Welsh Journals

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Llywelyn, moreover, like his great predecessor and namesake, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, relied heavily on a group of North Wales lawyers — specialists in the law of Hywel Dda-who were busily occupied in this period on the task of adapting old laws and institutions to the needs of a new era in Welsh politics. Those who thus subscribed to the policies of the princes of Gwynedd were, however, but a minority of the native population in those days, albeit a percipient and influential minority, an active upper crust of skill and talent who shared with their ruler a novel patriotic vision of a single cenedl or natio of Welshmen united in personal and symbolic loyalty to one Prince of Wales. On the other hand, Prince Llywelyn had to contend with powerful internal resistances to his will and authority, which, because those resistances too came from Welshmen, were a far more potent challenge to his designs than the open hostility, for example, of the lords of the March of Wales, such as the Mortimers and the Clares, or the steady resolve of King Edward I, from 1274 onwards, to destroy Llywelyn and all that he stood for. Deep-seated local patriotism and family feeling produced resistances, as a rule inert and elusive, on the part of the rank and file of Welshmen whose patriotic horizons rarely extended beyond the limits of their local country (gwlad or patria), and whose interests were normally exclusively concentrated on the affairs of the tribe and clan. Llywelyn had also to struggle with opposition from within his own family, for his brothers still believed in traditional partible modes of government, and strongly resented the intrusive principle of rule by one prince. Nor could he rely on the genuine support and sympathy of the vassal lords of Wales, conscious as the latter still were of the age-old equality which had governed the relations of the Welsh princes down to the era of the Llywelyns and indeed there were some, such as Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys or Maredudd ap Rhys of Deheubarth, who as a rule pre- ferred English to Welsh allegiance when the choice was forced upon them. In the present context, however, stress is laid on the opposition suffered by Llywelyn at the hands of some of the clergy under the leadership of the northern bishops, an opposition on the part of the bishops of St. Asaph and Bangor (the bishops of St. David's and Llandaff being resident in the March of Wales were beyond Llywelyn's reach) which arose rather more out of Llywelyn's intention to make himself master of his dominions in fact as well as in name, than as a protest against the Prince's mere assumption of a special constitutional status. The peculiar reasons for this conflict between the Prince and his bishops will emerge in due course, since they are epitomised in their most striking form in the career of Einion ap Ynyr-better known as Anian II, thirteenth in the succession, from 1143, of the bishops of St. Asaph, and with the possible exception of Geoffrey of Monmouth (who in any case never took possession of the see) the best known and probably the greatest of the medieval bishops of that diocese.