Legal fictions

Serving two masters (6, and last)

The death of the brothers Rhys and Hywel ap Gruffudd in the war of 1282, fighting on opposite sides, left their heirs vulnerable to rival claimants. In about 1307 Rhys’s son, Gruffudd Llwyd, moved to secure his inheritance from Thomas Bek, the predatory Bishop of St David’s. Gruffydd wrote to the council in London and reminded them that:

“His uncle, Hywel ap Gruffudd, knight…died in the service of the king, the father of our king, at the bridge of Anglesey, in the company of Sir Otto Grandison in the war of Llywelyn and Dafydd.”

This was true enough, but Gruffudd went further and claimed that: “After the conquest, the said Rhys ap Gruffydd, his brother and father of this Gruffudd [meaning himself], was assigned by the king as guardian of the county of Caernarfon and sworn to his council and in this state he died, as the earl of Lincoln, the said Sir Otto and other great lords of the king’s council can testify.”

Thus Gruffudd claimed that his father was not killed with Prince Llywelyn at Cilmeri, as the Peterborough chronicler claimed, but survived and was taken back into royal service. Gruffudd’s statement is flatly contradicted by the records. On 20 April 1284 the king allowed Margaret, the wife of Rhys ap Gruffudd, her lordship of Tregarnedd in Anglesey for life. Edward was not happy about the grant, which he regarded as neither “stable or firm”, but it was made over anyway. A few days later, on 4 May, the earl of Lincoln was ordered to deliver Rhys’s lands in the cantref of Rhos over to his son, Gruffudd.

If Rhys was still alive, than neither of the above grants make any sense. He was dead by 20 May 1284 at the latest and almost certainly died at Cilmeri in December 1282. Gruffudd’s claim that his father was made ‘guardian of the county of Caernarfon’ is also bogus, for the shire was not even formed until 3 March 1284, fourteen months after the last possible date his father may have been alive. The only other possibility is that Edward I made Rhys guardian for Caernarfonshire and then forgot to tell anyone, which doesn’t seem likely. 

Therefore Gruffudd Llwyd - later Sir Gruffudd Llwyd - tried to persuade Edward II that his father, Rhys, was loyal to Edward I until the end. This legal subterfuge was probably employed to protect Gruffudd’s standing in the edgy conditions of postconquest Wales. With regard to the actual petition, Gruffudd sold his advowson to the church of Llanrhystyd to the Bishop of St David’s in 1309, but held onto the rest of his lands. These were inherited by his son, Ieuan, Justice of South Wales, on 28 August 1335.