districts of any country. In the richer agricultural lands, the conditions of user lend themselves peculiarly to exaction and oppression. And so North and Mid Wales might rise enthusiastic to restore the corona of lost independence: there the bards might rouse young and old, chieftain and tribesman, to frenzy, as they sang of the restoration of the glory of those old days—

When victory lighted o'er Llewelyn's spears,

What time he carved his name across the years.

But in the older conquered districts, older conquered because more open, rich, and tempting, where the Marcher's heel had ground the people deepest and longest, what the people looked for was relief from rigorous exactions; it was there the common people who listened; the toil-wrung serf; the tribesman finding himself being slowly ground into villenage these they were who turned their faces towards Glyndwrdy and chanted Owen's name beneath their breath, like an orison to another Messiah; kindling their hopes at the flash of his broad sword, and hanging upon his spear the new milennium, when rent should be abolished and exactions be no more. Hearken to the voice of it" the country people rose, and swept away all boundaries, and divided the lands and gave them in common to all; and the owners fled." This was when Owen appeared amongst them in South Wales; this was what Owen meant to the rebels of South Wales at least, freedom from the oppressions of their lords-Welsh or English. "They took away from the rich and powerful and distributed the plunder amongst the weak and poor. The higher orders and chieftains were obliged to flee to England." Here is Utopia; here is socialism; here is the time-old revolt of the lowest class, the down-trodden and oppressed, against the bitterness of their lot. Small wonder that they worshipped Owen if he meant the realization of such a dream

to their hungry hearts; smaller wonder yet if it lasted but a little while, and if the first benefit received by his means caused them to slack away and sit down from their leader. Their eyes were blinded by long tears and by long delving in the mire of earth; they could not lift them high enough or far enough to see and realise all that Owen and the frenzied bards and mountaineers beheld afar off and dazzling the independence of Wales.

And by these heavy steps we come to understand why the rising lasted longer in the mountain countries than in the richer lowlands. Wealth, and the creation of it, tie a man's soul about with trammels of which the dweller amongst sterility knows nothing. The lords of the agricultural districts, finding that the King of England could not save them from the fury of Owen, reluctantly laid their account with naked facts and so came to treaty with their people, and by the proffer of new terms, less hard than the old, came again into possession and power; at the same time buying recognition and countenance from Owen by the payment of a set and calculated sum. Thus we get the entries" in this year the men of . Saxonised and deserted Owen." Owen had done what was hoped of him; his advent had lightened their burdens and had turned back the stream of increasing exactions. A year or two of wild license had shown the wisest of them that Utopia pure and simple was an impossible state, and so they listened to the proffers of their former lords and agreed with them while they were yet in the way with them. The terms were so good, so far excelling the old terms, that they made haste to clinch the bargain and resume a settled life. All of them, that is, save those few finer fibred spirits, whose souls had caught light at the torch of freedom in Owen's hand and who therefore caused that entry-" the remainder of the true men

followed Owen to the North and there settled." Small wonder that good sack-lined Adam of Usk should exclaim that the world was coming to ruin, for that the common people would rule their lords.

Still Owen had not finished with the good fortune which he brought to these benefited men. The fact that he still kept his footing in the wilder and more inaccessible districts held the Marcher lords to the letter of their new bargains. Had Henry been able to crush him in some great battle, to kill or capture him, then the Marcher tenants would undoubtedly have found the old whips substituted by scorpions; but as year after year went by and Owen still kept his eyries, the lords grew accustomed to the new order of things; acquiescence grew into settled custom, stronger for such lessons as that of 1409, when, following the defeat and death of Northumberland in the previous year, Henry's affairs seemed so prosperous that some of the lords attempted to restore the old order of things. Hence Owen's "excesses" in the spring of that year.

I do not wish to lay too much stress upon this part of the movement which Owen headed. Only as it has never before been spoken of, I have rather insisted upon it, because I think that from this point of view alone can we understand the outbreaks in South and East Wales, when, like a sudden flood, the tide of revolt rose and spread from boundary to boundary, as from lordship to lordship the commons cried war for Glyndwrdy. "Owen and his starvelings," says the chronicler, "eight thousand spears, such as they were," he writes in another place. Yea, in the rich and open districts it was clearly the lower classes who joined Owen's standard or gathered themselves together, leaderless, and proclaimed his name. And in a rich country a poor man's revolt is seldom successful or

productive of permanent good. Here, as was said above, the peculiar division of Owen's supporters into pastoral and agricultural tended to ensure some permanent benefit to the latter, through the easier pertinacity under different conditions of the former.

To leave, however, this point of the conditions which prepared the way for Owen, there is hardly time to indicate what is meant by "an enquiry into the permanence of his work." But in North and Mid Wales we find the older Welsh laws re-emerging into power as customs of the people. Rents fixed at Llewelyn's death are found to have returned to that figure, and exactions dating from intermediate times have vanished. Encroachments cease, yea, are even swept away; and so settled and strong does the return become that nearly two centuires afterwards, the first serious attempt to renew the policy of increasing exaction and encroachment-by Elizabeth's worthless favourite is immediately answered by a popular rising, which, though put down, yet has the result of stopping the injustice which provoked it. Here, then, is one of the tests of Owen's greatness-that though he did not set up a nominally independent Wales, yet, for all essential purposes of internal or domestic development, he rescued the nation from alien spur and bridle, and set it back upon its own native courses. Thus it could go on in hope and comparative freedom, as it watched and waited for the day when on Bosworth Field it merged its aspirations in seeming fulfilment, and so set its face to look for a new day and a new order of things.

But besides the interest of the beginning and the end of Owen's work, there is the interest of the actual methods of doing it. And here even Pennant comes short, though he is hardly to blame if, amongst his manifold accomplishments, a knowledge of the art of was not

included. Yet Owen's acts and policy cannot be properly expounded without some knowledge of strategy.

It seems a bold thing to claim for Owen a knowledge of strategy, since strategy is supposed to have been a lost art at that period: an art which, despite Hawkwood's fame in Italy, is not supposed to have re-emerged till Marlborough at Blenheim taught the world that lesson the value of which Napoleon was the first to really see and profit by and profit so splendidly.

But to take one particular instance. After the making of the famous plot with Percy and Mortimer, Owen was away in South Wales when Hotspur arrived at Chester. Now writer after writer has blamed Owen for being at that particular moment in South Wales instead of at Chester to meet his ally. He was "indulging his love of rapine by devastating the country", say these writers. As a matter of cold fact, politic as Owen usually was, he never engaged in a more politic and well-timed act than this of ravaging South Wales at that very moment.

For the real rendezvous of the three allies was to be in the Mortimer country, that is to say, at Ludlow, then as afterwards the Mortimer capital. From this place they were to march eastward into England to attack Henry with a view to placing the crown upon the head of the child Earl of March, rightful heir of the throne. This would have made the Percies and Sir Edmund Mortimer Regents in England, and left Owen Prince of all the country west of Severn. How long such an arrangement would have lasted has nothing to do with us here; what we are concerned with is Owen's conduct of his share of the plot. Parenthetically, however, this intended march from Ludlow as a base was a curious anticipation of those marches from the same base half a century later, which placed the Mortimer line upon the throne in the person of Edward IV.