improbable that they still do so here and there, unless the horrors of the ghastly murder last reported in the newspapers have been found to pay better. At any rate Mr. Fisher (p. 379) has known old people in his native district in the ILychwr Valley who could repeat stanzas or couplets from the ballads in question. He traces these scraps to a booklet entitled Merlin's Prophecy1, together with a brief history of his life, taken from the Book of Prognostication. This little book bears no date, but appears to have been published in the early part of the nineteenth century. It is partly in prose, dealing briefly with the history of Merlin the Wild or Silvaticus, and the rest consists of two poems. The first of these poems is entitled Dechreu Darogan Myrdin, 'the Beginning of Merlin's Prognostication,' and is made up of forty-nine verses, several of which speak of Owen as king conquering all his foes and driving out the Saxons: then in the forty-seventh stanza comes the couplet which says, that this Owen is Henry the Ninth, who is tarrying in a foreign land. The other poem is of a more general character, and is entitled the Second Song of Merlin's Prognostication, 1 I have never seen a copy, but Mr. Fisher gives me the title as follows: Prophwydoliaeth Myrdin Wyllt yn nghyda ber Hanes o'i Fywyd, wedi eu tynu attan o Lyfr y Daroganau... Caerfyrdin... Pris dwy Geiniog. It has no date, but Mr. Fisher once had a copy with the date 1847. Recently he has come across another versified prophecy written in the same style as the printed ones, and referring to an Owain who may have been Owen Lawgoch. The personage meant is compared to the most brilliant of pearls, Owain glain golyaf. The prophecy is to be found at the Swansea Public Library, and occurs in a seventeenth century manuscript manual of Roman Catholic Devotion, Latin and Welsh. It gives 1440 as the year of the deliverance of the Brytaniaid. It forms the first of two poems (fo. 37), the second of which is ascribed to Taliessin. Such is Mr. Fisher's account of it, and the lines which he has copied for me cling to the same theme of the ultimate triumph of the Kymry. Quite recently I have received further information as to these prophecies from Mr. J. H. Davies, of Lincoln's Inn (p. 354), who will, it is to be hoped, soon publish the results of his intimate study of their history in South Wales. and consists of twenty-six stanzas of four lines each like the previous one; but the third stanza describes Arthur's bell at Caerfteon, 'Caerleon,' ringing with great vigour to herald the coming of Owen; and the seventh stanza begins with the following couplet: Ceir gweled Owen Law-goch yn dod i Frydain Fawr, It closes with the date in verse at the end, to wit, 1668, which takes us back to very troublous times: 1668 was the year of the Triple Alliance of England, Sweden, and Holland against Louis XIV; and it was not long after the Plague had raged, and London had had its Great Fire. So it is a matter of no great surprise if some people in Wales had a notion that the power of England was fast nearing its end, and that the baledwyr thought it opportune to refurbish and adapt some of Merlin's prophecies as likely to be acceptable to the peasantry of South Wales. At all events we have no reason to suppose that the two poems which have here been described from Mr. Fisher's data represented either the gentry of Wales, whose ordinary speech was probably for the most part English, or the bardic fraternity, who would have looked with contempt at the language and style of the Prognostication. For, apart from careless printing, this kind of literature can lay no claim to merit in point of diction or of metre. Such productions represent probably the baledwyr and the simple country people, such as still listen in rapt attention to them doing at Welsh fairs and markets what they are pleased to regard as singing. All this fits in well enough with the folklore of the caves, such as the foregoing stories represent it. Here I may add that I am informed by Mr. Craigfryn Hughes of a tradition that Arthur and his men are biding their time near Caerleon on the Usk, to wit, in a cave resembling generally those described in the foregoing legends. He also mentions a tradition as to Owen Glyndwr-so he calls him, though it is unmistakably the Owen of the baledwyr who have been referred to by Mr. Fisherthat he and his men are similarly slumbering in a cave in Craig Gwrtheyrn, in Carmarthenshire. That is a spot in the neighbourhood of ILandyssil, consisting of an elevated field terminating on one side in a sharp declivity, with the foot of the rock laved by the stream of the Teifi. Craig Gwrtheyrn means Vortigern's Rock, and it is one of the sites with which legend associates the name of that disreputable old king. I am not aware that it shows any traces of ancient works, but it looks at a distance an ideal site for an old fortification. An earlier prophecy about Owen Lawgoch than any of these occurs, as kindly pointed out to me by Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans, in the Peniarth MS. 94 (= Hengwrt MS. 412, p. 