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Wales, Welshmen, and the Hundred Years War 217 Wales, Welshmen, and the Hundred Years War 217 WALES, WELSHMEN, AND THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR Adam Chapman The conflict between England and France now known as the Hundred Years War touched every part of the English realm and its peoples. At the time Edward III (r.1327-1377) first claimed the throne of France in 1340, the lands of Wales had been wholly subject to English rule for just over a half- century and its men regular members of English armies for far longer. It is unsurprising therefore that Welshmen were frequently called upon to serve the kings of England in their wars overseas. This has resulted in a popular modern view, of Welsh archers being responsible for winning English vic- tories in some of the set-piece battles of the Hundred Years War, notably Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415). This view probably derives, in large part, from Shakespeare’s Henry V, and the writings of Gerald of Wales, and probably bears only a distant relation to the activities of the majority of Welsh soldiers in this period. That said, the lives and careers of several Welsh soldiers from this period have received some of the attention they deserve.1 The intention of this paper is to address not only the involvement and impact of Welsh soldiers on England’s wars, but the effects of these wars on Welsh society in the same period. In addition, it will also address how the governance of Wales and its geography was reflected in the military measures taken within Wales in relation to both the defense of the English realm and the conduct of English campaigns overseas.2 Wales as we know it today is largely a product of the Act of Union with England of 1536. Prior to that date, it was divided into royal shires that formed the principality, and marcher lordships. The shires of North Wales—Caernarfon, Meirionnydd, and Anglesey—fell to the crown fol- 1 H.T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses (Oxford, 1915); D.L. Evans, “Some Notes on the Principality of Wales in the time of the Black Prince,” Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1926): 25-100; A.D. Carr, “Welshmen in the Hundred Years War,” Welsh History Review 1 (1968): 35-41, idem, “A Welsh Knight in the Hundred Years War: Sir Gregory Sais,” Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 22 (1977): 40-53. 2 The definition of Welshmen, for the purposes of this paper, will be confined to those men living within the modern borders of Wales without making judgements on their “Welshness.” 218 Adam Chapman lowing the defeat of the last prince of Gwynedd, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, in 1282, while the acquisition of the shires of South Wales—Carmarthen and Cardigan—was piecemeal, haphazard and spread over two centuries. The acquisition of the marcher lordships by foreign lords was also a very lengthy process that began in the eleventh century and was only completed in the thirteenth with the dispersal of the lands between Conwy and Cheshire to some of the most important captains of Edward I (r.1272-1307) in his Welsh wars.3 The division between the principality and the March was significant in legal, political as well as in military terms. To speak of medieval Wales as a corporate entity rather than as a place where Welshmen lived is an anachronism. This paper will, therefore borrow a contemporary formula- tion to discuss these political divisions; namely, the “Shires and the March” (siroedd a’r mars).4 It would be wrong to say that Welshmen dominated the military affairs of the war in France at any point between 1337 and 1453. Chroniclers of the period, following a long established tradition, when they mentioned the Welsh at all, tended to do so in order to add color to their narrative, por- traying their seemingly crude manners, wild behavior, and incomprehen- sible language.5 Part of Froissart’s account of the battle of Crécy includes a rather graphic, and appropriate, example. The brutality of the Welsh— and Cornish—men (both subjects of Edward, the Black Prince) contrasts starkly with ideals of chivalric behavior. However, among the English there were pillagers and irregulars, Welsh and Cornishmen armed with long knives, who went out after the French (their own men-at-arms and archers making way for them) and, when they found any in difficulty, whether they were counts, barons, knights or squires, they killed them without mercy.6 The Welsh, not unnaturally, held a rather different view. England’s wars in France were a constant refrain in the poetry dedicated to the leaders of the Welsh gentry and, occasionally their English lords, in the fourteenth and, 3 R.R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1066-1415 (Oxford, 1991), 363-64. 4 From Lewis Glyn Cothi: elegy for Tomas ap Rhydderch cited by Dr Dylan Foster Evans, “Poetry and Marcher Identity, 1300-1550,” [paper presented at Swansea, May 29, 2009]. 5 The most thorough survey of these external views is R.R. Davies, “Buchedd a Moes y Cymry.” [The Manners and Morals of the Welsh] Welsh History Review 12 (1984): 155-79 (in Welsh with an English précis). My thanks to Rachel Evans for assisting me in understanding the Welsh version. 6 Oeuvres de Froissart, publiées avec les variantes des divers, ed. K. de Lettenhove, 25 vols. (Brussells, 1867-1877), 5: 65-66. Translation from Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. G. Brereton (London, 1978), 93..
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