Wales, 20 September 1415: the disappearance of Owain Glyndŵr

The last secure attestation of Owain Glyndŵr is an ambush. In 1412, at or near Brecon, he caught Dafydd Gam, a leading Welsh supporter of the English crown, and let him go again for a ransom the published range puts between two hundred and seven hundred marks. After that one engagement, the man who had been proclaimed Prince of Wales twelve years earlier, who had held parliaments at Machynlleth and Harlech and written to Charles VI of France from a synod at Pennal, vanishes from the documentary record.

Three years later, a Welsh ecclesiastical lawyer named Adam of Usk wrote, in a chronicle he kept from 1377 to 1421, that Owain was dead. The entry is the only contemporary statement of his death. After four years in hiding from the king and the realm, Owain Glyndŵr died and was buried by his followers in the darkness of night; the grave was found by his enemies, so he had to be re-buried, and it is impossible to discover where he was laid. A Welsh chronicle, transmitted through Robert Vaughan’s transcript of Brut y Tywysogion with Brenhinedd y Saeson interpolations, places the disappearance on the feast of St Matthew, 21 September. The eighteenth-century antiquarian Thomas Pennant read the night before. The narrowest scholarly window for the death is the night of 20 to 21 September 1415.

Six hundred and ten years on, that window is still the best the record gives. No grave, no body, no monument, and no parish entry has been positively identified as Owain’s. Three Herefordshire candidate sites carry the local tradition, a mid-Wales abbey is a recent popular suggestion, and a minority reading holds that Owain survived into the 1420s as a priest at Kentchurch Court. The mainstream, anchored in R. R. Davies’s 1995 study, accepts Adam of Usk and places the death in or near the home of one of Owain’s daughters in Herefordshire. The burial site it does not pretend to know.

The documented account

Owain ap Gruffudd Fychan, known in Welsh as Owain Glyn Dŵr and anglicised as Owen Glendower, was born around 1359; the Dictionary of Welsh Biography uses c. 1354. His patrimony lay at Sycharth, near Llansilin, and at Glyndyfrdwy in Edeirnion. He was descended on his father’s side from the princes of Powys Fadog and on his mother’s from the royal house of Deheubarth. A long tradition, thin in the documentary record, has him studying law at the Inns of Court. He served on the 1385 Scottish campaign under Richard II.

On 16 September 1400, at Glyndyfrdwy, a small assembly of his followers proclaimed him Princeps Walliae. The immediate trigger was a land dispute with Reginald de Grey, 3rd Baron Grey of Ruthin, which the English crown had declined to resolve in Owain’s favour. The revolt that followed lasted fifteen years and is the last full-scale Welsh war against English rule.

The milestones came quickly. On Good Friday 1401 the Tudur brothers seized Conwy Castle for him. In June he won at Mynydd Hyddgen. On 22 June 1402 at Bryn Glas, near Pilleth, his army defeated an English force under Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle of the young Earl of March. Mortimer was captured, and later in the year married Owain’s daughter Catrin and threw his interest in with the Welsh side. In 1404 Aberystwyth and Harlech fell, and he held parliaments at Machynlleth and Harlech. On 28 February 1405, by the Welsh national tradition at the house of the Archdeacon of Bangor, he signed the Tripartite Indenture with Mortimer and Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland; the three parties agreed in principle to divide England and Wales between them. In May 1405 he lost at Pwll Melyn; his brother Tudur was killed and his son Gruffudd taken. On 31 March 1406, from a synod at Pennal, he wrote to Charles VI of France setting out a programme for an independent Welsh church, two Welsh universities, and recognition of the Avignon pope Benedict XIII; the original is at the Archives Nationales in Paris under J516 B.40 and J516.29.

The tide turned. Northumberland was defeated and killed at Bramham Moor in February 1408. In February 1409 Harlech fell to Prince Henry, the future Henry V. Owain’s wife Margaret, his daughter Catrin, and Catrin’s three young daughters were taken to the Tower of London, where most accounts have them dying in captivity around 1413, buried at St Swithin’s. Owain himself escaped and continued from the Welsh uplands. In 1410 he raided into Shropshire. In 1412 he ambushed Dafydd Gam at Brecon and ransomed him back. That is the last episode the contemporary record can pin to him.

