The troubled politics of the mid-fifteenth century are illuminated by the histories of leading gentry families just as much as they are by those of Neville, Stafford and other great aristocratic families. In one sense, lesser families offer a more subtle perspective in that, while great families were so central to politics that they could hardly avoid active involvement in the struggle between York and Lancaster, the leading gentry had the third option of neutrality. Those families that did commit themselves thus have a particular interest. Some, like the Yorkist Devereuxs or the Lancastrian Treshams, were consistent in their loyalty.  Others, however, transferred allegiance, whether through perceived self-interest, as a reaction (even a principled one) to political events or as a calculated gamble.  The story of the Blounts, one of a small coterie of gentry families that dominated Derbyshire politics, is particularly revealing in this regard. Their two changes of allegiance – in 1454 and 1484 – were examples of anticipating, rather than swimming with, the political tide. 

They were a family to whom commitment came naturally. In the early fifteenth-century they served the house of Lancaster with great distinction. Sir Walter Blount was killed at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 (according to some reports, acting as a decoy Henry IV); his son, Sir John Blount, a soldier notable enough to be promoted to the Order of the Garter, fell at the siege of Rouen in 1418; and Sir John’s brother and successor Sir Thomas, spent his best years in the service of Lancastrian arms in France. Sir Thomas’s eldest son, Walter, looked set to continue this tradition, entering the household of Henry VI in about 1440.

Soon, however, Walter, was to commit himself to the house of York with the same enthusiasm as his predecessors had supported Lancaster. The decisive moment came on 28 May 1454 with the famous sack of his manor of Elvaston.  This was a particularly acute example of the damaging interaction of local rivalries among the leading gentry with the crisis in national affairs. Sir Nicholas Longford of Longford, head of another family long connected with the house of Lancaster, led an armed band of 1,000 men to a raid on Elvaston. There they allegedly quartered tapestries charged with the Blount arms, justifying their action on the grounds that Blount ‘was gone to serve Traytours’.  They clearly believed that Blount had come to identify himself with the duke of York, who, the King mentally incapacitated, had become protector two months earlier.            

Whatever Blount’s prior connexion with the duke, the sack of Elvaston drove him further into the Yorkist camp. In the late 1450s he was serving both York and his ally, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, who, as captain of Calais, appointed him as his marshal there.  The outbreak of civil war in 1459 thus presented him with opportunities. Just as his grandfather, Sir Walter, had actively supported the Lancastrian usurpation of 1399, he fought for its end. He was in the Yorkist ranks in March 1461 at the decisive battle of Towton, where he was knighted.

Blount’s support for York brought him substantial rewards, not least a great marriage. In the aftermath of the earlier Yorkist victory at Northampton in the previous July, he had tried to win the hand of Elizabeth Butler, widow of one of the Lancastrian victims of that battle, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, but she repudiated him on the incontestable grounds that he ‘unequal and inferior to her in nobility and wealth’.  Fortunately for Blount, a widow of yet greater rank did not share her scruples. He soon married another of those widowed at Northampton, namely the King’s maternal aunt, Anne Neville (who was also Warwick’s aunt), dowager-duchess of Buckingham, the wealthiest widow in England.  It is hard to believe that Blount did not owe the match to royal patronage. With this marriage came a greater status: he served in the great office of treasurer and, in June 1465. was elevated to the peerage as Lord Mountjoy.

In the great crisis of Edward’s reign from 1469 to 1471, provoked by the King’s alienation from the earl of Warwick, Blount, after a brief period of equivocation, firmly committed himself to Edward. He fought for him in the victorious campaign of the spring of 1471, during which his son and heir, William, was killed at the battle of Barnet. In April 1472 he followed his uncle, Sir John, in having the honour of installation to the Order of the Garter.

