In our last episode
on the history of the medieval Welsh, we took a tour of the Cumbric Kingdoms of
6th to 8th century Britain and explored the complex relationships they held with their
Anglo-Saxon neighbours. In this episode, new warlords from the rugged north will arrive on
British shores for land and plunder, and throughout the 9th and 10th centuries,
the heirs of Arthur will continue the fight to preserve the independence of
their ancient Kingdoms against not only the English, but the Great Heathen Army as well.
Getting land and title in britain these days is much less hassle, and it’s even
good for the whole planet. You’ll see why that is with our sponsor, Established Titles.
They sell small plots of land in Scotland, which are sought after because of a historic Scottish
custom where landowners are referred to as Lairds, or Lords and Ladies in English. To protect these
lands and the planet, a tree is planted with every order, and Established Titles supports charities
like One Tree Planted and Trees for the Future. So it’s not just a title, it's a fun and novel way to
preserve the natural woodlands of Scotland, while helping global reforestation efforts.
You’ll get at least one square foot of dedicated land in Scotland,
with a unique plot number and a certificate to prove it. This allows you to officially
get Lord or Lady on your credit cards, dating profiles, and more.
You can give this certificate and title to someone else too,
making a great last minute gift, and you even get a couple pack with adjoining plots of land.
The first two hundred plots bought via our link will all be put together within a few minutes of
each other next to the Kings and Generals plot, so be quick to join our channel’s Scottish fiefdom.
Go established titles dot com slash kings and grab the perfect gift with a discount in their holiday
sale. Plus use our code kings to get a further ten percent off, and help support our channel.
At the turn of the 8th century, the geopolitical status quo of Britain would undergo a dramatic
shift. In the year 793 AD, Lindisfarne, the holiest monastery of the Kingdom of Northumbria,
was brutally sacked by people history remembers as ‘Vikings’. Throughout the next few decades,
waves of Danish and Norse raiders and settlers would continue to arrive on Anglo-Saxon shores.
This eventually culminated in the invasion of a great heathen army in 865 AD, in which three
out of the four of the great Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Northumbria, East Anglia, and Mercia, were overrun
by Danes, with the Kingdom of Wessex and its royal scion, Alfred, being the lone holdout.
While the lands of the Anglo-Saxons were consumed by the ingress of pagan Norsemen,
the land of the Britons would see an inverse trend of stabilization, as a new dynasty,
the Merfynion of Gwynedd, came to power. Before we delve further into the march of history,
we should talk about the sources available to us from this era. Manuscripts like the Harleian
genealogy, the Brut y Tywysogion, and the Annales Cambriae offer us valuable insight into the
succession of Welsh Kings and the events of the Viking age from the Welsh perspective. However,
it should be noted that while primary sources like these give us an invaluable window into
the world of Viking age Wales, they are, like all medieval documents, full of anachronisms, internal
contradictions, and heavy biases. As such, what follows is merely our best interpretation of an
era still shrouded in mystery and uncertainty. In 825, Merfyn Frych, a native of the Isle of Man,
seized the throne of the Kingdom of Gwynedd, where his descendants would rule until their
domain was annexed into the Kingdom of England in the year 1283. It is not known how exactly
Merfyn Frych came to become ruler of Gwynedd. Being from the Isle of Man, it is possible he
was dislodged from there by Norse Raiders and forced to take refuge across the water in Gwynedd.
Indeed, Viking longboats were active in the Irish sea at the dawn of the 800s AD, where they raided,
traded, and established settlements along the Hebrides Islands and the Irish coast.
From 816, Gwynedd had been plunged into turmoil, as two brothers, Hywel ap Rhodri
Molwynog and Cynan Dindaethwy ap Rhodri, fought a bloody civil war for the throne, all while
the bellicose King Coenwulf of Mercia’s armies ravaged throughout all of the Welsh Kingdoms.
By 825, both brothers had died, and a Wessex victory over Mercia at the
battle of Ellandun triggered the end of the Mercian presence in Wales, at least for now.
These elements combined to create a power vacuum in Gwynedd, which Merfyn Frych promptly filled.
We know almost nothing about Merfyn’s reign as King of Gwynedd, only that he
ruled until the year 844, when he died in battle against an unidentified foe.
He would be succeeded by his son: known as Rhodri Mawr: Rhodri the Great.
