Owen, hearing that his father had made peace with King Henry, returned
from Ireland, but his father refused to see him. Owen went off into
Powys and managed to patch up a reconciliation with Madog, who had
lately sought his life as the murderer of his brothers. The recent
enemies met and swore a solemn oath of perpetual friendship and of
united hostility to the King of England. Owen, with a party of
ruffians who had come with him from Ireland, now entered his father’s
territories in Ceredigion, and thence made a series of marauding
visits into Dyfed, using for the purpose the ships in which he had
crossed from Ireland. In one of these he killed a Bishop William of the
Flemings, who was on his way to the English court. The news reached
King Henry whilst Cadwgan was with him on some business connected with
the settlement of Welsh affairs. The King, exasperated to the last
degree, bitterly reproached Cadwgan for not restraining this wild son
of his, and at once despatched troops to chastise Owen, who immediately
fled to Ireland.
Cadwgan was suffered to return to Powys, but was there assassinated by
Madog, his son’s ally, who at once hastened to announce the news to the
Bishop of London, and was received with favour.
Owen hurried back from Ireland; Madog was caught in an ambush, and Owen
put out his eyes with red-hot irons.
Curiously enough, now King Henry received Owen into his favour, and
took him as a companion to Normandy, where he acquitted himself
gallantly, and was knighted by the King. On his return to England
Henry sent him into Wales with a commission and promises of favour
and assurances of confidence. But Gerald of Windsor was awaiting his
opportunity. Owen on entering Wales began to butcher and burn with the
utmost barbarity, and some peasants who escaped informed Gerald as to
his whereabouts. Gerald hastened to intercept him, surrounded him, and
Owen was pierced to the heart with an arrow.
A run of half an hour by train takes us to Corwen, a dingy little town
at the junction of the line to Ruthin and Rhyl. Lying under steep
mountains to the south, it comes off scantily for sun in winter.
Here the church has been rebuilt in very bad taste, with hideous
plate-tracery in the windows, and a cumbrous French “Gothic” arcade
within. The English and French architects of the Middle Ages started
with different conceptions as to how to deal with the arch and the
capital of the pillar on which it rested. The Frenchman made of his
arch a hole bored in slabs of stone with sharp angles. If he had to
sustain it on a circular drum of a pillar, he accommodated the capital
to the arch by taking the Ionic crown as his type and reproducing the
horns at the corners which serve as supports to the four angles of the
arch resting on it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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