23), and points back possibly to the last quarter of the fourteenth century. See also one quoted by him, from the Mostyn MS. 133, in his Report on MSS. in the Welsh Language, i. 106. Probably many more such prophecies might be discovered if anybody undertook to make a systematic search for them. But who was Owen Lawgoch, if there ever was such a man? Such a man there was undoubtedly; for we read in one of the documents printed in the miscel laneous volume commonly known as the Record of Carnarvon, that at a court held at Conway in the fortyfourth year of Edward III a certain Gruffyd Says was adjudged to forfeit all the lands which he held in Anglesey to the Prince of Wales-who was at that time no other than Edward the Black Prince-for the reason that the said Gruffyd had been an adherent of Owen: adherens fuisset Owino Lawegogh (or Lawgogh) inimico et proditori predicti domini Principis et de consilio predicti Owyni ad mouendam guerram in Wallia contra predictum dominum Principem1. How long previously it had been attempted to begin a war on behalf of this Owen Lawgoch one cannot say, but it so happens that at this time there was a captain called Yeuwains, Yewains, or Yvain de Gales or Galles, 'Owen of Wales,' fighting on the French side against the English in Edward's Continental wars. Froissart in his Chronicles has a great deal to say of him, for he distinguished himself greatly on various critical occasions. From the historian's narrative one finds that Owen had escaped when a boy to the court of Philip VI of France, who received him with great favour and had him educated with his own nephews. Froissart's account of him is, that the king of England, Edward III, had slain his father and given his lordship and principality to his own son as Prince of Wales; and Froissart gives Owen's father's name as Aymon, which should mean Edmond, unless the name intended may have been rather Einion. However that may have been, Owen was engaged in the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, and when peace was made he went to serve in Lombardy; but when war between England and France broke out again in 1369, he returned to France. He sometimes fought on sea and sometimes on land, but he was always entrusted by the French king, who was now Charles V, with important commands 2. Thus 1 Record of Carnarvon, p. 133, to which attention was called by me in the Report of the Welsh Land Commission, p. 648: see now The Welsh People, PP. 343-4, 593-4. " Nor was Owen the only Welshman in the king of France's service: there was Owen's chaplain, who on one occasion distinguished himself greatly in battle. He is called in Froissart's text David House, but the editor has found from other documents that the name was Honvel in 1372 he was placed at the head of a flotilla with 3,000 men, and ordered to operate against the English: he made a descent on the Isle of Guernsey 1, and while there besieging the castle of Cornet, he was charged by the king of France to sail to Spain to invite the king of Castile to send his fleet again to help in the attack on La Rochelle. Whilst staying at Santander the earl of Pembroke was brought thither, having been taken prisoner in the course of the destruction of the English fleet before La Rochelle. Owen, on seeing the earl of Pembroke, asks him with bitterness if he is come there to do him homage for his land, of which he had taken possession in Wales. He threatens to avenge himself on him as soon as he can, and also on the earl of Hereford and Edward Spencer, for it was by the fathers of these three men, he said, his own father had been betrayed to death. Edward III died in 1377, and the Black Prince had died shortly before. Owen survived them both, and was actively engaged in the siege of Mortagne sur Mer in Poitou, when he was assassinated by one Lamb, who had insinuated himself into his service and confidence, partly by pretending to bring Flinc, which is doubtless Howel, whatever the second vocable may have been see Froissart, viii, pp. xxxviii, 69. As to the original destination of the flotilla, see Kervyn de Lettenhove's edition of Froissart (Brussels, 1870–7), viii. 435-7, where the editor has brought together several notes, from which it appears that Owen tried unsuccessfully to recruit an army in Spain, but that he readily got together in France a considerable force. For Charles V, on May 8, 1372, ordered the formation of an army, to be placed under Owen's command for the reconquest of his ancestors' lands in Wales, and two days later Owen issued a declaration as to his Welsh claims and his obligations to the French king; but the flotilla stopped short with Guernsey. It is not improbable, however, that the fear in England of a descent on Wales by Owen began at least as early as 1369. In his declaration Owen calls himself Evain de Gales, which approaches the Welsh spelling Ewein, more frequently Ywein, modern Ywain, except that all these forms tended to be supplanted by Owain or Owen. This last is, strictly speaking, the colloquial form, just as Howel is the colloquial form of Hywel, and bowyd of bywyd, 'life.' |