WITH the accession of Llywelyn the Great in 1202 A.D. the power of the Welsh princes, thanks to the military and statesmanlike prowess of Llywelyn, attained to its highest point, and one of the first steps that Llywelyn took was to bring this part of Merioneth under his direct sway, pushing his power up the valley as far as Bala. Though, however, Merioneth figures occasionally in the life of Llywelyn, whose rule in course of time extended over most of Wales, Dolgelley and Llanelltyd do not stand out prominently, save for what was done by the great prince for Cymmer Abbey. No doubt the land was governed well and peaceably during the 38 years of his rule. He died in 1240 A.D., and was succeeded by his son Dafydd, who was not able to hold what his father had gained, and in the following year Henry III, without any apparent rhyme or reason, determined to invade Wales. He advanced as far as the Mawddach valley, and when in the neighbourhood of Llanelltyd a small body of his enemy eluded him.
To find out their whereabouts he seized upon a monk of Cymmer, and tried to extract information from him. The monk was loyal to his own people and valiantly refused to impart any, whereupon, in a fit of rage, the King descended on the abbey, threatening to burn it to the ground in revenge. Most of the buildings were given over to the flames, and all that the King left standing were the Church and a few monastic buildings, to save which from destruction the Abbot was forced to pay the enormous sum of 300 marks in the currency of the day, some thing like £12000/- in modern money, which was got together by those who knew and valued the work of the Abbey.
The war that Henry started dragged on for a While until the King was forced to retreat and Dafydd appealed to the Pope, who summoned the King, to appear before the Abbots of Cymmer and of Aberconway to explain his conduct in commencing the unjustifiable war. Henry, needless to say, paid no attention to the summons; but the incident is of value because it shows the high position to which the two foundations of the great Llywelyn had reached.
Dafydd was succeeded in 1246 by his nephew, the last Llywelyn, and, at the beginning of his rule, Dolgelley and Llanelltyd, with the rest of Merioneth, had passed under the sway of the invading Henry, and the King's triumph was marked by a military progress through the land, led by Nicholas de Meules; but, as time went on, Llywelyn recaptured the country, and passed thereafter much of his time at Tal-y-bont near Llanegryn.
Neither Dolgelley nor Llanelltyd appear prominently during his rule; and it is only with his death that we get a glimpse of Cymmer Abbey once more. It seems that when Llywelyn journeyed southward in the year 1282 to meet his fate at Builth, he stopped on his way at Cymmer Abbey; and there he left a parcel. the contents of which are not definitely known, but which, very probably, consisted of a few trinkets of his dead wife, and of the crown of Gwynedd, which he was the last to wear of a line which had worn it more or less continuously for something like 800 years.
It is possible also that he left behind him there the Croes Naid, the great holy relic of Wales. The Croes Naid was believed to be a part of the True Cross, brought to Wales centuries before, and which, richly adorned with gold and with jewels, had formed part of the Welsh regalia.
When Llywelyn was killed at Builth, a Norman officer of the King, Roger L'Estrange, came to Cymmer from Montgomery. He committed many atrocities on his way, and robbed the countryside like the freebooter he was. When he came to the Abbey, lie demanded that this little parcel should be given up to him, alleging that he had been sent for it by the King, and, having got it, he departed with his spoil.
He appears to have kept some of it; but story says that the jewels of the Crown and of the Croes Naid were sent to Westminster to adorn the tomb of Edward the Confessor, and that the Croes Naid was deposited in the Tower of London, where it rested until Oliver Cromwell came along, and had it destroyed as a pagan horror.
With Llywelyn's death, the struggle was carried on for two years by his brother Dafydd, who, in his last years, tried to redeem the faults of his early life. The centre of his last hopeless resistance was the immediate neighbourhood of Dolgelley. Sometimes we find him at Castell y Bere in the Dysynni valley, sometimes at Cymmer, holding out with a mere handful of men-one hundred or so-against the thousands of foreign troops drawn from all the lands between the Pyrenees and the Grampians, which were scouring the country for him. It was a desperate stand, but it ended as it was bound to end. Dafydd was taken at last, and done to death, in circumstances of untold barbarity, even for those days, at Shrewsbury. It was for poor Dafydd that the sentence of being hanged, drawn, and quartered was first invented; and it was carried out in all its ferocious details.
With Dafydd's death, resistance came to an end in Merioneth, save for a violent outburst in the days of Madoc's rising, and we enter on a new era, mainly one of intolerable oppression.
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