On Blount’s death in 1474, effective headship on the family devolved on his son, James. Although land and title passed to James’s elder brother, John, it was James who was the most politically active, and it was James who took the lead in the next major event in the family’s history. At the beginning of his rule, Richard III confidently placed his trust in the Blounts, giving them a central role in the defence of Calais (with which the family had long been associated), In James’s case this trust proved spectacularly misplaced, for he soon dealt the new King a major blow. Among the captives at Hammes castle, of which James was lieutenant, was the militant Lancastrian, John de Vere, the attainted earl of Oxford, who had been imprisoned there since 1474. The two men must have known each other well, and, at some date shortly before 28 October 1484, Oxford persuaded James not only to release him but to join him in fleeing to join Henry of Richmond at the French court. The probability is that Blount, alienated by the deposition of Edward V, needed little persuasion to revert to the family’s Lancastrian loyalties. He was now wholly committed to Richmond. He landed with him at Milford Haven on 7 August. 1485 and fought at the battle of Bosworth two weeks later. Unsurprisingly, albeit not as mightily as his father had done after the change of regime in 1461, James prospered in the early years of Henry VII’s rule. Sadly, he died childless in 1492 at the height of his career.

Whether Lord Mountjoy shared James’s dramatic change of allegiance cannot be known.  It may be that James, as a younger brother, took the active role because his forfeiture, should Richmond have failed, would not endanger the family’s future. John may also have been restrained by a natural caution.  The striking and well-known provision of his will is suggestive: he advised his sons (the eldest of whom, William, was only seven) , ‘never to take the state of Baron upon them if they may leye it from them nor to desire to be grete about princes for it is daungeros’.  Given that between 1403 and 1471 three of his family, including his eldest brother, had met violent deaths serving ‘princes’, such caution is understandable. Yet this was to be balanced by the positives: the family had been advanced to the peerage by their service to the Yorkists, and, when he drew up his will, his brother’s support for Henry VII promised further promotion.  In any event, the new Lord Mountjoy disregarded his father’s well-meaning advice.  Most famous as a friend and patron of Erasmus, he made a very successful career at the court of the most dangerous of princes, Henry VIII.

S.J.P.

Further reading

H. Castor, ‘Sack of Elvaston’, Midland History, xix. 21-39.

For biographies of Sir Walter Blount (d.1403), Sir Thomas Blount (d.1456) and Walter Blount, Lord Mountjoy: The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 258-60, 262-5; 1422-61, iii.  382-91.  A biography of Sir James Blount will appear in The Commons, 1461-1504.

In defeating the rebellion of the Percys at the battle of Shrewsbury, Henry IV overcame an existential threat to the infant Lancastrian regime. It was a threat that came upon him suddenly and undeservedly. The rebellion had but one cause, the overweening ambition of the Percys, and no justification, or at least no meaningful one. The best the Percys could offer was Henry’s alleged duplicity in the deposition of Richard II in 1399: they claimed that they had supported him because he had sworn to claim only his great Lancastrian patrimony and not the Crown.  Given their readiness to accept the rewards the new King bestowed upon them (and their belief that even these were not enough), this justification must have been widely perceived as hollow as it was. 

It was these rewards that made the rising so dangerous to Henry IV. Not only did they give the Percys a virtual monopoly of the local exercise of royal authority in their northern heartland, the east march towards Scotland, but also in north Wales, where the earl of Northumberland’s son, Henry Hotspur, was made justiciar.  Hotspur, a renowned soldier with a military career extending back to the late 1370s, repaid the King’s trust by fighting against Glyn Dŵr in the early stages of the Welsh rebellion, and, much more significantly, by defeating an invading Scottish force at Homildon Hill on 14 September 1402.  This victory, however, was to drive a wedge between the Percys and the King, or, perhaps to put it more accurately, to give the aggressively acquisitive Percys expectations of reward beyond anything a prudent monarch could give. The Scottish commander, Archibald Douglas, earl of Douglas, was among those captured, and the King exercised his legitimate right to deny the Percys permission to ransom a soldier whose reputation was almost as elevated as Hotspur’s.  This rebuff was added to another unjustified grievance over a ransom. At the battle of Pilleth on the previous 22 June Hotspur’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund Mortimer, had been captured by Glyn Dŵr, and the King refused to assent to his ransom, taking the view, correctly as it transpired, that Mortimer (who subsequently married one of the Welsh rebel’s daughters) was a traitor. 

