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The lion on red and gold was carried into battle during Owain Glyndwr's rebellion against the English.
Although the design has since become synonymous with the legendary Welsh warrior, its origins are unclear.
It has also been claimed that Glyndwr hoped to demonstrate his lineage from the princes of Gwynedd, whose flag in the 13th century had been four passive lions. By making the lions rampant, Glyndwr was giving out a clear signal.
The standard bears a marked similarity to the arms of Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, the flag of the royal house of Gwynedd. Llewelyn was the last prince of Wales prior to its conquest by Edward I.
It has also been claimed that the design was developed from the arms of Powys Fadog, where his father was a hereditary prince, and the coat of Dehuebarth, from which his noblewoman mother came. The Powys Fadog arms were a red lion on a gold background; those of Deheubarth were a gold lion on a red background.
The banner of has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in recent years. It is often seen at major sporting events, and has become a potent symbol of protest.
A variant of the design is still used as the Prince of Wales' standard for Wales.
King Richard II acceded the throne at the age of just 10, in 1377.
At 14 he faced down The Peasants' Revolt and negotiated personally with Wat Tyler. But by the time he came of age, he adhered to the idea of The Divine Right of Kings and although diplomatically astute (avoiding war and improving the economy wherever possible), he was politically risky.
He exercised power and expected to be obeyed without question. He raised friends to the nobility and ostracised some existing nobles not in his favour. This attitude towards some noblemen reached a turning point in 1397 when he had a group of Lords executed or exiled.
He had previously confiscated the lands of his uncle and legal protector, John Of Gaunt, on his death and exiled Gaunt's son - his own cousin - Henry Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke returned to England when Richard went on a mission to Ireland in 1399, armed with a French-raised army.
Bolingbroke and Richard met at Conwy Castle, ostensibly to discuss the restitution of the confiscated lands, but the king was arrested. He was taken to the Tower of London and forced to abdicate in Bolingbroke's favour.
Richard died in 1400, and with him came to rest a lot of the status and influence of the Welsh lords and princes he had called upon and raised in status. For the first time in many years, Welsh nobles were insecure in their relationship with the English crown.
Owain Glyndwr's own relationship with the crown came to a crucial point in 1399 when he appealed to the new king's parliament to rule in a long-running land dispute with his neighbour Reynold de Grey, an anti-Welsh Norman landowner of Dyffryn Clwyd.
Unfortunately for Glyndwr, de Grey used his influence with Henry IV to have the appeal rejected, and furthermore he withheld a summons for Owain to join Henry's Scottish campaign, putting him in the position of having committed treason by not providing troops.
Owain Glyndwr's hand was forced, and he began his revolt against the English/Norman powerbases in Wales.
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The revolt
On 16 September 1400, Owain was a proclaimed Prince Of Wales by his followers, following his disagreement with de Grey and his de facto treason against King Henry.
Gyndwr was popular as the Welsh nobleman with the greatest claim to the throne of Wales, and was able call on other disillusioned Welsh noblemens' support.
His first move was to sack the de Grey stronghold of Ruthin, before moving on to the towns of Denbigh, Rhuddlan, Flint, Hawarden and Holt. Oswestry followed, suffering massive damage at the hands of Glyndwr's troops.
With eight days, the force had moved as far as Welshpool and it, too, was sacked.
With such strong military success so quickly, other noblemen rallied to Glyndwr's standard. The Tudors of Anglesey, counsins of Owain and once close allies of Richard II, moved against English strongholds, employing guerilla tactics.
The military action happening across north and mid Wales forced Henry to bring his army back from a prospective invasion of Scotland. His initial skirmishes with the Welsh rebels were ignominious - harrassed by bad weather and the guerilla tactics of his aggressors. By 15 October he had retreated his forces back to Shrewsbury to lick his wounds.
Over the next few months, the revolt spread around Wales. Attacks rained in on English settlements, manors and castles, and in the south of the country, a group calling themselves Plant Owain (the Children of Owain), began mounting attacks around Brecon and Gwent.
In May 1401 the Tudor brothers seized Conwy castle when the garrison was at church. Owain himself overcame huge odds to rally 400 troops to victory over 1500 Pembrokeshire English and Flemish soldiers who charged their camp at the bottom of the Hyddgen valley. They killed 200 of the enemy took the rest prisoner.
King Henry was once more pushed into a punitive campaign, pressing for the Glyndwr-sympathetic abbey at Strata Florida in mid-Wales. He was attacked by the Plant Owain, suffering casualties from their guerilla tactics. His bad temper was such that after a marathon drinking session, he partially ruined the abbey and executed monks suspected of being Glyndwr loyalists.