Rhodri Mawr inherited the throne of Gwynedd at a good time, for the Kingdom’s traditional Mercian
enemies were too busy fighting either their Saxon kinsmen in Wessex or the increasingly troublesome
Viking raiders to partake in their favourite past-time of trying to subjugate the Welsh.
Taking advantage of this peace, Rhodri set his eyes upon expansion. In 855 AD, King Cyngen ap
Cadell of Powys died in exile in faraway Rome, ostensibly leaving no heirs. Pressing a dynastic
claim to Powys’ vacant throne through his mother, Nest ferch Cadell, sister of the late King Cyngen,
Rhodri annexed Powys into his realm. As Rhodri expanded his influence over the Welsh peoples,
he found out that Wales was not exempt from the Viking raids which plagued the rest of
the British isles. However, the son of Merfyn was dynamic and capable in his military leadership,
and was able to repulse the Northmen invasions, slaying a Viking warlord named Ormr in 856.
Rhodri’s expansions throughout the Welsh lands continued in the following decades, when in 872,
Gwgon, the last in the traditional line of kings of Seisyllwg, drowned,
leaving no heir. In prior years, Rhodri had secured a marriage to Gwgon’s sister, Angharad.
Thus, after the King of Seisyllwg’s death, Rhodri’s second son, Cadell ap Rhodri would
become ruler of that Kingdom by virtue of his mother’s blood, and become a vassal to his father.
Dynastic politics in medieval Wales was as sophisticated and complex as anywhere else
in Europe, and establishing a proper pedigree among the ancient families of the Celtic Britons
was essential to success, something Rhodri Mawr understood well, and exploited to his benefit.
This latest territorial expansion once more coincided with yet another wave of Viking
aggression, and in the same year Rhodri vassalized Seisyllwg, he won two further battles against an
invading Danish horde on the isle of Anglesey. However, in 877, the Vikings returned with a large
army, evidently overrunning Gwynedd and forcing Rhodri to flee to Ireland. Later that year, the
Great Heathen Army also overran Wessex, forcing King Alfred to go into hiding in the marshes
of Somerset. However, in one of history’s more unlikely comebacks, Alfred managed to rally the
West Saxon fyrds and decisively crush the Northmen at the Battle of Edington in the summer of 878.
With the majority of Vikings in Britain focused on the Wessex campaign, Rhodri
was able to return from exile and reestablish control over his domain. Unfortunately for him,
a decreased Viking presence in central Britain also meant that King Ceolwulf,
client ruler of a Mercian rump state under Danish overlordship, was given an opportunity
to try and re-establish his predecessors’ hegemony over the Wealas across Offa’s Dyke.
It is here that Rhodri ap Merfyn the Great met his end, perishing in the battle against the Mercians.
Upon his demise, the first great Merfynion’s realm was divided among his four sons,
although only two would end up being politically relevant: Anarawd ap Rhodri, assuming the Kingship
of Gwynedd, and the aforementioned Cadell, King of Seisyllwg. In 881, these brothers, led by Anarawd,
once more threw off the hegemony of Mercia, which was itself now under Wessex’s overlordship.
At the river Conwy, the sons of Rhodri crushed the Mercian Lord Aethelred’s armies in a victory that
Welsh annals vindictively describe as divinely ordained revenge for the death of their father.
Shortly after his victory, Anarawd forged an alliance with the Vikings of Jorvik,
presumably as extra insurance against future Mercian aggressions, then turned his focus onto
continuing his late father’s vision of uniting Wales. However, many other Welsh Kingdoms didn’t
appreciate the sight of the Anarawd ravenously eyeing their lands. To that end, southern Welsh
Kingdoms like Dyfed and Brycheiniog, who had never been under Rhodri’s overlordship,
gravitated to the court of the rising star that was Alfred of Wessex, accepting West
Saxon suzerainty in order to protect themselves from Gwynedd. Ironically, King Anarawd would
later abandon his alliance with Jorvik and also became a client to Alfred, thereby putting all
of Wales’ most influential native rulers within the gravitational orbit of the House of Wessex.
Overall, all of this politicking serves to re-illustrate a point from our first episode:
that Welsh history was never a binary ethnic struggle between Briton, Saxon, and now also Dane,
but a complex web of relationships in which various Welsh rulers were capable of working
both within or beyond cultural lines to preserve the independence and agency of their realms.
