Inheriting the purple

At the Lincoln parliament of 1301, on 7 February, Edward I granted the royal lands in Wales, along with the earldom of Chester, to his son Edward of Caernarfon. This was reminiscent of the grant made to Edward senior by his father, Henry III, forty-seven years earlier, and did not give the heir to the throne any specific title; Edward junior only began to be termed Prince of Wales from May onwards.

The grant may have been related to the forthcoming Scottish campaign. Edward had not raised any Welsh troops for the Galloway campaign in 1300, which proved a mistake as the English raised from the northern counties deserted in large numbers. In 1301 the king planned a two-pronged attack on the Scots; he would lead one army from Berwick, while Prince Edward led another from Carlisle. The idea was to catch the Guardians in a pincer movement and force them to battle.

In what looks like an act of political symbolism, the newly-minted Prince of Wales was given an army of Welshmen. William de Caumvill, Warin Martyn and Morgan ap Maredudd were empowered to raise the men of South and West Wales and ‘bring them to Carlisle by Friday before Midsummer’. The two sons of Hywel ap Meurig, Philip and Rhys, were appointed to pay the infantry conducted to Carlisle. Meanwhile Gruffudd Llwyd, Iwan ap Hywel and several others were appointed to raise the men of North Wales, specifically those of the Four Cantreds and Hopedale.

Carlisle Castle

Among the prince’s army were the sons of loyalist or defeated Welsh princes. Gwilym de la Pole and his brother Gruffudd, two of the sons of Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, served in the retinue of John de Havering, Justiciar of North Wales. The four sons of Madog ap Llywelyn, self-proclaimed Prince of Wales, were transferred from prison to Prince Edward’s bodyguard. As symbolism went, this was fairly blunt: the Plantagenet was master of Wales now, and his son had ‘inherited the purple’, as it were.

Getting the men up to Carlisle wasn’t an easy process. Warin Martyn, leader of the men of West Wales, later sought and received a pardon for the robberies and murders his men committed while they marched through England. The Welsh weren’t always perpetrators: on 26 July 1302 a commission was set up to investigate the killing of Welsh soldiers, attacked at Wigan in Lancashire on their way back from the Scottish war.