Edward didn’t conquer Wales. We let him

Antony David Davies

Edward I didn’t conquer Wales because he was clever. He conquered it because we tore each other apart.

Petty rivalries. Brother against brother. Princes hoarding power. Ambition, jealousy, betrayal. While the English Crown moved with brutal clarity, Wales splintered. And in the cracks, our freedom died.

This isn’t just a history lesson. It’s a warning.

Long before Edward’s armies built their iron ring of castles, the native princes of Wales were already fighting each other more than they were fighting England. The proud courts of Gwynedd, Deheubarth, and Powys clashed in a ceaseless cycle of internal war — sometimes even allying with the English king to undermine a rival.

We handed Edward the keys to our own downfall.

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Ruthless

Yes, Edward had money, power, and a military machine that dwarfed anything in Wales. He was one of the most ruthless and efficient monarchs of the European Middle Ages. Even a united Wales would have faced overwhelming odds. Edward’s England had wealth, manpower, and a war machine the Welsh principalities could never match. But disunity turned a monumental challenge into an impossible one. He didn’t need to deploy his full strength until we had already broken ourselves.

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd — the last sovereign Prince of Wales — knew the cost of disunity. He struggled to unite the country, earning recognition as Prince of Wales in the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267. But even then, his rule was plagued by conflict — not from England, but from within. His own brothers turned on him.

In 1282, Dafydd ap Gruffudd — Llywelyn’s younger brother — reignited conflict with the English Crown, giving Edward the pretext he needed to crush Welsh resistance. It proved a fatal turning point. That winter, Llywelyn was ambushed and killed near Builth. His head was sent to London, mounted on a pike above the Tower, crowned mockingly with ivy. A year later, Dafydd too was captured and executed — the first recorded case of hanging, drawing and quartering in British history.

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Betrayal

Wales was annexed. Our laws abolished. Our culture suppressed. Our freedom extinguished — not just by conquest, but by betrayal.

This wasn’t new. It was a pattern. In the generations before Edward’s conquest, Welsh leaders had squandered every chance at unity. The princes of Deheubarth and Gwynedd jostled for supremacy. Powys shifted alliances like weather vanes. And the Marcher Lords — backed by the Crown — were always ready to exploit our weakness.

We had the mountains. We had the warriors. We had the cause. But we did not have unity.

And in that failure, we lost a nation.

There’s a brutal honesty in that history. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes — and the same self-sabotage that doomed Llywelyn echoes in our headlines today.

Divided

Scroll through modern Welsh politics and you’ll see the same patterns. Party divisions. Petty point-scoring. Personality clashes dressed up as principle. I won’t name parties or figures — because the pattern runs deeper than that. It’s not about left or right. It’s about whether we rise together or fall divided.

Too often, the biggest threat to Welsh progress is not Westminster. It’s ourselves.

Edward didn’t have to break Wales.

He just waited for us to break each other.

And we did.

As we look to the future — to questions of independence, language, and self-determination — we must remember this. Power never yields itself freely. It must be earned — and defended — by unity of purpose. Not uniformity, but solidarity. Wales will not rise through cynicism and factionalism. It will rise when we speak as one.

We — not as individuals, but as a people across generations — have too often been our own undoing.

This is not just the story of 1282. It is the story of every generation since.

And the next chapter is being written now.

So we must ask: Will we finally learn from our past — or let Wales fall, again, not by conquest but by our own hand?

Antony David Davies FRSA is a historian of Welsh upland communities, author of Old Llyfnant Farming Families, with deep family roots in Montgomeryshire.