While the Merfynion of Gwynedd busied themselves with uniting the Britons of Wales proper, further
north, their wayward kinsmen in the Kingdom of Alt Clut thrived. Sharing extremely close
cultural ties to their sister-peoples in Wales proper, Alt Clut was the last independent remnant
of Yr Hen Ogledd, the Welsh of the Old North. It was a small but prosperous maritime Kingdom,
named for the titular coastal fortress town of Alt Clut, known in English as Dumbarton Rock.
This fortress, which served as the seat of the Northern Welsh Kings, was nigh impregnable,
with an alliance of Northumbrians and Picts having failed to take it back in 756.
However, during the reign of King Arthgal ap Dyfnwal, Alt Clut would face a new foe.
In the year 870 AD, the mighty Norse warlord Ivar the Boneless, having conquered the
Northumbrian capital of York and ravaged the lands of the Picts in previous years,
set his sights on the fortress of Alt Clut. Ivar was joined by his brother Olafr, King of Dublin,
and together they brought their might to bear upon Dumbarton Rock. King Arthgal resisted valiantly,
holding out for an unprecedented four months, one of the longest sieges of the era. However, the
Vikings eventually cracked the nut, and Alt Clut fell, its people massacred or sold into slavery.
The fall of Dumbarton Rock was not the end of the independence of the northern Britons,
for the Kingdom survived, moving its center of power inland along the Clyde river, near modern
day Glasgow. Deprived of its titular fortress, it rebranded itself as the Kingdom of Strathclyde.
Ironically, the presence of the Vikings in northern Britain, which had initially been a
fiery plague upon the northern Welsh, soon turned into one of their greatest political assets.
From 875 onwards, the Kings of Strathclyde appear to have established long-term friendly
relationships with the Norse rulers of Dublin and Jorvik. Because of this, Strathclyde was able to
expand its borders greatly, having reached as far south as Penrith by 927 AD. Much of this expansion
was at the expense of the greatly weakened and Viking-overrun Kingdom of Northumbria.
In that sense, the Strathclyde Britons were taking advantage of the Danish invasions of
Anglo-Saxon territory to reconquer land taken from the Celtic Kings of Yr Hen Ogledd centuries ago.
Let us now shift the focus of our story back onto the Merfynion,
for as Strathclyde thrived in the north, in the southwest of Wales proper, a grandson of Rhodri
was poised to surpass his grandfather’s legacy. Hywel ap Cadell, known to history as Hywel Dda,
or Hywel the Good, was the son of Cadell ap Rhodri, the King of Seisyllwg.
Towards the end of his life around 904 AD, Cadell conquered the neighbouring statelet of Dyfed,
installing his son Hywel as King there. In 920, after assuming sole possession of the throne,
Hywel united the realms of Dyfed and Seisyllwg into one Kingdom, Deheubarth.
In 928, Hywel went on a pilgrimage to Rome. He was not the first Welsh King to undergo this journey,
but he was the first one to return home alive. Around this time, the Merfynion monarch also
devoted himself to what would become the keystone of his legacy: the Cyfraith Hywel,
or “Laws of Hywel.” Before Hywel’s reign, Welsh law was a jumble of regional customs passed down
orally through the poems of Bards. Attempting a Justinian-esque standardization of this eclectic
mess of ancient Celtic traditions was a monumental feat, yet it was accomplished nonetheless.
Beyond this, Hywel is also the only Welsh King known to have minted his own coins.
From a geopolitical point of view, the reign of Hywel Dda marked a turning point for the Welsh,
for it was during the King of Deheubarth’s lifetime that the Celtic Britons would, for
the first time in history, have to contend with a united Kingdom of the English. After the triumph
of King Alfred over the Great Heathen Army, his descendants in the House of Wessex had continued
what he had started. Throughout the 910s, Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, and his daughter,
Æthelflæd the Lady of Mercia, succeeded in pushing the Danes out of Viking Mercia and East Anglia.
Upon Edward’s death in 924, he was succeeded by his son, Æthelstan, who achieved overlordship
over the Vikings of Jorvik in 927, thereby bringing Northumbria back under Anglo-Saxon rule.
With the four great Anglo-Saxon domains of Wessex now united, a new Kingdom was formed,
which for the rest of history, would be the dominant titan of the British Isles.
