Welsh Journals

'HENRY II AND THE FIGHT AT COLESHILL': SOME FURTHER REFLECTIONS MR. Cathcart King's paper, with its accompanying map, in a recent number of this review1 deals so challengingly with some aspects of Henry 11's invasion of North Wales in 1157 that it prompts further reflections on some of the points involved. Certain twelfth-century writers who mention the invasion-William of Newburgh, Gervase of Canterbury, and more particularly Gerald of Wales-tend to censure Henry's conduct of it as rash and even foolish. (In fairness to Gerald, one must remark that Mr. King is mistaken in supposing that Gerald described the fighting of 1157 as a 'signal defeat' for Henry: the phrase 'signal defeat' was due to Gerald's nineteenth-century translator, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, and was by no means an accurate rendering of Gerald's actual words.2) Mr. King argues persuasively that Henry's movements, though they landed him in some desperate fighting, were sound in principle and were successful in achieving their immediate object. He also very properly emphasizes the fact that Henry's opponent, Owain Gwynedd, adopted an unusual strategy for a Welsh military leader: Owain met Henry's invasion by taking up a markedly forward position close to the English boundary, and strengthened that position with earthworks. Nevertheless, Mr. King's proposed reconstruction of the earlier phase of the campaign leaves at least two questions which cannot be said, in the light of the evidence as a whole, to have been convincingly answered. Firstly, where did Owain Gwynedd take up his markedly forward position protected by earthworks? Secondly, where was the scene of the hot fighting in which Henry II was for a time in serious personal danger? To the first question, Mr. King's text and map answer in effect, 'At Basingwerk', by which he means at Greenfield, where the well-known ruins of Basingwerk abbey still stand. To the second question, Mr. King's map makes answer by marking diagrammatically what it calls the 'Probable scene of fighting' as being closely adjacent to the shore of the Dee estuary, 1 Ante, II. 367-73. 2 What Gerald actually wrote was that Henry 'cum detrimento suorum et damno non modico ambiguam bellorum aleam expertus est'. (The passage is quoted in its context below, p. 257) The words which I have italicised, and which Hoare rendered as 'experienced a signal defeat', mean no more than 'experienced the changeable chance of battles', a statement which was exactly applicable to Henry's experiences in 1157.