In each of the three kingdoms of Gwynedd, Powys, and Deheubarth, the death of its powerful ruler was followed by a contested succession. In Powys and Deheubarth the unity of the kingdom was never restored; but with the emergence to power in the late 12th century of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (died 1240), a grandson of Owain Gwynedd, Gwynedd was united once more under the strong hand of a single ruler. Llywelyn’s aggression against neighbouring territories incurred resistance, which King John turned to his advantage in a campaign in 1211 whereby the prince of Gwynedd was subjected to humiliating terms. But availing himself of a general Welsh reaction to John’s measures for the permanent subjugation of the country, Llywelyn directed a sustained campaign in which his former adversaries participated. Llywelyn achieved a dominant position among the princes, which, while the contest with John persisted, augured the forging of a Welsh polity by bonds of homage and fealty to himself. But, though he remained a powerful influence over the other Welsh princes and thereby minimized the crown’s involvement in the affairs of Wales, Llywelyn was unable to secure a formal royal recognition of the territorial and conceptual achievements of the period of conflict. Llywelyn’s aspirations for a wider Welsh principality based upon the supremacy of Gwynedd then centred upon David ap Llywelyn, his son by Joan, daughter of King John. David was designated as Llywelyn’s heir in preference to his elder but illegitimate son, Gruffudd, and the Welsh dynasty looked to the English monarchy to ensure an unchallenged succession. In the event, the crown was able to use the dissension between the two sons and the disparate ambitions of the other Welsh princes to restrict David’s power to Gwynedd alone. During the war of 1244–46 David contended for a broader influence, but his promising endeavour was cut short by his early death in 1246, without heir.

In the following year his nephews Owain and Llywelyn, two of the four sons of Gruffudd, entered into a treaty obligation by which the crown decreed the partition of a truncated Gwynedd into two parts, with the prospect of further division to provide for the younger brothers. But between 1255 and 1258 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (died 1282), one of the four brothers, asserted his supremacy first in Gwynedd and then farther afield. In this he was helped by the preoccupation of the English crown with the baronial conflict that led to the Provisions of Oxford in 1258. The prince secured a hegemony that was formally acknowledged by Henry III in 1267 by the Treaty of Montgomery, in which Llywelyn’s style, “prince of Wales,” first assumed in 1258, and his right to the homage and fealty of the Welsh lords of Wales were recognized. Llywelyn had thereby brought into being a Principality of Wales composed of the lands that had formed the 12th-century kingdoms of Gwynedd, Powys, and Deheubarth as well as parts of the March. Historically, this meant the reversal of a situation, for which there were several centuries of precedent, whereby the increasingly fragmented territories under Welsh rule had been fiefs held directly from the king of England. The opportunity to consolidate the governance of the principality proved to be brief. Friction between Llywelyn and Edward I led in 1277 to a war in which the prince, isolated by the withdrawal of his vassals’ fealty and confronted with the great resources and superior organization of England, was forced to accept terms that restricted his power to Gwynedd west of the Conwy. By 1282 a deterioration in relations between Edward and a number of Welsh princes resulted in renewed conflict. Although Llywelyn may not have been the instigator of the rebellion, he placed himself at its head. In his negotiations with Archbishop Pecham late in 1282 he forcefully expressed the aspirations that had inspired his great endeavour to secure the internal unity of Wales and to stabilize its relationship with England. Shortly afterward, on December 11, Llywelyn was slain in combat, and the resistance, though sustained by his brother David ap Gruffydd (died 1283) for several months, finally collapsed in the summer of 1283.

The Edwardian settlement

Edward I provided for the security of his conquests by means of a program of castle building, initiated after the war of 1277 and subsequently extended to include the great structures of Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech, and, later, Beaumaris. Each castle sheltered a borough where English colonists were settled. The king’s arrangements for the governance of Llywelyn’s former lands in northwestern Wales were embodied in the Statute of Wales (1284). Three counties (shires)—Anglesey, Caernarvonshire, and Merioneth—were created and placed under the custody of a justice of North Wales. In northeastern Wales a fourth county, Flintshire, was attached to the earldom of Chester. In southwestern Wales the counties of Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire, under the custody of the justice of West Wales, were formed out of lands over which royal power had been gradually extended by a process completed upon the failure, in 1287, of the revolt of Rhys ap Maredudd, the last of the princes of the dynasty of Deheubarth. Structurally, the shires that formed the Principality of Wales were similar to those of England, and certain common-law procedures were introduced into their courts, but the shires remained outside the jurisdiction of the central courts of Westminster and they did not elect representatives to Parliament. The March of Wales was extended through the creation by royal charters, out of parts of Gwynedd and Powys, of the lordships of Denbigh, Ruthin, Bromfield and Yale, and Chirk. In his relations with two of the major barons of the older March, Gilbert de Clare of Glamorgan and Humphrey de Bohun of Brecon, Edward showed a determination to assert the sovereignty of the crown over the March and to eradicate abuses of the Custom of the March such as the claim, defiantly expressed by Gilbert, to the right to wage war in the March. But neither Edward nor his successors attempted any far-reaching changes in the organization of the March, and political fractionization persisted over the next two centuries.

Rebellion and annexation

Both the crown and the marcher lords employed in the administration of their lands Welshmen drawn from an administrative class that had been fostered by the princes themselves. Those of the principality revealed a particular loyalty to Edward II in the political crises of his reign, and their continued attachment to his cause even after his deposition created a tense situation in 1327. During the 14th century there were occasional variances, but the identity of interest established between the crown and the leading Welshmen proved durable. Even so, the community endured both the economic difficulties encountered over wide areas of Europe at this time and the specifically Welsh problems created by the fact that an important phase in the transition from early medieval social arrangements coincided with the pressures exerted by an alien and fiscally extractive administration. At the very end of the century the deposition of Richard II, who had influential Welshmen among his partisans, released from allegiance to the monarchy a group that, associated with Owain Glyn Dŵr), raised a great rebellion which drew its strength from the community as a whole. In the period 1400–07 the royal government lost control of the greater part of Wales, and in some areas the insurrection remained unextinguished several years later.

The rebellion, however, quickened certain processes that were to lead ultimately to the enfranchisement provided by Tudor legislation. In northern Wales particularly, the availability of civil actions by English law led to an early but unrequited demand for English land law. After the rebellion the disabilities incurred by reason of Welsh nationality were underlined. Although often expressed in literature in militant terms and, during the years of dynastic conflict, manipulated by the protagonists of York and Lancaster, the aspirations of the community were focused in a demand for English denizenship. First individual petitioners looked for enfranchisement, and then whole communities in northern Wales secured from Henry VII, by negotiation and payment, charters conferring upon them English land law and other advantages. A realization by the crown of its inability to reverse a decline in the financial yield of its Welsh lands, an experience shared by the marcher lords, contributed to Henry VII’s policy.