Llywelyn ap Gruffudd
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was the only native ruler whom the English crown recognised as Prince of Wales, held that title by treaty for fifteen years, and was killed by an English lance in a valley near Builth in December 1282; the title has been given to the king's son ever since. He was a grandson of Llywelyn the Great through the son who had been passed over, and after his uncle Dafydd died in 1246 he shared Gwynedd with his brothers until he beat two of them at Bryn Derwin in 1255 and imprisoned one for twenty years. He took the lands east of the Conwy back from Henry III, took the homage of the other Welsh princes, and called himself Prince of Wales from 1258. When the barons' war weakened Henry he allied with Simon de Montfort, and after Montfort's death the king, needing peace, conceded at Montgomery in September 1267 what no English king had before: that Llywelyn was Prince of Wales and the Welsh lords held of him. He was to pay for it, and did not; he was to do homage to Henry's successor, and when Edward I asked five times he refused, because Edward sheltered his brother Dafydd and the men who had plotted to kill him. Edward came in 1277 with three armies and the fleet at Anglesey, cut off the harvest, and the treaty of Aberconwy left Llywelyn the title and the land west of the Conwy and nothing else. He married Eleanor, Montfort's daughter, at Worcester in 1278 with Edward paying for the feast. In March 1282 Dafydd, now on the other side again, attacked Hawarden on Palm Sunday and began the war Llywelyn had not chosen; Eleanor died in June giving birth to a daughter. He went south in December to raise the middle March and was killed on the 11th at Cilmeri, separated from his men, by a soldier who did not know who he was until later. His head went to London on a pike. Dafydd was hanged, drawn and quartered at Shrewsbury the next year, the daughter Gwenllian spent her life in a Lincolnshire convent, and the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 made Wales a set of English shires.
- Lived: 1223 CE – 1282 CE
- Nationality: Welsh
- Roles: prince, monarch
