Elin Gregory

  Vengeance

{click on the pictures for the link to the other participants}

The unhealthy desire to get ones own back on people has probably caused as much grief, death, atrocity and anguish on a small scale as the squabbles of organised religions have on a much larger one.

Today I’m going to talk about a very small scale local squabble that could have escalated to a war.

Sometime in the late 11th century the Norman invaders moved into South Wales. They were very organised about their invasion. They would pick a site, round up the local peasantry and put them to work felling timber and digging moats to build a castle. Men, even proud independent Welshmen disinclined to bend the knee to anyone, will usually do as they are told if their wives and children are held hostage. A small wooden stronghold would be completed [4 to 6 weeks if they had prefabricated the tricky bits], the hostages freed, and the fort would be used as the base from which to take over the next area.

By 1136 the Usk Valley was under the control of Brian FitzCount, bastard so of the count of Britanny and generally considered to be a decent heavy-handed overlord, in comparison with the Norman norm. It’s not recorded that he had problems with the locals, though they must have been livid. Fitzcount treated them with respect but other families were less considerate.  The Clares, for instance, were hated by the Welsh.

Richard De Clare was on his way to visit the Earl of Hereford and stopped off with Brian to spend the night. Brian warned him that his party wasn’t large enough to make it to Hereford but Richard thought he knew better. He made it rather less than halfway before his party was caught and Richard was murdered.

Photo by Eddie Proctor of Landscapism

A stone on the road near to Llanthony Abbey is said to mark the place of his death. This is well off the direct route to Hereford so one suspects that he was hunted for a while before they made their kill.

Iorwerth ab Owain and his cousin Morgan claimed responsibility, citing de Clare’s brutality as just cause.

That one of their own could be caught and killed so easily outraged and horrified the Normans of the southern Marches and so the brutality increased. For the next 40 years tit for tat crimes may be inferred, although couched in term of just retribution by the Normans for Welsh atrocities. They truly felt themselves to be waging a war against terror.

In 1175 Henry FitzMiles, lord of Abergavenny, may or may not have arrested several members of the Dwynfal family, who may or may not have been killed trying to escape.  The head of the Dwynfal family, Seisyll, was annoyed about this and, it is said, arranged for Henry to be ambushed and killed. Abergavenny passed into the hands of his nephew, William d Braose, from Bramber in Kent.

William invited all the Welsh family heads to dinner in Abergavenny around Christmas in 1177. We have his own account, taken down by Gerlad of Wales, of what happened. William claimed he wanted to broker a peace between Welsh and Norman. The Welsh, with their own very well established laws, including the absolute respect for the safety of a guest, felt no worry about leaving their weapons at the gate. Enter the sheriff of Hereford, Ranulf le Poer, who took the opportunity to unleash his troops on the defenceless Welshmen and murder the lot of them, including Seisyll and his eldest son and Iorwerth ap Owain, who must have been an old man by then.

All that remains of Castle Arnold is a bump in a field. When the Normans razed something, it stayed razed.

To make a clean sweep, Ranulf sent troops to Seisyll’s house at Castell Arnold where they killed the youngest son in his mother’s arms.

This was a gaffe of epic proportions because Seisylls wife, Gwenllian, or Amhuara depending upon which book you look in, was the sister of Rhys, Prince of South Wales and Rhys was very good pals with Henry II, who was red headed, short tempered and only slept 4 hours a night. Henry was a scary man and he was furious – this was partly because he needed to use Wales as a hopping off point to invade Ireland – but I’m sure it was expressed as outraged friendship rather than a desire not to be fighting  war on two fronts.

William was disciplined – he lost a very lucrative position as Justiciar of Gwent which allowed him to levy fines – and the matter was supposed to be at an end. But the Normans had forgotten the sensible Welsh habit of fostering out teenagers when they reached the age of thinking their parents knew NOTHING and just didn’t UNDERSTAND. Seisyll’s two middle sons had been safely away from home learning how to be gentlemen from someone they didn’t despise but it wasn’t long before they were old enough to come home and go to war.

In 1182, a Norman guard was approached by a youth would told him that an attack would be made on the  castle at Abergavenny at midnight. He even showed the guard the low place on the wall where, the boys said, the Welshmen would climb over. So the garrison turned out and stood ready all night to repel attackers – who very sensibly didn’t attack until the morning when the garrison stood down and went off to get some breakfast. the Welsh soldiers burned the outer walls of the castle, killed whoever they could catch and penned up the rest in the central keep, demanding that Willam be handed over to them. Someone explained that William was at one of his other castles, but that Ranulf le Poer was overseeing the building of a new castle at Dingestow. Accordingly the boys popped off to Dingestow where they caught Ranulf and cut his throat.

It’s possible that the Welsh believed Williams protestations that he had honestly wanted peace with them because there are no more reported attempts on his life and the country was quiet enough for Henry to send his troops to Ireland. There landlords like the De Clares handled the Erse so well that the hatred for foreign landlords still wells up today.