What Griffith did in the north, and the sons of Bleddyn in the east, Griffith ap Rees did in the south; he showed that the Norman army could be beaten in battle, and that a Norman castle could be taken by assault. After his father’s death he spent much of his youth in exile or in hiding: sometimes we find him in Ireland, sometimes in the court of Griffith ap Conan, sometimes with his sister Nest—now the wife of Gerald, the custodian of Pembroke Castle. But he had one aim ever before him—to recover his father’s kingdom and to make his people free. Castle after castle rose—at Swansea, Carmarthen, Llandovery, Cenarth, Aberystwyth—to warn him that the hold of the Norman on the land was tightening. He came to the forests of the Towy; his people rallied round him, and his power extended from the Towy to the Teivy, and from the Teivy to the Dovey. His wife, the heroic Gwenllian—who died leading her husband’s army against the Normans—was Griffith ap Conan’s daughter. The great final battle between Griffith and the Normans was fought at Cardigan in 1136, in which the great prince won a memorable victory over the strongest army the Normans could put in the field. In 1137 he died, and they said of him that he had shown his people what they ought to do, and that he had given them strength to do it. The work of Griffith ap Conan and Griffith ap Rees was this: they set bounds to the Norman Conquest, and saved Deheubarth and Gwynedd from the stern rule of the alien. But, though the Norman was not allowed to bring his stone castle and cruel law, what good he brought with him was welcomed. The piety of the Norman, his intellectual curiosity, and his spirit of adventure, conquered in Welsh districts where his coat of mail and his castle were not seen. IX OWEN GWYNEDD AND THE LORD REES THE men who opposed the Normans left able successors—Owen Gwynedd followed his father, Griffith ap Conan; the Lord Rees followed his father Griffith ap Rees; and in Powys the sons of Bleddyn were followed by the castle builder Howel, and by the poet Owen Cyveiliog. Owen Gwynedd ruled from 1137 to 1169; the Lord Rees from 1137 to 1197. The age was, in many respects, a great one. It was, of course, an age of war. Up to 1154, during the reign of Stephen, the English barons were fighting against each other, and the king had very little power over them. The most important Norman barons in Wales were the Earls of Chester in the valley of the Dee, the Mortimers on the upper Wye, the Braoses on the upper Usk, and the Clares in the south. Their castles were a continual menace to the country they had so far failed to conquer, and the Lord Rees was glad to get Kidwelly, and Owen Gwynedd to get Mold and Rhuddlan.