Beauty of shape of Snowdon—Vortigern retreated to it—Story of his castle—Merlin—S. Germanus—The last Llewelyn—Dolbadarn—Owen and David—Treachery—David Gam—Topography of the Snowdon district—Glacial action—The great red sea—Llanberis—Church rights a family matter—Married clergy—Beddgelert—The legend of the hound—Whence it came and how it grew—Capel Curig—Curig visits Brittany.

SNOWDON is a topic to be approached with hesitation and reluctance, because it has been so much and so well written about that it is not easy to describe the mountain without a sense of falling behind others who have done the work superlatively well. It is therefore advisable to touch only on such topics as have been passed over by other writers, or not dealt with fully by them.

Snowdon compared with the Alps is of course inconsiderable, so far as altitude goes; so is Pilatus, but Snowdon shares with this latter the supreme beauty of shape, and it surpasses Pilatus in that it does not stand near giants as those of the Oberland. And hugeness is not of the essence of beauty. No one looking on Snowdon can deny that it is a mountain in its majesty, and that in form it is absolutely perfect.

Snowdon, or Eryri as it is called by the Welsh, has served as a fastness to which the hard-pressed princes of Gwynedd could retreat before the overwhelming power of England. It was an impregnable stronghold, and the Norman or English could not penetrate to it, and could only hope to starve into surrender those who took refuge there. It could not be approached through broad valleys. It is reached only by ravines. It was possible at any time for those sheltering in its recesses to collect unobserved and swoop down on a town or castle where the defenders were few. To Snowdon Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu, or Vortigern, retreated before the angry and resentful British, who laid upon him the blame of calling in the aid of the Jutes and Saxons, although he had only so done as the mouthpiece of their general council.

Nennius tells a strange story of the founding by him of a castle in Snowdon.

The History of the Britons that passes under the name of Nennius was composed in Alclud, or Dumbarton, about the year 679. It was re-edited by one Nennius in or about 796, and it underwent a second redaction by Samuel in Buallt, or Builth, later again, about 810.

The story of Vortigern and his castle in Snowdon is compounded of two distinct legends that have been clumsily put together. It is to this effect. Vortigern desired to erect a residence for himself in Eryri, but met with difficulties over the foundations. He consulted his Druids, and they recommended him to bury under the wall a fatherless child whose parentage was unknown. The laying of the foundations with a human victim was a common form of pagan superstition. The reason for selecting a child of unknown parentage was to avoid the risk of a blood-feud, should one be taken from a tribe of which he was an acknowledged member. After some seeking, a brat was discovered that answered the requirements, and he was brought before Vortigern, where he announced to the king that the real reason why his foundations gave way was that they were laid in a swamp, and that in the swamp were two reptiles engaged in incessant conflict. Then he proceeded to declare that these creatures symbolised the Briton and the Saxon, that although the latter seemed to prevail, in the end the Briton would obtain the mastery and expel the other from the land.

The story goes on, with curious inconsequence, to relate that the boy informed Vortigern that he was named Ambrose, and was the son of a Roman consul; and then taking a high hand he ordered the king to depart and leave the fortress and the better portion of his kingdom to himself, and Vortigern meekly submitted. But the story gets still further tangled up, for Ambrose is made to be one with Merlin the prophet and enchanter.

Now, although the story as it reads is in a muddle, it is possible to disentangle the threads, and, moreover, to restore a substratum of truth that has been disturbed by the importation of foreign matter. The incident of the reptiles and the prophecy must be eliminated as belonging to a legend of Merlin. Vortigern, it would seem, after popular feeling had turned against him, fell back on the pagan party, which was still strong in country places, whereas the Romano-British towns were wholly Christian. That he actually did have recourse to the pagan practice of burying a child alive under the foundations of his castle, or of sprinkling them with its blood, is probable enough under the circumstances. The practice did not die out for some time. From this fortress Vortigern was obliged to withdraw through the defection of his followers, and it was seized by Ambrose, who was at the head of the opposed faction. He had been raised to lead the revolt because descended from one of the Roman emperors—in fact, from Maximus, who had married Elen.

