Parallel Lives I: Owain Glyn Dwr

On 21 July 1403 the army led by Henry Hotspur was defeated by Henry IV at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Hotspur's army consisted of Welsh lords, Scotsmen and disaffected English nobles, Hotspur himself and his uncle, Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester. Hotspur died in the aftermath of this battle and the Earl of Worcester was executed two days later. The Battle of Shrewsbury was one of a series of engagements and skirmishes that together comprised the Glyn Dwr rebellion: between 1400, when he had himself declared Prince of Wales, and 1415, when he makes his final appearance in English records as a hunted guerrilla leader, Owain Glyn Dwr was the leader of a Welsh revolt against English rule. Yet the revolt was not, as is already indicated by the presence of Hotspur, a purely Welsh affair: it was supported by northern lords, the Percies as well as Scotsmen and Irishmen. What is made clear by these alliances is the fragmented nature of the kingdom in the fifteenth century – and already, in saying that, one is confronted by problems: what kingdom? which fragments?

The late twelfth-century historian, Ralph, dean of St. Paul’s, wrote that the kingdom was ‘wide in extent, peacefully governed and contained within it some very barbarous inhabitants, the Scots and the Welsh’. John Gillingham comments:

James Campbell has remarked that the closest modern parallel to the Anglo-Welsh border is provided by the Indian north-west frontier or Afghanistan, both sites of constant renegotiation, division, faction and fundamentalism.