He had now remained in Wales for more than two years, and the great work of union, and the establishment of peace, and the reign of law, seemed to be solidly advancing. At Newyn, in Carnarvonshire, in the summer of 1284, Edward held a grand tournament, with the usual festivities. Here were assembled, says Matthew of Westminster, “the great body of the knights of England, with many foreign nobles.” So splendid a spectacle was, at least, calculated to show the chiefs and gentry of Wales that the nation with which they had been incorporated was no mean one, and that the sovereign they had gained was a chief of might and power. So ended the king’s transactions in Wales in 1282, 1283, and 1284, and in the autumn of the latter year he proceeded slowly through Cardiganshire and Glamorganshire, reaching Bristol before the end of the year, and celebrating Christmas in that city. So ends the brief history of the union of Wales with England. This war had been forced upon Edward, who evidently had no option in the matter. It was soon ended, and a single criminal—he who had caused the war—was the only victim claimed by the scaffold. The king’s slowness and long deliberation show also that, could any reasonable plea for mercy have been found, even David himself would have been spared. A rather severe judge of Edward’s whole career, says, of the annexation: “Never was conquest more merciful.”[26] Yet some of the Scottish historians, while they endeavour to assume an air of impartiality when they speak of Edward’s Scottish controversies, are eager to create a prejudice against him by giving the darkest complexion to his acts in Wales. Thus Hume, in narrating this portion of Edward’s career, calmly tells us that “The king, sensible that nothing kept alive the ideas of military valour and of ancient glory so much as the traditional poetry of the people, which, assisted by the power of music and the jollity of festivals, made a deep impression on the minds of the youth, gathered together all the Welsh bards, and, from a barbarous but not absurd policy, ordered them to be put to death.” And Gray, accepting the fiction as a fact, clothed it in noble verse, and his ode beginning “Ruin seize thee, ruthless king,” fixed the alleged crime in the memory of every school‐boy and school‐girl in the realm. And yet the whole charge was a mere calumny. These bards, who were said to have been extirpated, continued to sing and to write in such sort that “Mr. Owen Jones, in forming a collection of their productions, _after the time of Edward_, had to transcribe between fifty and sixty quarto volumes”; and “the work of transcription,” said Sir Richard Hoare, “was not even then completed.”[27] A later Scottish historian than Hume—Sir James Mackintosh—admits the falsity of the charge. He says, “The massacre of the bards is an act of cruelty imputed to Edward _without evidence_, and it is inconsistent with his spirit, which was not infected by wanton ferocity.”