This was the immediate background of a rising that took the King entirely by surprise.  On 9 July Hotspur raised rebellion in Cheshire, as the King, with a small force, was advancing north from London, ironically with the aim of supporting the Percys against the Scots on the northern border, ‘to the last unaware of the yawning danger that was opening at his very feet’ (as the great Victorian scholar, James Hamilton Wylie, elegantly put it).  He was at Nottingham when, on 12 July, he heard that Hotspur had rebelled. Perhaps acting on the advice of the experienced Scottish soldier, George Dunbar, earl of Dunbar, whose feud with the earl of Douglas had brought him into Henry’s ranks, he determined to risk the hazard of an immediate battle rather than return to London.  Here he had one advantage. The great Lancastrian retinue was particularly strong in the Midlands, and many of its leading gentry rallied to his cause, as they had done in 1399.

The King was also aided by what appears to have been a miscalculation of the rebel side.  No one could dispute Hotspur’s choice of Cheshire as the locus of rebellion, for not only had it been a Ricardian stronghold but its geographical position offered the prospect of joining the Welsh rising with his own.  If, however, the location of the rising was logical, its timing was not.  Hotspur’s plan appears to have been to seize Shrewsbury, the headquarters of the heir to the throne, Henry, prince of Wales, who, despite his youth, had been appointed royal lieutenant in Wales in the previous March, and there to await reinforcements from his father in the north and from the Welsh rebel leader.  This plan, however, was thwarted by the King’s swift and decisive action.  Had Hotspur delayed making plain his intentions until the King had reached the north, he would have had time to seize Shrewsbury and the prince. The King would then have been faced a long march back to intercept Hotspur, who would probably have made for London. The timing of the rebellion was also unfortunate in another sense, although one that was not apparent at its beginning. On 12 July Glyn Dŵr was defeated near Carmarthen by the Pembrokeshire levies, headed by Sir Thomas Carew, constable of Narberth, so diminishing any aid he might have been able to offer Hotspur in a future campaign. Carew, something of an unsung hero of the campaign, was later fittingly rewarded by a grant of Sir Edmund Mortimer’s forfeited estates.

These considerations aside, the rapid approach of the royal army forced Hotspur to abandon his plan of taking Shrewsbury, and draw up in battle array on its outskirts.  None the less, although much had run in the King’s favour in the lead up to the battle, when that battle was joined, it was still a close-run thing.  Although it appears to have lasted no more than two hours, it was, in the words of the later Gregory’s Chronicle, ‘one of the wyrste bataylys that ever came to Inglonde,, and unkyndyst’.  The casualty rate was very high, a product of the intense exchange of longbow fire with which it began, with, according to the St. Albans chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, men falling ‘as fast as leaves … in autumn’.  These casualties were heaviest on the royalist side, certainly in respect of the leading men (the most notable casualty on his side was the young Edmund, earl of Stafford), and it is probably fair to say that, if Hotspur had not fallen on the field, the result of the battle, if not that of the rebellion, might have been different. Indeed, if the accidents of battle had brought death to the King rather than to Hotspur, the civil war, the ‘Lancastrian’ title against the ‘Yorkist’, (represented in 1403 by the young Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, nephew of Hotspur’s wife) would have begun in 1403 rather than 1459.

SJP

Further reading

J.M.W. Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, History xliv (1959), pp. 212-27.

P. McNiven, ‘The Scottish Policy of the Percies and the Strategy of the Rebellion of 1403’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library lxii (1979-80), pp. 498-530.  

For biographies of some of the casualties on the royalist side: The Commons, 1386-1421, ed. Clark, Rawcliffe and Roskell, ii. 262-5 (Sir Walter Blount of Barton Blount, Derbyshire), 467-9 (Sir John Calverley of Stapleford, Leicestershire), 593-4 (Sir John Clifton of Clifton, Nottinghamshire); iv. 364-6  (Sir Hugh Shirley of Shirley, Derbyshire), 607-9 (Sir Thomas Wensley of Wensley, Derbyshire). For a probable casualty on the rebel side see ii. 384-6 (Sir Hugh Browe).

It is surprising to find the sister of a King buried in a remote Shropshire church.  Henry IV’s sister, Elizabeth, in marked contrast to her elder sister, Philippa (d.1415), wife of King John I of Portugal, grandly entombed in Batalha Monastery, found her final resting in the modest country church of Burford.  The two sisters were also markedly contrasted in life.

