In Search of the Dark Ages by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781448141517
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2015-05-13T23:00:00+00:00

THE KINGS OF WALES SURRENDER: ‘THE ENGLISH ARE OVER-PROUD’

From Cumbria Athelstan rode south during July and launched an attack on the North Welsh kings, who, having given nominal submission to his father, seem now to have come out in open hostilities. They resisted him for some time but then risked warfare and were defeated and driven into flight. (Some of them, that is. For the Welsh kings included the Anglophile, Hywel Dda, ‘the Good’, who always cooperated with the English kings. Hywel’s kinsmen fought a bitter struggle for supremacy within Wales throughout this period with the anti-English line in Gwynedd, and this dynastic rivalry was cynically exploited by the West-Saxon kings to aid their domination of the Welsh kingdoms.)

The king who led the resistance against Athelstan in 927 was Idwal Foel of Gwynedd, grandson of the ‘nationalist’ Rhodri the Great and the protagonist of contemporary anti-English poetry (Idwal was eventually killed by the West Saxons in 942). The upshot of these events was that all five kings who ruled within Wales met Athelstan at Hereford, acknowledged his overlordship as ‘mechteyrn’ (Great King) and agreed to pay him a huge yearly tribute: 20 pounds of gold, 300 pounds of silver, 25,000 oxen, and as many hawks and hounds as the king wished. Nothing could be more indicative of the crushing scale of Athelstan’s victory over the Welsh than the size of this tribute, and an inflamed, astonished Welsh reaction to it appears in the contemporary poem ‘Armes Prydein’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.