Meanwhile, the Plant Owain continued their hit-and-run attacks on his supply lines, and on the way back to Hereford, the weather once more played its hand against Henry. Floods nearly washed the army away and the king himself almost died as his tent was blown over.
Complaints about the rising level of rebelliousness - including in the north west of England - gave rise to new laws which in the end served only to stoke the fires of rebellion, especially among those Welshmen hitherto remaining peaceable. There was now no pragmatic stance to take.
The revolt - part two
In 1401, Owain Glyndwr captured his old enemy Reynal de Grey, holding to ransom for a year until the king paid a substantial sum.
In June of that year, an army under the command of Sir Edmund Mortimer met Glyndwr's at Bryn Glas. Mortimer was defeated and he was captured, again offered for ransom to the king, but this time he declined to pay Glyndwr for the privilege of having one of his knights back. But this was not a sticky end for Mortimer and he negotiated an alliance with Owain - including marriage into his family.
Glyndwr increased the reach of his military conquests, forging south west and taking Carmarthen castle, an important power base of the English. Settlements across south Wales fell one after another, including Cardiff, Newport, Usk and Abergavenny.
The rising fortunes of this educated, pragmatic nobleman-turned-warlord and national figurehead encouraged many expatriate Welshmen to return and join his forces.
Only a few castles still held out against the rebels as major military powerbases of the English in Wales, and Caernarfon Castle almost fell in 1403. King Henry's son, Henry of Monmouth, attacked and burned Owain's houses at Glyndyfrdwy and Sycharth, but this hardly amounted to a dent in his war machine.
Indeed, when the famous and inspirational soldier Henry' Hotspur' Henry defected to Glyndwr against his own cousin the king, it seemed that the Welshman was almost unstoppable. But the young Henry of Monmouth defeated Hotspur's army at Shrewsbury, with the death of Hotspur among 20,000 dead or injured.
In 1404, the castles of Harlech and Aberystwyth fell to Glyndwr and soon after he called his first Cynulliad, or Parliament at Machynlleth. He was crowned Owain IV of Wales and laid out his vision of an independent Wales.
It was a vision of a modern society, with an independent church, two universities and a parliament. It was a vision which still holds currency today.
Things - despite the setback at Shrewsbury - looked sufficiently rosy for Owain and his allies Mortimer and the Earl of Northumberland to set out plans for the division of Wales and England between them. With money, supplies and help coming in from a range of sources, secular and religious, and the support of France and Brittany, Glyndwr could afford to be optimistic.
Sea battles went the way of the Welsh-Breton-French alliance during 1403 and 1404, then in 1405 a large French force landed at Milford Haven. Despite some military success in Wales, the Franco-Welsh force got as far as a stand-off with the English in Worcestershire, but for some reason both sides withdrew and the army went back through south Wales.
This mysterious volte-face seems to be the turning point of the rebellion for Owain Glyndwr.
The revolt - part three
The rebellion founders and ends in defeat, casting Wales into lengthy economic, social and political diaster.
Six years after the rebellion had started, and after huge successes, the balance of power began to shift away from Owain Glyndwr.
The French involvement ebbed away, and even a politically-astute promise by Owain to the Avignon-based papacy to shift Wales' allegiance in the Catholic schism to the French side didn't work.
Battles didn't go Glyndwr's way, with his own son, Gruffudd, being captured. King Henry had 300 prisoners beheaded in Usk, and ever-more violent treatment of the captured become the norm.
King Henry's excessive violence on its own hadn't worked, but in partnership with his son's scheme of an economic blockade, it began to pay dividends.
English forces landed in Anglesey from Ireland at the start of the year and gradually pushed their way across the island during 1406. Combining this with the securing of some of Wales' coastal strongholds, the English began to put a strangle-hold on the supply of arms and trade to Glyndwr's vestigial state.
Gradually, communities felt the pinch had began to fall over the next two years. Lordships surrendered one by one, and Glyndwr's castle at Aberystwyth came under siege. It fell, followed by Harlech in 1409.
The French and Scottish were approached in last-ditch requests for assistance, but no help was forthcoming. In 1409, his own wife, two daughters and three granddaughters were captured and sent to the Tower.
Owain, perhaps desperate and looking for a glorious defeat to end his revolt, led a last-gasp sortie with his remaining, most-trusted soldiers. The raid into Shropshire was a defeat, and many of Glyndwr's highest commanders were captured and executed.
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