From the majestic Welsh mountain ranges comes the distinguished surname of Howell. Wales is a land of soft spoken, music-loving poets, a people famous for their bards. Eisteddfods (Music Festivals) and their choral groups.

After the Romans vacated the British Isles at the end of the 4th century the Welsh or ancient Britons were left in sole possession of all of England, all the way north to the banks of the Clyde River. Their most distinguished leaders were Ambrosious, and later in the 5th century, King Arthur of the Round Table. The Saxons forced them westward into the mountains of what is now Wales, north to Cumberland and southern Scotland, and into Cornwall to the south.

The first recorded King of Wales was Hywel ap Rhodri Mawr, or Roderick the Great who ruled from his seat in Anglesey. He died in 893. On his death he gave Wales to his three sons, Anarawd, who became King of North Wales, Cadath (Hywel ap Cadell), better known as Hywel Dda “The Good,” becoming King of South Wales and Mervyn, who became King of Powys, or mid Wales.

By 950 AD, Dinefwr was the principal court from which Hywel ap Cadell ruled a large part of Wales including the southwest area known as Deheubarth. His great achievement was to create the country’s first uniform legal system. Hywel shared with his brothers lands in Ceredigon and Ystrad Tywi after the death of their father, Cadell, about 909 AD. He united their inheritance in 920, and acquired Gwynedd after the death of Idwal Foel in 942. He married Elen, daughter of Llywarch of Dyfed, and on Llywarch’s death in 904 he took over the southern kingdom. In the perspective of the Dark Ages he was a powerful prince.

Like his grandfather, Rhodri the Great, Hywel was given an epithet by a later generation. In the age of Hywel Dda, the essential attribute of a state builder was ruthlessness, and attribute which Hywel possessed. His main base was in the south and his was a time of peaceful consolidation, with the introduction and widespread use of coinage leading to an expansion of trade.

King Hywel was responsible for some of the consolidation of the Laws of Wales. The law was Hywel’s Law, Cyfraith Hywel; his name gave to the law an authority comparable with that given to the laws of Mercia by King Offa or the laws of Wessex by King Alfred. He almost certainly knew of them; he was a regular visitor to the English Court in 928. When in the flower of his manhood, he went on a pilgrimage to Rome. It was assumed that he took copies of his laws to Rome, where they were blessed by the Pope.

The Law of Hywel was not a body of law; it was the systematization of the legal customs, which had developed in Wales over the centuries, A total of forty-two copies have survived from the period when the Law was still in partial use. Of these, thirty-six are in Welsh and six in Latin; the Latin versions are adaptations, for Welsh was the language of the law.

He was successful in defending his territories, for there is no record that they were ravaged by the Vikings during his reign. Hywel adhered to the close relationship with England initiated by his father-in-law, Llywarch of Dyfed.

Hywel’s creation of the Kingdom of Deheubarth, survived his death. In 950 it passed to his son Owain. Gwynedd and Powys returned to the line of Idwal ap Anarawd while Glamorgan continued to be subject to its own kings. Although the union between Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth was broken, Wales had only three kingdoms after 950, compared with over twice that number two centuries earlier.

When Hywel died in 950, disunity returned; 35 Welsh Princes were killed within 120 years either by Saxons, Vikings or fellow Welshmen. In 1018 the line of Merf~yn Frych was outsted by a new dynasty, whose most notable member, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (1039-1063), reunited Wales under his sole control. But by the end he had overreached himself attracting retaliation from Edward the Confessor’s Lieutenant, Harold Godwinson.

After some initial success, Norman control in North Wales was short-lived. In 1094 Gruffyd ap Cynan regained his freedom and, with the help of his mother’s Irish relations, drove out the Norman Earls. The next seventy years, the reigns of Gruffydd (1094-1137) and his son, Owain Gwynedd (1137-1170), marked the most peaceful period of Welsh independence, when the native princes absorbed many of the current European reforming ideas and adapted the more effective structures of both church and state to their own society.

After the death of Owain Gwynedd in 1170, Southern Wales, under Rhys ap Gruffydd (The Lord Rhys) in Dyfed, became dominant, but at the end of the century Gwynedd once again had a powerful prince. Llywelyn ap Lorwerth emerged as ruler in 1200, after a fierce family struggle. At his death in 1240 he was the undisputed ruler of all Pura Wallia (Wales), who corresponded on equal terms with Philip Augustus of France, and had hanged one of the most powerful Marcher Lords for undue familiarity with his wife, the daughter of King John of England.

Llywelyn’s position as effective ruler of all Wales was eventually recognized by Henry III, in the Treaty of Montgomery (1267). This acknowledged the title ‘Prince of Wales,” and the concept of Wales as a unified state. The Prince of Wales was a vassal of the King of England but was, in effect, an independent political power. His grandfather’s castles still provided the main defense of the kingdom. Llywelyn reinforced and enlarged them, but founded only one new castle at Dolforwyn near Welshpool, which was begun in 1273.

In 1271 his own son Edward I succeeded Henry III, and Llywelyn’s brothers and allies began to make trouble for him, war being declared in 1276. At the Peace of Aberconway, concluded in 1277, Llywelyn lost all that he had gained 10 years before.