Philippa’s sole marriage was made in 1387 to advance, unsuccessfully as it transpired, the claims of her step-mother, Constance of Castile, to the throne of Castile. Elizabeth had a rather more colourful marital history.  In 1380, when she was about 17, her father, John of Gaunt, contracted a conventional marriage for her: John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, was his ward, and by birth and wealth a suitable spouse. There was, however, a problem, that Gaunt chose to ignore. The groom was some ten years younger than his bride, and it would be some years before they could live together as a married couple. In the interim, the young earl grew up in Gaunt’s household, while Elizabeth was sent to the royal court to, in the words of the Westminster chronicler, ‘study the behaviour and customs of courtly society’. That study took a predictable and active form. She formed a romantic attachment with Richard II’s half-brother, Sir John Holland, some ten years her senior, who had, rather ironically, been present at her marriage to Pembroke.

Whatever her precise marital status, this attachment was less than ideal.  Holland, despite his grand birth, was a younger son with no great financial prospects, and he had shown himself to have tendencies violent beyond even the generous limits of his times. None the less, in its most notorious manifestation, that violence had been exercised in defence of Elizabeth’s father.  In 1384, when a Carmelite friar denounced Gaunt to the King’s face as a traitor, Holland took a leading part in the torture and murder of the either deranged or unwisely forthright friar (‘Am I not your uncle?’: John of Gaunt, the murder of Friar Latimer and the Salisbury Parliament of 1384, 8 March 2022).  It was perhaps Holland’s apparent devotion to him that led Gaunt to abandon the objections raised by prudence to his daughter’s liaison; or else, perhaps more probably, he found himself faced with a fait accompli when she fell pregnant.  What is not clear is whether the Pembroke marriage had already been set aside before this happy event.  Since the marriage had been contracted when the groom was under the canonical age of consent, its dissolution was a matter of no great difficulty, and it is probable that it had already been dissolved as unsuitable before her affair with Holland.  However, it makes a better story to assume a causal link, and contemporary chroniclers were not slow in proposing one.  In any event, the new marriage was made before the child was born.  The young couple were married at Plymouth on 24 June 1386 as her father made ready for a campaign in Spain.  Holland had a leading position of command in that campaign, and his new wife accompanied him, perhaps not the ideal start to married life.

A less than ideal start was followed by a calamitous end.  In the late 1390s the marriage was compromised by mounting political crises.  As Richard II’s autocracy created unbridgeable divides among the leading aristocracy, Elizabeth faced a terrible dilemma. Her husband had never enjoyed the same close relationship with her brother, the future Henry IV, as he did with her father, and, given his own kinship with Richard II, it is not surprising that he should have sided with the King.  His reward was promotion to the dukedom of Exeter.  By contrast, her brother found himself banished and excluded from inheriting the great Lancastrian inheritance on his father’s death in February 1399.  Even, however, against this background, all would have been well if Holland had been able to reconcile himself to the new political disposition after Henry returned triumphantly from exile to depose Richard II.   Given his marriage to Elizabeth, such a reconciliation would, no doubt, have been expected (although it must be said that Henry did not exert himself to bring it about), and it must have been to her dismay that her husband chose to rise in a futile conspiracy to depose her brother.  Taking flight, his reward was execution in January 1400 at the hands of a group of Essex peasants.

Elizabeth, not seemingly one to dwell on life’s setbacks, lost little time in making a new marriage.  1400 was a momentous year for her, beginning with her husband’s death and ending with the death of her eldest son, Richard Holland.  In the interval, however, there was a much happier moment.  At a tournament held at York in July, her attention was caught by the skill of one of its participants, Sir John Cornwall, a few years her junior.  As the son of a younger son of a Shropshire knightly family, and notwithstanding the fact that his mother was, reputedly at least, a niece of John de Montfort (d.1399), duke of Brittany, he hardly had the social qualifications as a husband for a King’s sister, yet the couple were married by the end of the year. If Henry IV originally viewed this with disapproval, he quickly came to a brighter view, making lavish grants in favour of the couple and, in February 1405, standing godfather to their son. The couple went on to prosper.  The profits of Cornwall’s military career compensated him for his lack of hereditary expectations. Through their only son, John, the couple could look forward to establishing a dynasty.

