A month later, however, the destination of his armament was changed. Just as his plans were ripe for an attack upon France, they were checked once more by the necessity of guarding his realm against the Welsh. Before the close of 1211 Llywelyn--provoked, as he declared, by “the many insults done to him by the men of the king”--had leagued himself with his former rivals in South Wales and taken “all the castles which John had made in Gwynedd, except Dyganwy and Rhuddlan.”[750] And this time the league was more likely to hold together than was usually the case with alliances formed by the Welsh princes either with their neighbours or with each other; for a new hope had dawned upon the Welsh people. The tidings of John’s excommunication and deposition by the Pope had penetrated into Wales; and in this matter the Welsh, although of all Christian nations probably the least amenable to ecclesiastical discipline and the least submissive to ecclesiastical authority, became full of zeal to do the utmost that in them lay towards carrying out the Papal sentence against their overlord and conqueror. “They with one consent,” says their own chronicler, “rose against the king, and bravely wrested from him the midland district which he had previously taken from Llywelyn.”[751] The version of the English chroniclers is that the Welsh invaded the English border, took some castles and beheaded their garrisons, carried off a mass of plunder, and then burned everything and slew every man that they could lay their hands on.[752]