Owen Glendower

Owen Glyn DWR has been neglected to a remarkable extent by English historians. The reason is perhaps not far to seek. He belonged to the great army of unsuccessful men; and history has never been kind to failures. He survived in the memory of Englishmen as a character in a Shakesperian play. In so far as he entered at all into serious history, they were content to put him down as an irascible but unpractical Celt, a picturesque bandit, the main object of whose existence was to kill Saxons.His fate at the hands of his countrymen was little better. Paradoxically enough the battle of Bosworth, which enabled a Welsh king to ride into London at the head of a largely Welsh army, did Wales little but harm. The gentry came to court and became Anglicised : the Reformation which destroyed the monasteries-the cultural centres of the country-completed the process. The patriots were usually papists, and either fled abroad or perished on the gallows. The Act of 1535 avowedly aimed at the extirpation of the Welsh language : and the unpleasant figure of the anglicised Welshman began to appear. In 1567 Dr. Griffith Roberts, the Chaplain of St. Charles Borromeo, and a prominent exile, satirized the type in the preface to his Grammar : 'their Welsh is Englishfied, and their English, God knows, is too Welshy.' Morus Kyffin, a fervent defender of the Reformation, wrote in 1595 of a 'clerical person' who 'said that it was not right to allow any Welsh books to be printed

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