Note 25 — Chapter VIII · Welsh Cave Legends

Now as to Yvain de Galles, the Rev. Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) in his Hanes Cymru, ‘History of Wales,’ devotes a couple of pages, 735–7, to Froissart’s account of him, and he points out that Angharad Ỻwyd, in her edition of Sir John Wynne’s History of the Gwydir Family25, had found Owen Lawgoch to have been Owen ab Thomas ab Rhodri, brother to Ỻewelyn, the last native prince of Wales. One of the names, however, among other things, forms a difficulty: why did Froissart call Yvain’s father Aymon? So it is clear that a more searching study of Welsh pedigrees and other documents, including those at the Record Office26, has to be made before Owen can be satisfactorily placed in point of succession. For that he was in the right line to succeed the native princes of Wales is suggested both by the eagerness with which all Wales was represented as looking to his return to be the lord of the country, and by the opening words of Froissart in describing what he had been robbed of by Edward III, as being both lordship and principality—la signourie et princeté. Be that as it may, there is, it seems to me, little doubt that Yvain de Galles was no other than the Owen Lawgoch, whose adherent Gruffyđ Says was deprived of his land and property in the latter part of Edward’s reign. In the next place, there is hardly room for doubt that the Owen Lawgoch here referred to was the same man whom the baledwyr in their jumble of prophecies intended to be Henry the Ninth, that is to say the Welsh successor to the last Tudor king, Henry VIII, and that he was at the same time the hero of the cave legends of divers parts of the Principality, especially South Wales, as already indicated.