which rejected the concept of original sin. In the course of his keynote speech, it is said that the ground beneath his feet formed itself into a small hill in order that the crowd might be able to see and hear him better, and a white dove descended on his shoulder. Dewi’s efforts to maintain the authority of the church help to explain why this ‘miracle’ is recorded and why he was officially canonized by the pope in 1123. The irony is that Pelagius, the originator of the heresy he so condemned, was also a Celt, and probably British.
Dewi Sant was himself of royal blood, albeit illegitimate. According to his eleventh-century biographer, Rhigyfarch, Dewi’s father was a king of Ceredigion. He is described by Rhigyfarch as ‘Sanctus rex ceredigionis’, which may equally well mean ‘Sanctus, the king of Ceredigion’ or ‘the holy king of Ceredigion’. There does not seem to have been anything very holy about Dewi’s father, at least not to begin with. Dewi’s mother, Non, was a nun or religious recluse, who was raped by the king of Ceredigion, and it was from this most unsanctified union that the saint was conceived. Whether this ancestry was invented, either in order to give the saint royal status or the other way round, will never be known. It is said that Non later married the king, but probably only after she had given birth to her son. The delivery is said to have taken place on top of a cliff in the middle of a storm, and the spot is marked by a much later building known as St Non’s Chapel.
Dewi Sant is almost the only one of the leading figures of the period of Welsh history sometimes called the Age of the Saints to have been genuinely canonized. Other royal families of Wales also claimed descent from ‘saints’ or holy men, but few of them are in the same class. Brychan, who gave his name to the kingdom of Brycheiniog, lived in the fifth century. He was of Irish origin and is commemorated by place names throughout the Celtic world, in Ireland, Cornwall, Wales and Brittany. Like Dewi Sant’s father, ‘Saint’ Brychan was a rapist, not to mention a polygamist, and fathered an estimated sixty-three children. His descendants form one of the three so-called ‘tribes of the saints’, the other two being those of Caw and Cunedda.
By far the most notable of these early rulers was Cunedda (d.c.460), and his reputation rests on his military successes, not on his devotion to God. Like Magnus Maximus before him, he was given the epithet ‘Wledig’, in recognition of the extent of the territories over which he ruled. It has been postulated that it was Magnus Maximus himself who invited Cunedda to Wales, in order that the stable regime maintained by the Romans should be sustained, at least in this western region, relatively safe from the depredations of Saxon invaders.
The eagerness shown by later rulers to trace their ancestry back to Cunedda is indicative of the respect in which his name continued to be held throughout the Middle Ages. The astonishing thing about Cunedda (for us in the twenty-first century, that is) is that he began his career in what is now Scotland. There being no significant ethnic difference between the Celtic tribes of mainland Britain at this time, he had no hesitation in relocating his power base when the Irish threatened to invade, despite the distances involved.
The land and people of Manaw Gododdin, immortalized in a poem (one of the earliest in the Welsh language) attributed to the bard Aneirin, is thought to have been located in the region of modern-day Clackmannanshire. In around 600, its leaders fought the Angles at a place referred to as ‘Catraeth’ in the north of England, tentatively identified as Catterick in North Yorkshire. Aneirin’s poem influenced later royal bards, such as the prince-poet Owain Cyfeiliog (c.1130–97), not to mention Dafydd Benfras, whose works in praise of Llywelyn Fawr (c.1173–1240) draw heavily on the same tradition.
The evidence for Cunedda’s existence is largely circumstantial; for that of his sons, even more so. According to legend, he had eight or nine of these, including such familiar names as Meirion and Ceredig, and Cunedda’s kingdom was shared between them. Historians tend to believe that at least some of the names of Cunedda’s sons were invented by later generations to give greater credibility to dynastic claims on the territories in question, particularly Ceredigion.
Cunedda’s ‘royalness’ is unquestioned by later writers. Royalty feeds off royalty, and lineage was everything in the Middle Ages. The son of a ruler could normally expect to succeed him. The main difference among the Celts from the system we know today is that they did not practise primogeniture, but preferred what seems to our modern eyes a more even-handed system. All the king’s sons, however many there were, and regardless of whether they were legitimate, could expect to inherit an equal share in his realm.
This system had its drawbacks. The in-fighting between a man’s sons to control his property led inevitably to a dilution of the image of royal dignity attributed to them purely by their birth (important as that undoubtedly was). However, we may assume that the ability to overcome opposition was another aspect of kingship that was seen as admirable or at any rate ‘regal’ in the widest sense. At any rate, the experience of previous generations did not stop kings from procreating at a sometimes alarming rate, Owain Gwynedd being a notable example.
One consequence of the practice of primogeniture was that English kings expected a lot of their eldest sons. It did not matter whether a younger son was stronger, tougher or brighter than the eldest; there was no option to designate him heir to the throne. The Welsh did not have quite the same problem, and sons were thus able to develop according to their own abilities. If one son killed all the others in order to acquire the whole of his father’s property, it might be regarded by many as morally reprehensible, but he did not find his rule challenged on the grounds that he had usurped the throne.
In England, a son was expected to live up to his father’s example, and many were unable to do so: Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI would all fail miserably in the eyes of their subjects. Each would lose his hold on the kingdom as a result. As for daughters, they were fit for only one thing: to be married off to a potential ally. Elizabeth of Rhuddlan (1282–1316), the eighth daughter of Edward I, born in Wales during her father’s successful campaign, eventually married a Marcher lord, Humphrey de Bohun, fourth earl of Hereford. She passed on her blood to her Welsh-born great-great-grandson King Henry V, making him royal several times over.
The Welsh had alternative expectations of their rulers. Piety was one of these, just as it had been for the Romans; but, as we have seen, it was a piety that had a host of manifestations. The English were not without religious devotion, and expected some sign of it from their rulers. Edward I, like his great-uncle Richard the Lionheart, fulfilled public expectations by going on crusade. Failure to live up to the standards required could lead to excommunication, as it had done for King John, whose subjects were encouraged to rise up against him by Pope Innocent III in 1209. This had given an unexpected opportunity to Llywelyn Fawr (c.1173–1240), prince of Gwynedd and most of Wales, who, despite being the king’s son-in-law, took his chance and allied himself with some of John’s disgruntled barons.
Thirty years later, Llywelyn, who had suffered a stroke, went into retirement at the Cistercian abbey of Aberconwy which he had founded. Such a retreat from the world would have been unthinkable for a Norman king of England, but was not without precedent in medieval Wales. (It might of course be argued that the Welsh princes had less to give up, and remained closer to the seat of power even after their retreat.) Princes such as Owain Cyfeiliog had found withdrawal from their role in government an attractive option. In 1195, Owain had retired to the abbey of Strata Marcella, leaving Powys in the hands of his son. No one thought any the less of him for it; indeed, his memory was revered, because Owain had not only been an effective ruler, he had been a poet.
Culture was another requirement in the repertoire of the successful king. One of the most beloved of Welsh princes was Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd, who has gone down in historical legend as a successful military leader, an upright man and a great poet. Some of Hywel’s work has survived. His best-known offering, Gorhoffedd Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd, was a propaganda effort on behalf of his father, praising Gwynedd for its scenery (and its women). Hywel’s death at the hands of his half-brothers led to his acquiring a saintly image and the possibly undeserved reputation of