Again, however, tragedy intervened.  Just as war had made Cornwall rich, it also ended his male line.  Late in 1421, at the siege of Meaux, the young John was killed by a cannonball in the presence of his father (H.W.Kleineke, ‘1421: a troubled royal Christmas’, 11 Jan. 2022).  Elizabeth did not long survive this loss, dying in November 1425.  Cornwall, for reasons one can only speculate, did not remarry.

It is not known why Elizabeth should have been buried in the church of Burford.  Her husband was not the lord of the manor, only the representative of a junior branch of the knightly family long established there.  Further, he had, before her death, purchased the extensive lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire and began the building of a great castle there.  That castle, not yet complete on Elizabeth’s death, had no doubt been intended as the grand residence of a new dynasty, and the church of Ampthill might have become its mausoleum.   The only plausible explanation for her burial at Burford is her personal affection for the place, perhaps because she had spent time there during Cornwall’s absences fighting in France.

Elizabeth’s career was a remarkable one. She demonstrated a degree of independence unusual for an aristocratic woman. She repudiated the marriage made for her by her powerful father when she was in her late teens; she then chose her own husband in what appears to have been scandalous circumstances; and, as a widow in her thirties, she followed her own inclinations in marrying below her rank to one of the foremost soldiers of the day. No doubt part of the reason for this seeming freedom was the indulgence of a father and brother to a favoured daughter and sister. Yet that indulgence was only necessary because of Elizabeth’s spirited independence.  

SP

By modern convention, the death of a sovereign and the accession of their successor do not bring a parliament to an end. Rather, Parliament meets as soon as practicable after the event, and Members and peers take the oath of allegiance to the new monarch. This was not always so. In the case of the Parliaments of medieval England, the death or deposition of a King put an end to any Parliament summoned in his name. Thus, the proclamation of Edward IV as King on 4 March 1461 was deemed to have ended the Parliament summoned in Henry VI’s name in the previous autumn, and the same was true of the Readeption parliament of 1470-1. In both instances, many Members of the assemblies had in any event dispersed long before their formal or legal ending.

It was more unusual for a King to die while Parliament was in session, but this did happen when Henry IV died in March 1413. Writs had been issued on 1 December 1412 for a Parliament that was to meet at Westminster on 3 February 1413. Although the King suffered repeated bouts of illness and had to delegate much of the ceremonial surrounding the opening to the Chancellor, Archbishop Arundel, he did eventually appear in public and pledge a crusade. To this end, the Commons agreed a grant of taxation, and other business, including the framing of an ordinance concerning the manufacture of cloth, was also transacted.

Yet, the Parliament was never brought to a formal close, but rather was unceremoniously deemed to have come to an end with the King’s death on 20 March. None of the formalities normally associated with a dissolution, such as the issue of writs de expensis (ordering the payment of wages to the Members of the Commons) were observed, and in the absence of the royal assent none of the Parliament’s measures were regarded as acts. As a result, no Parliament roll was compiled, and the records of the assembly were discarded.

The new King, Henry V, lost little time in summoning a new Parliament, and in this assembly, which met at Westminster on 3 May the Commons complained bitterly of the expenditure that their predecessors had incurred during the time of the earlier, abortive, gathering. Henry V equivocated. He ordered that the records be searched for any precedents, but rather than promising to follow these, he merely agreed that on their basis he would do what seemed best to him.      

H.W.K.

Further reading:

C. Given-Wilson, Henry IV (New Haven and London, 2016), pp. 515-16.

‘A Draft of the Protestation of the Speaker’, in Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages ed. N. Pronay and J. Taylor (Oxford, 1980), pp. 197-201 (here ascribed to 1504, but in reality probably dating from the Parliament of Feb. 1413)

The History of Parliament joins the nation and the world in mourning Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and in gratitude for her remarkable lifetime of service.

Parliament met on 20 January 1401 in a distinctly uncharitable mood. The Welsh rising of the previous autumn had, it seemed, been quickly quelled, but there were fears that the danger was not passed. The Commons’ solution to this problem was the stick rather than the carrot. In a series of petitions, largely accepted by the Crown, a series of harsh measures was proposed against the Welsh: they were to be excluded from the acquisition of land in England and the status of burgess even in the plantation towns of Wales; and they were not to hold major office or to carry arms in a town or on a highway. The Commons were not to be deflected from this course by warnings that such measures threatened to promote further rebellion. According to one chronicler, their answer to such a warning from John Trevor, bishop of St. Asaph, was that they cared nothing for the Welsh, whom they characterised as ‘barefooted buffoons’. This heedless attitude and the dangers it brought are reflected in the words of the Welsh cleric, Adam of Usk. He recalled that, on the morning of 10 March, the last day of the Parliament: ‘I heard it being urged that all sorts of rigorous measures ought to be decreed against the Welsh … And, as God is my witness, the previous night I was roused from my sleep by a voice ringing in my ears … as a result of which I awoke with a sense of foreboding’.