The peace did not last long. Llywelyn’s brother, Dafydd, provoked Edward by an attack on Hawarden in March 1282, and the war reopened. Llywelyn was killed in a skirmish near Builth Wells and Dafydd had to continue the fight alone. Edward captured Dafydd in 1283 and executed him, thus bringing to an end the House of Gwynedd.

Llywelyn managed to get himself recognized as the first Prince of Wales by Henry III of England in 1267. With the succession of the throne of his son Edward I, the title ‘Prince of Wales” was given to the English monarch’s eldest son in 1302 and it has remained in the hands of the English monarchs ever since.

Despite creating castles like Dolbadarn and Dolwyddelan, the Welsh did not really adopt the Norman practice of building castles. Out of over 400 that still survive within the modern borders of Wales, less than 10 percent can be shown to have been built by Welshmen.

One notable castle is Castel Machen. In the early part of the 13th century Morgan ap Hywel used this site as a retreat after he had lost his main stronghold of Caerleon to the Normans. Morgan probably built the round tower keep, but the bailey and curtain wall appears to have constructed by Gilbert Marshall, earl of Pembroke in 1236, when he captured the castle and held it for a short while. The castle passed to Morgan’s grandson Maredudd in 1248, from whom the name is derived, and it was later held by the de Clares. The bailey is about 60m square. Although once protected by a wall and ditch it was poorly defended and is overlooked by higher ground to the north. The southern side is a cliff edge from which rises two tree-clad knobs of rock which bear the last traces of a round tower keep and a retangular hail block, which were separated from each other and the bailey by ditches. The keep was a small speciman of its type, having a diameter of 8.6m over walls 2.5m thick. A latrine chute discharges down the cliff edge. The castle remains are located a few miles east of Caerphilly, in South Wales.

This simplified genealogy examines the House of Deheubarth, which dominated South Wales for much of its history. Two names stand above the rest. The first is the legendary Rhys ap Gruffydd, the Lord Rhys, a powerful and influential 12th century prince who was probably responsible for building the first stone castles in southern Wales. The second is Hywel Dda, the great 10th century lawgiver of Wales and the 4th great-grandfather of the Lord Rhys. Both Hywel Dda and the Lord Rhys had their principal courts at Dinefwr, where remains of the castle built by Rhys can be seen today.

The following is a genealogy of the Kings of Wales from Ap Rhodi Hywel. Ap Rhodi Hywel (Howell) - King from 844 to 878
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ap Rhys ap Tewdwr Hywel
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Cadell ap Hywel
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Hywel Dda (d. 950) Hywel the Good-married Elen, daughter of Llywarch
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Rhodri (d. 953) Owain (d. 988) Edwin (d. 954)
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Einon
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Cadell
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Tewdwr
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Rhys
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Gruffydd-married Gwenllian
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The Lord Rhys (d. 1197) - married Gwenllian
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Gruffydd Rhys Gryg Maelgwn Maredudd

Following the death of the Lord Rhys, what was left of his kingdom was divided between his warring sons. The power of Deheubarth had, in fact, been declining for years, and the death of the Lord Rhys brought about the practical end of this dynasty.

With the construction of Offa’s Dyke came an awareness to the Welsh people, tor, in the generation following it’s existence, kingdom was linked with kingdom and the result was that the greater part of the inhabitants of Wales became the subjects of a single ruler. According to the genealogies, it appears that it was through marriage rather than through conquest that the kingdoms of Wales were united. The heir of one kingdom married the heiress of another.

A chain of marriages begins around 800 when Gwriad, of the lineage of the Men of the North, married Esyllt of the line of Maelgwn Fawr; their son, Merfyn, became King of Gwynedd in 825 on the death of Esyilt’s uncle, Hywel ap Rhodri. Merf~’n married Nest of the House of Powys, and their son, Rhodri, married Angharad of the House of Seisyllwg. Rhodri became ruler of Gwynedd in 844 on the death of his father, of Powys in 855 on the death of his uncle, Gwgon, and of Seisyllwg in 871 on the death of his brother-in-law, Gwgon; he died in 877 King of a realm extending from Anglesey to Gower.

A later generation of chronicles hailed Hywel Rhodri ap Merfyn as Rhodri Mawr (Rhodri the Great), a distinction bestowed upon two other rulers in the same century. Charles the Great (Charlemagne, died 814) and Alfred the Great (died 899). Unfortunately, the entire evidence relating to the life of Hywel Rhodri consists of a few sentences; yet he must have made a deep impression upon the Welsh, for in later centuries being of the line of Jiywel Rhodri was a primary qualification for their rulers.

Hywel Rhodri’s fame sprang from his success as a warrior. That success was noted by the Ulster Chronicle and by Sedulius Scottus, an Irish scholar at the Court of the Emperor Charles the Bald at Leige. It was his victory over the Northmen ~ 856, which brought him international acclaim.

Wales was less richly provided with the fertile land and with navigable rivers which would have attracted the Northmen, and the Welsh Kings had considerable success in resisting them. Anglesey and a third of Bretland (Wales) bore the burnt of their attacks, and it was there in 856, that Hywel Rhodi won his victory over Horn, the leader of the Danes, much to the delight of the Irish and the Franks (French).