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A major revolt against English rule was mounted in the early fifteenth century led by Owain Glyndwr, a member of the prosperous Welsh gentry who became embittered against the local English magnates for reasons which are uncertain, but probably owe as much to personla disputes as national sentiment. Glyndwr's rebellion achieved astonishing success, for a while. Beginning on Good Friday 1401, the rebels came to control much of the countryside and many Welsh towns, even advancing to Worcester in England. Glyndwr, who had been proclaimed Prince of Wales, held two parliaments at Machynlleth in mid Wales, and allied himself with the Duke of Northumberland and and the Earl of Mortimer in a plan to dismember the English kingdom once Henry IV had been conclusively defeated. He made an alliance with France, and created two (short-lived) universities, one each in north and south Wales. However, by 1408 the tide had turned. His Northumbrian allies had been defeated and English forces retook many Welsh towns. Te rebels resorted to guerilla warfare but by 1410 Glyndwr was a fugitive and he disappears from history, his fate a mystery.
A major revolt against English rule was mounted in the early fifteenth century led by Owain Glyndwr, a member of the prosperous Welsh gentry who became embittered against the local English magnates for reasons which are uncertain, but probably owe as much to personla disputes as national sentiment. Glyndwr's rebellion achieved astonishing success, for a while. Beginning on Good Friday 1401, the rebels came to control much of the countryside and many Welsh towns, even advancing to Worcester in England. Glyndwr, who had been proclaimed Prince of Wales, held two parliaments at Machynlleth in mid Wales, and allied himself with the Duke of Northumberland and and the Earl of Mortimer in a plan to dismember the English kingdom once Henry IV had been conclusively defeated. He made an alliance with France, and created two (short-lived) universities, one each in north and south Wales. However, by 1408 the tide had turned. His Northumbrian allies had been defeated and English forces retook many Welsh towns. Te rebels resorted to guerilla warfare but by 1410 Glyndwr was a fugitive and he disappears from history, his fate a mystery.
Much as Owain Glyndwr emerged from the ranks of the Welsh gentry, so too did Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who in 1485, as a somewhat tendentious claimant to the throne of England through the Lancastrian line, led an army of disaffected English magnates to victory over the Yorkist king Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Henry became King Henry VII and the progenitor of the Tudor dynasty, the first Welsh king of England. Henry's son, Henry VIII, completed the absorption of Wales into England in 1536, when the remaining parts of Wales were formally annexed to England and 'shired' - that is, divided into counties (shires) with sheriffs and lords lieutenant, rather than being ruled as marcher lordships.
==Notes and references==
==Notes and references==