Trevor’s warning and Usk’s foreboding were both justified by events, and it is hard not to draw a very direct link between these measures and the intensification of the rebellion. Although, to a large extent, these new measures simply reinforced the disabilities under which the Welsh had laboured since the Edwardian conquest, those disabilities had not been systematically enforced. Indeed, discrimination had not prevented a significant degree of integration between the native Welsh uchelwyr (aristocracy) and the English landowners of the border shires. The Welsh leader, Owain Glyn Dŵr, stands as an example. His paternal grandmother had been a daughter of the Shropshire peer, John, Lord Strange of Knockin (d.1309); his father-in-law, Sir David Hanmer (d.1387), of Anglo-Welsh descent, had been a justice of the King’s bench; and, by the time of the rebellion, two of his daughters had been married, if sixteenth-century pedigrees are to be trusted, into the Herefordshire gentry families of Croft and Monnington. Such ties of kinship were reinforced by ties of service. Glyn Dŵr was typical of the leaders of Welsh society in enjoying the patronage of a great Marcher lord: his father had been Richard Fitzalan (d.1397), the earl of Arundel’s steward, in the lordships of Chirk and Oswestry, and it was natural that he himself should have enlisted in the earl’s military retinue in the 1380s. Yet, for all this integration, there existed a strong undercurrent of Welsh resentment, disseminated in a bardic tradition that contrasted a glorious past with an oppressed present. This tradition invested the hope of deliverance in the emergence of a triumphant leader from the ranks of the Welsh princes. It was this call that Glyn Dŵr answered in the autumn of 1400, and the anti-Welsh legislation of the Parliament of 1401 served to validate his action.

This was the background to his famous victory at the battle of Pilleth. No sooner had the Parliament dispersed, than the rebellion flared into life again and quickly gained a momentum it had not had at its outset. It soon had its greatest triumph. On 22 June 1402 Glyn Dŵr’s small army, travelling from Snowdonia to raid in the south, encountered the county levy of Herefordshire, raised in haste by Sir Edmund Mortimer. The battle was joined at Pilleth near Knighton. Although it is a largely hopeless task determining exactly what went on at any medieval battle, the outlines of the clash at Pilleth are fairly clear. The English had the advantage in mounts, arms and numbers, with about a thousand men; but the Welsh had the advantage of position, drawn up on the top of the hill of Bryn Glas (‘Blue Hill’). Mortimer, confident in the superiority of his forces, attacked up hill, either fearlessly or foolishly depending upon one’s point of view. One tradition has that, even with this disadvantage, he would have prevailed but for the defection of his own Welsh archers. This, however, may reflect, no more than the English chronicler’s tendency to attribute any Welsh success to treachery and deceit. Whatever, however, the reason, defeat was total. Three of the leaders of the English side, all formerly MPs for Herefordshire, were killed, including Sir Walter Devereux, who had represented it in the Parliament of 1401, and Mortimer himself was captured.

The Welsh victory had, in the short term, profound consequences. Beyond adding fuel to the rebellion, it widened existing divisions within the English elite. Henry IV’s failure to ransom Mortimer was a factor in driving Mortimer’s brother-in-law, Henry Hotspur, heir to the earldom of Northumberland, into his own rebellion. Mortimer himself, seeing an opportunity to forward the claim of his young nephew, the earl of March, to the English throne, defected to Glyn Dwr’s cause and married one of his daughters. It would not be going too far to say that the Welsh victory at Pilleth transformed a minor local rebellion into real threat to Henry IV’s kingship.

S J P

Further reading

Owain Glyn Dŵr: A Casebook, ed. M. Livingstone and J.K. Bollard (Liverpool, 2013)
R.R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford, 1995)

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