Slave girls

Today is the (probable) anniversary of the death of Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in December 1282. Rather than go through the murky deed all over again, it might be worth rewinding a couple of generations.

In 1222 Llywelyn ab Iorwerth - Llywelyn the Great - asked Pope Honorius III to abolish the custom in Wales that illegitimate children could inherit just as if they were legitimate. Further, the prince asked that the pope would confirm Llywelyn’s statute that his son Dafydd, ‘by his legitimate wife Joan, daughter of the late king of England’, would succeed him in all his possessions.

Llywelyn’s original petition is lost, but several responses from the pope survive. The archives at Vatican City contain the pope’s final judgement:

“To the nobleman Lord Llywelyn of North Wales. Bringing about from us the attached petition. Certainly your petition showed that since some detestable custom or rather corruption has developed in the land subject to your authority - as evidently the son of the slave girl could be the heir together with the son of the free woman and illegitimate sons could obtain the inheritance just as the legitimate - you [Llywelyn] and your Lord Henry, illustrious king of the English, beloved sons of Christ, have agreed in harmony and also further with the intervening authority of our beloved sons, our venerable brother Archbishop Stephen of Canterbury…that Dafydd your son, who from Joan the daughter of Clementia and the king of England, your legal wife, should succeed in receiving your inheritance by right in all your possessions.”

Llywelyn’s elder son, Gruffudd, was thus condemned as ‘the son of the slave girl’ and barred from inheritance. Far from being a slave, his mother was in fact the daughter of King Reginald of Man. This was all swept aside by Llywelyn the Great, in his desire to get rid of his first wife and marry into the Plantagenets: one might draw comparisons with the behaviour of his eighth great-grandson, Henry VIII.

Gruffudd’s son was the aforesaid Prince Llywelyn, killed near Builth in 1282 by his kinsmen, the Mortimers. The decision of his grandfather Llywelyn the Great to change the inheritance laws in Wales meant that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was the son of a legally declared bastard and the grandson of a woman condemned as a slave by the Holy See. The Mortimers, on the other hand, were legitimate heirs via the female line of Llywelyn the Great’s son, Dafydd, who died without issue in 1246.

Whether or not the rules of succession influenced the rules of engagement near Builth in December 1282 is speculation, but it’s something else to throw in the mix.