Ambrose was supported by S. Germanus, who excommunicated Vortigern and called down the vengeance of Heaven on his head.

The palace of Vortigern is now called Dinas Emrys, or that of Ambrose, and it rises above Llyn Dinas—some mounds indicate the site—on the summit of an insulated hill surrounded by woods. It would be most interesting to explore this spot with pick and spade—not in quest of the child’s bones under the foundation-stone, nor of the reptiles, but in the hopes of finding personal ornaments and weapons of the period of Vortigern and Ambrose, for such are most scanty and rare in our museums.

Merlin, or, as the Welsh call him, Myrddin or Merddin, was the son of Morfryn, and he was actually engaged in conflict against his own brother-in-law Rhydderch Hael in the north of Britain; Rhydderch being the leader of the Christian Britons, Merlin threw himself into the opposed party, which was pagan, headed by Gwenddolew, and was defeated in a great battle at Arderydd, now Arthuret, in 573.

To Snowdon twice retreated Llewelyn, the last Prince of Wales of the House of Cunedda.

If it served the Welsh princes as a refuge, it was also of use to them as a prison, in which they could hold their most dangerous adversaries, and the tower of Dolbadarn at the foot of Llyn Peris was their gaol. The most noted of those who were there confined was Owen the Red, brother of Llewelyn ab Gruffydd. On the death of David, son of Llewelyn the Great, in 1246, the Welsh of Gwynedd chose the brothers Owen and Llewelyn as joint kings to rule over them and lead them against the English. It was an injudicious choice, for in Wales in a royal family a man’s worst foes were those of his own household, and the electors might have foreseen that these brothers would ere long fly at each other’s throat. The two princes had a brother David, who was dissatisfied at being left out in the cold, and he hasted to the court of King Henry III. to obtain his assistance against his successful brothers. The King was delighted to have an excuse for fomenting fratricidal war in Wales, and he flattered and encouraged David, who began to intrigue with Owen against Llewelyn. Suddenly, in 1255, these two brothers raised the standard of revolt, but Llewelyn was on his guard, and he captured both of them and slew many of their followers.

Owen, as the more dangerous, was sent to Dolbadarn, and was immured there for twenty years; but David was liberated in 1258, as he feigned the profoundest contrition.

But David only waited his opportunity, and he entered into a secret arrangement with Owen, prince of Powys, to murder his brother Llewelyn, so that he might secure the crown of Gwynedd. In order to further this plot, David recommended Llewelyn to invite the prince of Powys to a great banquet at Aberffraw, to be followed by hunting parties in MÔn. This was in 1275. Llewelyn, unsuspecting treachery, agreed. Prince Owen arrived, but his retinue, on which he relied for obtaining the mastery of the palace, in the confusion consequent on the murder, was detained by bad weather and the impassability of the roads. David was alarmed. He suspected that Owen of Powys purposed betraying him, and he took to flight.

Llewelyn, perplexed at the disappearance of David, questioned Owen, who made full confession of the plot. The conspirators intended to have surrounded the bedroom of Llewelyn in the night, and to have assassinated him in his sleep.

The Prince of Wales, on learning all particulars, cited David to appear before him and answer to the charge of high treason; but David declined to attend, and, collecting a body of armed men, fell on and ravaged portions of his brother’s territory, and when Llewelyn marched to chastise him he fled to the court of Edward I., who received him favourably.

In 1277 Edward invaded Wales, and was greatly assisted by David, who knew the country and the people, and was able to foment jealousies among the Welsh chieftains, and cripple Llewelyn in his resistance to the advance of the invader, by detaching them from his allegiance. Owen the Red from his prison contrived to send to Edward his best wishes for his success.

Llewelyn was now obliged to take refuge in Snowdon, and was forced to come to terms with Edward, and by these terms he was compelled to release Owen. After this we hear little more of this red-haired fox, and it is probable that his long captivity had broken his health.

Now the false and fickle David deserted Edward, and went over to the side of Llewelyn, actuated, not by patriotism, but by self-interest.

