at the entrance of a deep glen, near Aber in Carnarvonshire; " and the tradition of the country is, that a bard of the palace accidentally meeting with the princess, who was ignorant of the fate of her paramour, thus impudently accosted her; Diccyn, Doccyn, wraig Llewelyn! Beth a roed' am gweled Gwilym?' Hark'e, Dame! say what wilt thou To which the Englishwoman is supposed to have been such a fool, as, to have answered flippantly, and in tolerable Welsh rhyme,— Cymru, Lloegr, a Llewelyn, A rhown y gyd an gweled Ġwilyra.' Upon receiving this answer, the bard, it is added, showed her the body of her favourite suspended on the branch of a tree." "Such is the story," says Mr. Jones, "as related by many historians, and confirmed in some degree by tradition; but, notwithstanding this, there are many reasons which render it liable to suspicion, and make its veracity extremely doubtful." These reasons are detailed as follows; and we think them fully sufficient to establish the fact that De Breos's death was not occasioned by any adulterous connexion with the wife of Llewelyn. "In the first place, Matthew Paris, who is one of the earliest authors that assigns the jealousy of Llewelyn as the cause of De Breos's death, gives it as a report only-ut dicebatur' are his words; and he afterwards informs us, that among the charges against Hubert de Burgh were, stealing a precious stone from the King of England's treasury, which had the virtue of rendering the wearer of it invulnerable in battle; sending it to Llewelyn the king's enemy; and treacherously writing letters to the same Llewelyn, by which means the Prince of Wales was induced to hang • William de Breos as a common thief." In the second place she was, to use a common phrase, old enough to be De Breos's mother- she was married to Llewelyn in 1201, or the beginning of 1202: supposing her therefore to be only twenty years of age at that period, she must have been nearly fifty when William's captivity commenced, It must also be observed, that though the heroes of those days were not very delicate in their amours, it is extremely improbable that De Breos should have intrigued with the wife of his father's father-in-law; and that David ap Llewelyn, the son of the adultress, should have afterwards married Isabel the daughter of his mother's seducer. It seems also extraordinary that a woman, accused tauntingly of a crime of this nature, should ayow it, and avow it without hesitation, to one, who from the familiarity of his address evidently meant to insult her; and that in a language, too, in which it cannot be supposed she was an adept, unless her facility of acquiring a knowledge of it far exceeded that of her countrywomen of the present day. Lastly, we are told that her husband Llewelyn, in honour of her memory, soon after her death, in the year 1236, erected the Franciscan monastery of Llanfaes, in Anglesea, to enshrine her tomb; so that, upon the whole, it may fairly be concluded, that if any thing was said about this familiarity between William de Breos and the Welsh princess, it was only meant to furnish a pretence for his death, which the tortuous policy of the times suggested, and to which it is by no means improbable that Herbert de Burgh, from a personal quarrel, or to get rid of a troublesome neighbour, by falsehood or artifice, contributed.” P. 131. In the sixth and seventh chapters, the history of the lordship of Breconshire is traced through the families of Bohun, Stafford, &c. till the reign of James the Second, which, by some strange oversight in the leading paragraph to the seventh chapter, would, in the estimation of our author, appear to be regarded as the 'present time.' These divisions of the work contain much interesting and valuable matter; yet by far the greater part is misplaced, as it more peculiarly belongs to the pages of the general historian than to the delineation of a particular district. This fault indeed does not exclusively attach itself to Mr. Jones; it runs through most of our county histories, the writers of which seem to forget that every well-furnished library (and in scarcely any other will these kind of publications be found) must necessarily contain all that extended information on national concerns, which they descant on so diffusedly, that the repetition palls upon the ear, and sickens the understanding. Let us, however, not be misunderstood: there are cases, such as the perversion of historical fact in general history, in which it becomes the duty of the provincial writer to employ all the advantages obtained from local situation and local inquiry, in order to elucidate the truth. Our meaning will be illustrated by reference to the contradiction given above to the presumed adultery of Llewelyn's wife, and still further exemplified in the account of the death of Llewelyn ap Griffith, which we shall presently insert; but passages such as these (and we could quote many similar), drawn from Dugdale's Baronage, cannot surely be considered as having any possible connexion with the history of Breconshire. Our first lord, of the name of Stafford, was created Duke of Buckingham by King Henry the Sixth, in the twenty-third of his reign, when a whimsical dispute arose about precedence between him and Henry Beauchamp, created at the same time Duke of Warwick, which was as whimsically determined by an act of Parliament, ordaining that they should take precedence, one one year, and the other the next year, and that their posterity should have precedence according as who should first have livery of their lands. Luckily, the Duke of Warwick died without issue; whereupon Humphrey, to prevent the agitation of so important a question in future, obtained a grant upon the 22d of May, in the twenty-fifth of Henry the Sixth, unto himself and his heirs, for precedence above all dukes whatsoever, whether in England or France, excepting only such as were of the blood royal." P. 170. Mr. Jones remarks, in a note, though somewhat inelegantly we think, that "the business might have been settled with infinitely less trouble by the toss of a halfpenny," than by act of Parliament. The death of Llewelyn ap Griffith, "the last and greate est of the Welsh princes," who for a time most gallantly withstood all the efforts of Edward the First to annex the principality of Wales to the English crown, has been “described in so confused and unintelligible a manner by different authors, that those who know the country are more at a loss to comprehend the circumstances attending it than even strangers." From a review, therefore, of all the previous accounts, and a survey of the supposed scene of action, corroborated by the voice of tradition, Mr. Jones states the particulars of the fatal end of Llewelyn in the following words : "Led by the promises and flattered with the hopes of assistance held out to him by some men of power in the hundred of