Family Lessons 134: Battle of Crogen

This month I called at the site of the Battle of Crogen, near Chirk on the Anglo-Welsh border. It is not clear whether this was a proper, pitched battle, which the local information boards naturally prefer, or a series of minor engagements or skirmishes. For this reason, the exact site is not certain, but we know where the bodies were piled, and these were unlikely to have been shifted very far.

King Henry II of England campaigned in the summer of 1165 against an alliance of Welsh princes and petty monarchs led by Owain, King of Gwynedd. Henry was coming to assert his lordship and punish those who had been raiding his lands; the Welsh were keen to emphasise their independence and demonstrate to their powerful neighbour that in the valleys of Wales, his writ ran small. Local sources claim that small bands of determined Welsh defeated Henry’s thirty-thousand-strong army. This sounds unlikely, and the numbers exagerated, but his objectives certainly failed and he was likely harassed from the heavily wooded hills and crags with which he was not familiar. He even employed woodsmen to cut down trees to minimise the chances of ambush. The Brut y Tywysogion (Chronicle of the Princes) declares:

“after staying long in their tents there without the one daring to attack the other, [Henry] moved his host into the wood of Dyffryn Ceiriog, and had the wood cut down and felled to the ground. And there a few picked Welshmen, who knew not how to suffer defeat, manfully encountered him in the absence of their leaders. And many of the doughtiest fell on both sides. And then the king, and the advanced forces along with him, encamped on the Berwyn Mountains”.

The interpretation boards present at the scene paint a dramatic picture, with thousands of arrows falling on the English army, and a mighty host humbled by a handful of determined Welsh, "driving King Henry’s elite soldiers over their dead and dying compatriots". Whatever happened, the Welsh Princes' objectives were met, and the English King’s not.

So what has this to do with my family? Well I suspect that several of them were present. Eight years before this ‘battle’, King Henry had lodged with my 26th great-grandfather in his Staffordshire manor house. He had made him Master Serjeant of Lancashire’s West Derby Hundred, which is a kind of under-sheriff. A 'Hundred' was a portion of a shire (Lancashire had six, centred on Lonsdale, Blackburn, Amounderness, Salford, Leyland and West Derby, the latter roughly corresponding to Merseyside) which could muster one hundred fighting men when required by the King. If Henry required a large army to operate only forty miles south, it is inconceivable that the hundred men of Lancashire’s West Derby would not have been summoned to play their part. My ancestor was called Waldeve, which is a Danish name, or Waltheof, which is Saxon and Old English, but he was evidently one trusted by the Norman and Angevin kings, and seemed to enjoy a personal friendship with Henry II, for which continued gratitude and loyalty would be expected. So although evidence is lacking, I am fairly certain that as I walked through the Ceiriog Valley, I stood where my ancestor fought. There is no record of his year of death (his son, Gilbert, had inherited his father’s estate before 1173), so it is even possible that he was one of the unfortunates who was killed by the Welsh arrows, and whose body lies in Offas’s Dyke.

Probably all of us have ancestors who fought in battles. Although some will have died before they could have procreated, most left heirs and offspring. Fallen humanity is violent and brutish, asserting dominance and bloody resistance in equal measure. Our own times in this land might be more peaceful, and we Christians are more pacific than the average. Nevertheless, we wage war against dark spiritual forces, vain philosophies and ungodly principles. Less dramatically, we must fight and resist temptation, regarding what we speak, what we think and even what we eat. Whether we win these battles, or die battling, may we ‘fight the good fight’ until our war be won.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12, NKJV