The crown’s pardon offers map the closing of the file. A general pardon to the Welsh rebels on 21 December 1411 excepted Owain. The accession pardon of 9 April 1413 excepted him again, although Henry V is recorded as having sounded out an offer through Owain’s son Maredudd. A further entreaty is said to have been made in 1415; if it reached Owain, no record survives that he answered. On 30 April 1417 Maredudd refused a pardon, and historians read the offer’s weight on Maredudd as a sign that the English court already believed Owain dead. On 8 April 1421 Maredudd accepted. That date is the closest documentary terminus ante quem the record gives for Owain’s death. (An earlier briefing placed Maredudd’s acceptance in 1416 at Carmarthen; the sources consulted do not support either point, and 8 April 1421 stands.)

Between the 1412 Brecon ambush and Maredudd’s 1421 acceptance, the only narrative event the documentary record offers is Adam of Usk’s entry.

Adam of Usk, born around 1352 and dead in 1430, was a Welsh ecclesiastical lawyer who served at the papal curia in Rome from 1402 to 1406. His Chronicon covers 1377 to 1421 and survives principally in BL Add. MS 10104, with the final quire rediscovered at Belvoir Castle in 1885. (An earlier briefing also referenced BL Harley 4023; the sources consulted name only Add. MS 10104 and the Belvoir quire.) The standard modern edition is C. Given-Wilson’s The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377-1421 (Oxford Medieval Texts, 1997). The English wording of the 1415 entry given above is the one most often reproduced in the secondary literature; the Latin original should be confirmed against the 1997 edition, and the Latin formula about death in the house of a daughter circulated in modern briefings was not independently verified.

That leaves the burial question. Adam of Usk’s chronicle itself says the burial was hidden and then moved. Three Herefordshire candidate sites recur. Monnington Straddel, in the Golden Valley, is the mainstream scholarly reading: Lloyd in 1931 and, with caution, Davies in 1995 took Adam of Usk’s “house of one of his daughters” to mean Alys, the daughter who married Sir John Scudamore. A motte near Monnington Court is the locally traditional site; a 2000 geophysical survey is reported to have revealed a rectangular stone footing of ten metres by six with walls a metre thick, the original report not at hand, and the present Monnington Court building is a nineteenth-century structure on much older ground. On some accounts the medieval land at the broader locality was Dore Abbey rather than Scudamore. Kentchurch Court, the principal Scudamore seat, holds the local tradition that Owain spent his last days there with a saddled horse beneath his window for escape, and was then taken to Monnington Straddel for burial. Lawton’s Hope Hill, between Leominster and Hereford, carries the minority tradition that he died on the road between two of his daughters’ homes. Cwmhir Abbey in Maelienydd is a recent popular fourth possibility. The Scudamore papers and parish registers contain no Glyndŵr burial entry.

Running alongside the burial question is the survival tradition. A minority but published reading holds that Owain outlived Adam of Usk’s death notice, took refuge with the Scudamores under the assumed identity of a priest, John of Kentchurch, sometimes identified with the poet Siôn Cent, and lived on into the 1420s. It rests on long family memory at Kentchurch and on an old oil portrait there of an elderly man, identified by some as Owain in old age and by the Scudamores as Siôn Cent. A Flemish-school attribution to Jan van Eyck has been offered; van Eyck’s first documentary appearance is 1422 and his confidently attributed works run 1432 to 1439, too late for any sitting in Owain’s lifetime. Davies in 1995 considered and rejected the identification. The Cold File reports the tradition as a minority published reading and nothing further.

Beside the documentary question runs a literary one. Welsh prophetic and bardic poetry, drawing on the tenth-century Armes Prydein Fawr and the broader “prince who will return” cycle, cast Owain in life and after as Y Mab Darogan, the Son of Prophecy, the foretold redeemer who would restore Welsh sovereignty. Even after Adam of Usk’s entry, a strand of Welsh popular tradition long held that Owain had not really died. The Mab Darogan tradition is reported here as a documented Welsh cultural fact, not as evidence about the death.

The evidence

The documentary record around the disappearance is small. Adam of Usk’s Chronicon in BL Add. MS 10104, with the 1885 Belvoir quire, supplies the only contemporary death notice. The Brut y Tywysogion in the Peniarth MS 20 version, via Robert Vaughan’s transcript with Brenhinedd y Saeson interpolations, supplies the feast-of-St-Matthew dating. The English Chancery Patent and Close Rolls at Kew record the 1411 and 1413 general pardons with Owain excepted, the 1417 offer to Maredudd, and Maredudd’s acceptance on 8 April 1421. The Pennal Letter of 31 March 1406, at the Archives Nationales under J516 B.40 and J516.29, and the Tripartite Indenture of 28 February 1405 sit outside the disappearance window but anchor the documentary identity of the man who vanished.

