Note 20 — Chapter VIII · Welsh Cave Legends

But who was Owen Lawgoch, if there ever was such a man? Such a man there was undoubtedly; for we read in one of the documents printed in the miscellaneous volume commonly known as the Record of Carnarvon, that at a court held at Conway in the forty-fourth year of Edward III a certain Gruffyđ Says was adjudged to forfeit all the lands which he held in Anglesey to the Prince of Wales—who was at that time no other than Edward the Black Prince—for the reason that the said Gruffyđ had been an adherent of Owen: adherens fuisset Owino Lawegogh (or Lawgogh) inimico et proditori predicti domini Principis et de consilio predicti Owyni ad mouendam guerram in Wallia contra predictum dominum Principem20. How long previously it had been attempted to begin a war on behalf of this Owen Lawgoch one cannot say, but it so happens that at this time there was a captain called Yeuwains, Yewains, or Yvain de Gales or Galles, ‘Owen of Wales,’ fighting on the French side against the English in Edward’s Continental wars. Froissart in his Chronicles has a great deal to say of him, for he distinguished himself greatly on various critical occasions. From the historian’s narrative one finds that Owen had escaped when a boy to the court of Philip VI of France, who received him with great favour and had him educated with his own nephews. Froissart’s account of him is, that the king of England, Edward III, had slain his father and given his lordship and principality to his own son as Prince of Wales; and Froissart gives Owen’s father’s name as Aymon, which should mean Edmond, unless the name intended may have been rather Einion. However that may have been, Owen was engaged in the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, and when peace was made he went to serve in Lombardy; but when war between England and France broke out again in 1369, he returned to France. He sometimes fought on sea and sometimes on land, but he was always entrusted by the French king, who was now Charles V, with important commands21. Thus in 1372 he was placed at the head of a flotilla with 3,000 men, and ordered to operate against the English: he made a descent on the Isle of Guernsey22, and while there besieging the castle of Cornet, he was charged by the king of France to sail to Spain to invite the king of Castile to send his fleet again to help in the attack on La Rochelle. Whilst staying at Santander the earl of Pembroke was brought thither, having been taken prisoner in the course of the destruction of the English fleet before La Rochelle. Owen, on seeing the earl of Pembroke, asks him with bitterness if he is come there to do him homage for his land, of which he had taken possession in Wales. He threatens to avenge himself on him as soon as he can, and also on the earl of Hereford and Edward Spencer, for it was by the fathers of these three men, he said, his own father had been betrayed to death. Edward III died in 1377, and the Black Prince had died shortly before. Owen survived them both, and was actively engaged in the siege of Mortagne sur Mer in Poitou, when he was assassinated by one Lamb, who had insinuated himself into his service and confidence, partly by pretending to bring him news about his native land and telling him that all Wales was longing to have him back to be the lord of his country—et lui fist acroire que toute li terre de Gales le desiroient mout à ravoir à seigneur. So Owen fell in the year 1378, and was buried at the church of Saint-Léger23 while Lamb returned to the English to receive his stipulated pay. When this happened Owen’s namesake, Owen Glyndwr, was nearly thirty years of age. The latter was eventually to assert with varying fortune on several fields of battle in this country the claims of his elder kinsman, who, by virtue of his memory in France, would seem to have rendered it easy for the later Owen to enter into friendly relations with the French court of his day24.