Builth and its neighbourhood, he [Llewelyn] ventured to march with his little army to Aberedwy in Radnorshire, three miles below Builth, on the banks of the river Wye, where it is said he expected to have held a conference with some of his friends: here, however, he found himself fatally disappointed; for instead of allies and partisans, whom be was encouraged to look for, he was almost surrounded in the toils and trammels of his adversary. A superior force from Herefordshire having had notice of his route from some of the inhabitants of this country, approached under the command of Edmund Mortimer and John Giffard. Llewelyn, finding from their numbers that resistance would be vain, fled with his men to Builth; and in order to deceive the enemy, as there was then snow upon the ground, he is said to have caused his horses' shoes to be reversed: but even this stratagem was discovered to them by a smith at Aberedwy, whose ame, as tradition says, was Madoc goch min mawr, orRedhaired wide-mouthed Madoc.' He arrived, however, at the bridge over the Wye, time enough to pass and break it down, before his pursuers could come up with him: here therefore they were completely thrown out, as there was no other bridge over the Wye, at that time, nearer than Bredwardine, thirty miles below. "Thus foiled and disappointed of their prize for the present, the English immediately returned downwards, to a ford known to some of the party, about eight miles below, now a ferry called Caban Twm Bach, or Little Tom's Ferry-boat. In the interim, it would seem that Llewelyn must have gained sufficient time to have distanced his followers, if he had made use of it; but he had not yet abandoned the expectation of meeting with assistance, and some hours may have been employed with the garrison of the castle of Builth, who, awed by the approach of Mortimer, refused to treat with or support him. "Stowe says, he was taken at Builth Castle, where, using reproachful words against the Englishmen, Sir Roger le Strange ran upon him and cut off his head, leaving his dead body on 'the ground.' It is by no means improbable that he should have accused the garrison of Builth and the inhabitants of that country of perfidy; and, as Stowe says, used reproachful words towards the English: he may also have bestowed upon the men of Aberedwy as well as of Builth that epithet which has stuck by them ever since*, but he certainly was not slain at Builth Castle, or by Sir Roger le Strange; for being here repulsed by those from whom he had expected support, and baffled in his attempts to reduce them to obedience, he proceeded westward up the Vale of Irvon on the. southern side, for about three miles, where he crossed the river a little above Llanynis church, over a bridge called Pont y Coed, or the Bridge of the Wood, &c.-This passage once secured, he stationed the few troops who accompanied him on the northern side of the river, where from the ground being much higher and more precipitous than the opposite bank, and at the same time covered with wood, a handful of men were able to defend the bridge against a more numerous enemy. In this situation he preserved a communication with the whole of Brecknockshire; and as he supposed that the river was at this season of the year [the depth of winter] wholly impassable, he waited with confidence and security while he commanded the pass, in hopes to hear further from his correspondents, or in expectation of being reinforced from the westward. By this means the English forces gained sufficient time to come up with him, and appearing on the southern side of the Irvon, made a fruitless attempt to gain the bridge; and here they probably would have been compelled to abandon the pursuit, or at least Llewelyn might have escaped in safety to the mountains of Snowden, if a knight of the name of Sir Elias Walwyn, a descendent of Sir Philip Walwyn of Hay, had not discovered a ford at some little distance, whence a detachment of the English crossed the river, and coming unexpectedly on the backs of the Welsh at the bridge, they were immediately routed, and either in the pursuit, * ( Bradwyr Aberedwy! Bradwyr Buallt!-Traitors of Abe redwy! Traitors of Builth!" or while he was watching the motions of the main body of the enemy, who were still on the other side of the river, he was attacked in a small dell about two hundred yards below the scene of action, from him called Cwm Llewelyn, or Llewelyn's dingle, and slain unarmed (as some say) by one Adam de Francton, who plunged a spear into his body, and immediately joined his countrymen to pursue the flying enemy.-When Francton returned after the engagement in hopes of plunder, he perceived that the person he had wounded, and who was still alive, was the Prince of Wales; and, on stripping him, a letter in cypher and his privy seal were found concealed about him. The Englishman, delighted with the discovery, immediately cut off his head, and sent it as the most acceptable present that could be conveyed to the King of England. The body of the unfortunate prince was dragged by the soldiers to a little distance, where the two roads from Builth now divide, one leading to Llanafan, and the other to Llangammarch: here they buried him, and this spot has ever since been known by the name of Cefn y Bedd, or Cefn Bedd Llewelyn; that is, the ridge of Llewelyn's grave." P. 139. Thus fell the brave Llewelyn. His body, notwithstanding the intercession of Maud, or Matilda Longespee, to procure for it the rites of Christian sepulture, was suffered to rot in the unhallowed ground where it had first been deposited; and with still greater unfeelingness, as we learn from Matthew of Westminster, and other writers (for Mr. Jones drops the subject with a short panegyric on the virtues of Llewelyn), the head of the ill-fated prince was, by the king's orders, conveyed to London; where being met by the citizens in cavalcade, it was placed on the point of a lance; and the crown having been encircled with a silver chaplet, in derision of a pretended prophecy, it was paraded through the city in triumph, with the sound of trumpets and horns, and scornfully set upon the pillory in Cheapside. Here it continued some hours exposed to mockery and brutal insult; and it was at last carried to the Tower, and fixed upon the walls, crowned with a diadem of ivy. In the following year, anno 1283, the head of David ap Griffith, Llewelyn's brother, who was ignominiously hanged and quartered as a traitor, for bravely defending the independence of his country, was also brought to the Tower, and fixed up near that of his ill-fated relative. From the particulars already given, the reader will readily appreciate the merit of the historical part of this volume, which now begins, much too decidedly, to identify itself with the general history of the nation. The eighth chapter treats of the religion of this district, |