The physical record is larger than the documentary one and meets it at none of the relevant points. Sycharth, Owain’s principal residence near Llansilin, was excavated in 1962 and 1963 by Douglas Hague with Cynthia Warhurst; the motte is roughly fifty metres in diameter and 10.6 metres high, and the dig recovered two timber-framed buildings and burnt material consistent with the burning by Prince Henry in 1403. A 2009 Cadw survey added a second enclosure. Glyndyfrdwy is a scheduled monument. The Machynlleth building known as the Owain Glyndŵr Parliament House is traditionally identified with the 1404 parliament; the medieval fabric is debated. Kentchurch Court holds the disputed portrait. Monnington Straddel carries the uncorroborated 2000 stone-footing survey. No grave, no remains, and no monument have been positively identified as Owain’s at any of these sites.

The modern scholarship runs from J. E. Lloyd’s 1931 monograph through Glanmor Williams in 1966 and Geoffrey Hodges in 1995 to Davies’s 1995 Oxford volume, the definitive treatment, and Given-Wilson’s Henry IV of 2016. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography entry rounds the reading. None of them offers a grave.

Hypotheses and open questions

Each of the readings below is labelled as a hypothesis. None of them is asserted as fact.

Hypothesis A, the mainstream reading. Owain died on the night of 20 to 21 September 1415 at or near the home of his daughter Alys Scudamore in Herefordshire, and was buried in a deliberately concealed grave. For: Adam of Usk’s contemporary entry, dated by long tradition to the feast of St Matthew; the Welsh chronicle on the same feast; the Scudamore connection through Catrin and Alys; Maredudd’s 1421 pardon as terminus ante quem. Against: no grave has been identified; Adam of Usk does not name the daughter, and the identification with Alys is an inference; on some accounts the medieval land at Monnington Straddel was Dore Abbey rather than Scudamore.

Hypothesis B, the minority survival reading. Owain outlived the 1415 chronicle entry and lived on at Kentchurch into the 1420s under the assumed identity of a priest, John of Kentchurch, identified by some with the poet Siôn Cent. For: Scudamore family memory; the disputed portrait. Against: the memory is later; the portrait identification is itself disputed (the Scudamores read the sitter as Siôn Cent); the van Eyck attribution is chronologically impossible; Davies in 1995 rejected the reading.

Hypothesis C, Lawton’s Hope Hill. Owain died on the road between two of his daughters’ homes, near Lawton’s Hope Hill in Herefordshire. For: consistent with the documented Herefordshire refuge. Against: rests on a local tradition with no independent documentary anchor.

Hypothesis D, Cwmhir Abbey. Owain was buried at Cwmhir Abbey in Maelienydd. For: a Welsh monastic burial would be parsimonious for a Welsh ruler in the Welsh uplands. Against: it does not fit Adam of Usk’s “house of one of his daughters” formula, and the source is recent popular writing.

Hypothesis E, died in obscurity in the Welsh mountains. The broadest “died in hiding” reading. For: parsimony for a hunted man in his sixties in the uplands. Against: it contradicts Adam of Usk’s specific entry.

Alongside the five hypotheses, the Mab Darogan tradition is recorded as a documented Welsh cultural tradition that runs alongside the documentary record. It is part of the historical reception of Owain; it is not evidence about his death.

What remains unknown

What is in the record is narrow. The last secure attestation is the Brecon ambush of 1412. A contemporary Welsh chronicler at Usk wrote, within a few years, that Owain died after four years in hiding and was buried at night by his followers, that the grave was found and had to be moved, and that the final resting place was beyond knowing. A Welsh chronicle placed the disappearance on the feast of St Matthew. The English Chancery records have Maredudd accepting a pardon on 8 April 1421, a date the court would not have offered if it believed Owain still in the field. That is the documentary case for the death, and it has held since the fifteenth century.

What is not in the record is the rest. The date is narrowed to the feast of St Matthew of 1415, the night of 20 to 21 September, but is not certain to the day. The location is not securely identified; Herefordshire, and Monnington Straddel within it, is the dominant scholarly direction but is not proven. The burial site is unknown, by the explicit statement of the only contemporary source. No remains have been identified as Owain’s, no excavation has recovered a grave, and neither the Scudamore papers nor the parish registers carry an entry. The John of Kentchurch survival tradition has never been positively excluded; the mainstream rejects it, and the evidentiary record is too thin to disprove it either way.

The documentary record is what Adam of Usk wrote and what the rolls leave to be read against him. The grave is still where he said it was. It is impossible to discover where he was laid.

Wales, 20 September 1415: the disappearance of Owain Glyndŵr

The documented account

The evidence

Hypotheses and open questions

What remains unknown

Sources

Primary

Secondary