Battle of Orewin Bridge, 1282: how Wales lost its last prince

The dispatch that reached Edward I was almost laconic. Roger Lestrange wrote that the king's good men had fought with Llywelyn son of Gruffudd in the land of Builth on the Friday after the feast of St Nicholas, that Llywelyn was dead, his army beaten and "all the flower of his men" killed; the bearer would tell the rest. In a few lines it announced the end of the native principality of Wales. The battle is one chapter in the military history of Wales.²

Background: Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and Edward I

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was a grandson of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, the great prince of Gwynedd. By his victory at Bryn Derwen in 1255 over his brothers Owain and Dafydd he began to rebuild his grandfather's power, and between 1256 and 1267, helped by the weakness of the English crown, he reunited north Wales and pushed into the middle March. In 1258 he took the title Prince of Wales, and the other native rulers did homage to him.³

Henry III recognized the title in the settlement of 1267, which the Dictionary of Welsh Biography calls the peace of Montgomery and Britannica the Treaty of Shrewsbury. The Dictionary sees in it the first experiment in Welsh statehood. It did not survive Edward I. After Llywelyn repeatedly refused to do homage, Edward invaded in 1277 with three coordinated advances and naval support, blockaded him in Snowdonia and starved him into submission. The peace of Aberconwy left Llywelyn only Gwynedd west of the Conwy, with what the Dictionary calls the now hollow title of Prince of Wales.⁴

On 13 October 1278, at Worcester, he married Eleanor de Montfort, daughter of Simon de Montfort, in the presence of the king. For four years he kept the peace. Then, on the eve of Palm Sunday 1282, his brother Dafydd, until then a friend of the English, stormed Hawarden Castle, and the chieftains of the south attacked Aberystwyth, Llandovery and Carreg Cennen. Lloyd places the cause in the oppressive rule of royal officials in the lands taken from Llywelyn; the prince was drawn in, he writes, less by his own wrongs than by those of his former subjects.⁵

The war of 1282

Edward repeated the method of 1277: knights to clear the way, the king himself in the north, and the conquest of Anglesey with the ships of the Cinque Ports, to shut Llywelyn and Dafydd into Snowdonia. The Welsh hit back. On 16 June a force under the Earl of Gloucester was defeated near Llandeilo Fawr, and on 6 November a column crossing a bridge of boats over the Menai Strait was cut to pieces. Llywelyn turned down Archbishop Peckham's offer of an English estate worth 1,000 pounds a year.⁶

To relieve the pressure on Gwynedd, Llywelyn marched south. In November he appeared in the uplands of Builth. The lordship was in the king's hands, and its castle, on the south side of the Irfon where it falls into the Wye, had lately been rebuilt at great cost. Winning over the Welsh tenants was easy; taking the castle, held by John Giffard with Shropshire levies, was not.⁷

Armies and commanders

The Welsh. Llywelyn's army is not counted in any source. The Peniarth version of the Brut, quoted by the Royal Commission, says that he had advanced as far as Llanganten and had sent his men and his steward to take the homage of the men of Brycheiniog, so that he was left with only a few men about him. Morris notes that the Welsh had missiles, perhaps used by the local Welsh who had joined his standard rather than by his own northerners.⁸

The English. Who commanded is uncertain. Archbishop Peckham and the Osney annalist name Edmund Mortimer and his household; Walter of Guisborough names John Giffard, with the younger Roger Mortimer; the Peniarth Brut names Roger Mortimer and Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys. Roger Lestrange, the royal commander at Montgomery, sent the official dispatch. Morris, who worked from the pay rolls, believed that apart from a contingent from Powys the foot were Shropshire men, with the horse of the marcher lords.⁹

Who won the Battle of Orewin Bridge?

Only Walter of Guisborough gives a definite account of the ground, and the Royal Commission warns that it must be treated with caution, because it resembles the same author's account of Stirling Bridge. In his version Llywelyn's men held the heights above the Irfon and a bridge over the river. A Welshman showed the English a ford; some of them crossed and seized Orewin Bridge from the rear, and the whole army then crossed and climbed the slope.¹⁰ › Battle of Stirling Bridge, 1297

The Welsh, taken by surprise and with no orders in their prince's absence, stood their ground manfully and shot down at the English. But they were shaken by the archers, who were interlaced with the heavy cavalry, and then attacked in the rear by horsemen who had worked round higher up the slope. They broke and fled. Morris saw the fight as one step in the slow English discovery of how to combine horse and missile-armed foot against spearmen, a process that in his view led on to Crécy.¹¹

How did Llywelyn ap Gruffudd die?

Llywelyn did not die at the head of his army. In Lloyd's words he died almost alone, in an unregarded corner of the field, hurrying back from some private errand to rejoin the troops holding the north bank of the Irfon. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography says the same: he did not die in open battle but on the banks of the Irfon, at the hands of one who did not know who his victim was. The man was named as Stephen de Frankton; Morris found a centenar of that name commanding Shropshire foot from Ellesmere in 1287.¹²

Why the prince was apart from his men is unknown. The Welsh tradition, Morris notes, told of a treacherous summons to a parley; another story had the Mortimers pretending to change sides to lure him. Lloyd concluded that the true story of that day would probably never be known. Only when the dead were stripped was the body recognized.¹³

Aftermath: the end of the principality

Llywelyn's head was cut off and sent to Edward, who showed it to his army in Anglesey and then sent it to London for public display. His body, once church scruples had been met, was buried by the Cistercians of Cwm Hir. His wife Eleanor had died in childbirth that June; their only child, Gwenllian, was taken into the king's hands and lived out her life as a nun of Sempringham.¹⁴

Without him the war collapsed. Dafydd tried to make a new stand at Castell y Bere under Cader Idris, but Bere surrendered on 25 April 1283 to an English army of more than 3,000, and in June Dafydd was taken, handed over, Morris writes, by men of his own tongue. Edward summoned his barons to Shrewsbury to decide his fate, and Dafydd was put to death that year. By the Statute of Wales of 1284 the principality was reorganized on English lines, with shires and hundreds, and a ring of castles was built around Gwynedd.¹⁵ › Battle of Evesham, 1265

Why the Battle of Orewin Bridge mattered

The Royal Commission calls the battle a decisive engagement in the history of medieval Wales: at its end Llywelyn was dead, and with him the possibility, at that date, of an independent Wales. Britannica calls him the only Welsh ruler officially recognized by the English as Prince of Wales; within a year of his death Wales was wholly under English rule. He is remembered in Welsh as Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, Llywelyn our last leader.¹⁶

The poet Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch read the disaster in the wind and the rain and the roar of the oaks in that more than wintry December, and asked why the sea did not swallow the land. Lloyd ended his history of Wales with the prince's death, writing that by his life's work Llywelyn had helped to build the enduring fabric of Welsh nationality.¹⁷

Where is the Orewin Bridge battlefield today?

The battle is generally placed near Builth Wells, where the Irfon meets the Wye, though no site is precisely fixed. At Cilmeri, about three kilometers to the west, a stone obelisk set up in 1902 marked the traditional spot where Llywelyn fell; in 1956 it was replaced by a block of granite from Trefor in his native Caernarfonshire. The Royal Commission notes that most of the evidence puts his death away from the main battle.¹⁸