For the entirety of his reign, Hywel Dda willingly accepted a junior, tributary relationship with the
English crown. In 926, he supplicated himself before King Athelstan, and thereafter was known
to be a fairly regular guest at the court of Wessex. Playing the sycophant to the English
may have been a dent on Hywel’s Cumbric pride, but it is clear that the good King was a realist,
recognizing who the powerhouse in Britain was now, and that there was more to gain by being England’s
friend than England’s enemy. Not everyone was happy with Hywel’s appeasement of the English,
which we can see in the Welsh literature of the age. The Armes Prydein, or ‘prophecy of Britain’,
is a famous piece of heroic poetry that claimed to foresee a future in which all the non-English
peoples of Britain, including the Scots, the Irish, the Norsemen, and the Britons of Cornwall,
Wales and Strathclyde would come together in a coalition and push the Anglo-Saxons
back into the sea. The Armes Prydein was no doubt written during Hywel Dda’s reign,
and was an explicit criticism of the Welsh King’s policy of peaceful pragmatism with the English.
Hywel would never buy into such romantic visions of past Celtic glory.
Infact, in 934 AD, he, alongside other Welsh Kings, had even joined Athelstan in a campaign
to help the English subdue the Scots and their Brittonic kinsmen in Strathclyde.
Hywel’s pro-English policies bore him fruit in 942, when Idwal ap Anarawd, King of Gwynedd and
Hywel’s cousin, grew fed up with being under the English thumb, started a rebellion, and launched
an attack on the English. Predictably, Idwal was killed in action. He left behind two sons, Iago
and Ieuaf, but before either could inherit the throne, Hywel swept in, forcing them into exile,
and seizing the northern Kingdom for himself. This made Hywel Dda the King of all Wales except
Gwent and Morgannwg, something which the newly crowned king Edmund of England did not challenge,
likely due to Hywel’s long-standing friendliness to the English throne.
In 950, Hywel the Good passed away, and upon his death, his united realm collapsed into dynastic
warfare. In the north, the sons of Idwal returned from exile and reclaimed Gwynedd,
waging war on Hywel’s sons, Owain, Rhodri, and Edwin, who retained power in Deheubarth.
Let us now turn our attention northwards once more. Back in 937, King Owain ap Dyfnwal of
Strathclyde, responding to the imperialist aggressions of King Athelstan in the north
of England, entered into an alliance with King Olaf Guthfrithson, the Viking King of Dublin,
and Constantine II, King of Alba, an early form of Scotland. This was the closest thing to the
anti-Saxon coalition dreamed up in the Armes Prydain. However, rather than sweeping the English
back into the sea, this alliance of Norsemen and Celts was crushed at the battle of Brunanburh.
The disaster at Brunanburh did not spell the immediate end of Strathclyde,
but it did mean that, for the next century, the northern Britons would find themselves
increasingly hemmed in between two growing powers, the Scots of Alba, and the English.
Over the next few decades, Strathclyde came increasingly under the sway of the Gaelic
Kings of Scotland, and, sometime between 1018 to 1054, the last remnant of Yr Hen
Ogledd had been annexed into the Scottish crown or the English lords of Northumbria.
After the fall of Strathclyde, where Brythonic chieftains had once ruled throughout all of
Britain, now only among the squabbling petty kingdoms of Wales proper did the Cymric peoples
retain their independence. In the following centuries, even those domains would come under
threat, as in 1066, a bastard from Normandy defeated the Saxon King Harold Godwinson
in a place called Hastings, and the course of British history was once again forever altered.
Thanks again to our sponsor, Established Titles. Buy land in Scotland and become a
lady or a lord, or give this title as an amazing and easy gift. In return,
Established Titles plants a tree to protect the pristine forests
of our planet. There are big savings in their holiday sale and use our discount code kings,
at establishedtitles.com/kings, to get a further ten percent off.
In our next video on the history of medieval Wales, we will talk
about the arrival of the Normans, and their attempts to conquer the land of the Britons,
so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to see it. Please,
consider liking, commenting, and sharing - it helps immensely. Our videos would be impossible
without our kind patrons and youtube channel members, whose ranks you can join via the links
in the description to know our schedule, get early access to our videos, access our discord,
and much more. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one.