretariat. The traditions of the Aber valley made sense, but how to prove them.

So Kathryn started a quest into the past that began to occupy so much of her life. ‘For the most part in was an incredibly long, lonely task.’

She began by reading the research notes made by Jones Pierce.  Armed with this information she visited academic libraries and archives; she ploughed her way through countless numbers of documents noting the smallest seemingly irrelevant details. She examined letters held in private collections and talked to descendants of the Marcher families who had occupied the same properties on the border between England and Wales for centuries. Slowly the information began to fall into place.

It is one thing to live on a site where something has happened, quite another to touch

the stones those other hands may have touched. That is when the pulse starts racing. But how to go about this when what is before you is not an archaeological site but a house in which you live?

Praising God for dampness, Brian began to hack away at a dark patch of modern plaster on the wall of the first floor of the tower. Here, under the plaster, he found the brickwork of a Victorian fireplace sealing off a Tudor fireplace built into a cupboard. Now the house began to reveal its secrets.

In the ground floor of the tower, blocked in, the three girls, exploring their new home, discovered a trap door, and below, down a narrow stone stairway, seven feet below the present ground level, a long room with tiny slit windows and the depth of wall you only get in very early buildings. And in the wall a doorway filled with boulders.

A computer scan of the field, Cae Celyn, in front of the house revealed the remains of walls under the grass, and it became obvious that the house was set in a double bank and ditch enclosure. Finds like this made the Gibsons think of an archaeological excavation but such a venture would need a study centre as a base. The derelict farm barn was an obvious choice, but it was in a terrible mess, with cement blocks pushed in where the walls had crumbled. They began picking away at the broken render, and it was then that they saw, blocked up and shadowy, the outline of small mullions, three and five in line, tiny apertures, windows of the Middle Ages.

Now it is possible to come on such things in Welsh farms under the centuries of bodging. The cowshed becomes a chapel again; the place where they kept the feed an exact replica of the hall in which King Harold sat in the Bayeux tapestry. I have seen such places, where it was all still there under the long agricultural centuries. So in Pen y Bryn, the latest occupants carefully pulled away at the walls of the barn until they saw a graet arch and another matching one in the opposite wall, as though a passageway had once passed under them.

And Kathryn and Brian had found the gatehouse of the princes.

Map References: Llywelyn’s Tower and House, Garth Celyn         SH65827273

                              Gatehouse, Garth Celyn                                      SH65847279

The past, like wilderness, is essential to us. The past is inspiration. The past triggers the imagination. Inspiration and imagination allows us to lift up our eyes and dream of something more vast and enduring than our small selves. The past offers us an ultimate perspective, a scale; a true measure. In our individual lives, in communities, in nations and in combinations of nations, we aspire, we try, to some extent we succeed and to some extent we fail. But at the root of everything, there is the sun, the moon and the stars; there are the seasons; there are the winds and tides. That is our human stage no matter what gadgetry we gather about us in each our individual lives.

We have to strike such a fine balance in that we don’t in any way want to add further to the confusions and misunderstandings.

There is a huge responsibility on us to behave in a way that allows the knowledge that we have gleaned about the past to continue to be, for the generations of people who come after us.

Historical narrative is a powerful political weapon. It is the victor’s version that enters the authorised pages of history books, but folk memory is not easily erased.

This is our watch, and what we do on our watch is simply crucial; it is always crucial that we get as right as possible.

                         ©