In 1282 King Edward again invaded Wales, but his advance was checked at Conway. He accordingly sent a fleet to effect the subjugation of Anglesey, and to form that a base for operations against Llewelyn in Snowdon. Having succeeded in this, Edward exclaimed exultantly, “Now I have plucked the finest feather out of Llewelyn’s tail.”

Llewelyn, hard pressed in Snowdon, left that stronghold to be defended by David, whilst he hastened south to rally the Welsh under the prince of Dynevor. He fell into an ambush, as has been already related, and was killed. David was captured, and hanged, drawn, and quartered. Another prisoner detained in Dolbadarn was David Gam of Brecon, who tried to assassinate Owen Glyndwr. But about him more when we come to Machynlleth.

To understand the topography of the Snowdon district we must conceive of Snowdon itself as shaped much like a star-fish with the radiating arms curved, and little lakes lying in the hollows between the ridges. The entire mass, however, forms a rude triangle with its base at Llyn Dinas and Llyn Gwynant and the pass of Bwlch-y-Gwyddel, the neck that attaches Snowdon to the stately mountain mass of Moel Siabod. North of Llyn Padarn and Llanberis is again a great mountain bulk.

The geology of Snowdon is too complicated for the unscientific eye to understand and unravel, but broadly it may be described as eruptive matter breaking through the Cambrian slates. These slates are the best in England, though their purple tinge is unpleasant to the eye, and the silvery grey is far more grateful. The slate quarries find employment for armies of workmen, but are detrimental to the beauty of the scenery, the mountain-sides being sliced and hacked and hewn into, and over the hideous piles of dÉbris it will take thousands of years for the grass to grow.

Even the uninitiated eye will soon be able to detect the traces of glacial action in scored rocks as the great ice rivers moved over them, scratching them with the stones embodied in the frozen stream, in the fragmentary moraines, and in the eratic blocks.

Once, in that cold remote age, the sea, a red sea, swept from the mouth of the Dee over Cheshire, Staffordshire, Herefordshire, to the estuary of the Severn. Wales was a great mountainous island with glaciers rolling down the valleys, discharging their mighty rivers of ice into it. The Wrekin stood up above the waters, and the waves leaped about it. The great rollers from the north plunged and shivered into foam against Wenlock Edge. The swirls formed the pools that are now still basins full of carp around Ellesmere; it deposited its salt in the beds whence the brine is pumped at Droitwich and in Cheshire. Rafts of ice broken off from the glacier, descending the valleys of the Dee, the Severn, and the Wye, drifted about till they melted, tilted, and discharged their burdens of stone, brought from the Welsh mountains, over the sea bed, so that now these are found strewn around Birmingham and Bromley, scattered over the Clent and Lickey Hills.

Snowdon, unhappily, is fond of wearing his cloud-cap, that Tarn-Kappe of Northern mythology which was supposed to make him invisible who donned it. In the Niebelungen Lied, one of the four greatest epic poems the world has produced, when Gunther, the Burgundian king, goes to court, Brunehild of Iceland, the virago, informs him she will have none but such as can overmaster her in hurling and in leaping. Siegfried dons the mist-cap, and puts his hand behind that of Gunther to assist him in casting the spear and pitching the stone, and he takes him in his arms to leap, and so wins the bride for Gunther. And dear old Snowdon with his mist-cap on has baffled the forces of Norman and English again and again as he hugged to his heart the gallant but outnumbered Welsh. It was not the rugged heights or the impenetrable ravines alone that bewildered and held back the invader, but the cap of cloud which Snowdon drew over the refugees who clung to him for safety. Standing forward, and looking over the western sea, Snowdon attracts the vapours, and they are fortunate who, ascending it, can see from its summit the glorious panorama of tossed mountain ridges and jewelled lakes surrounding it.

And now a few words relative to those places whence the visitor to Snowdon will explore this beautiful neighbourhood.

Llanberis, much given over to slate quarrying, takes its name from a certain Peris, “Cardinal of Rome,” of whom scarcely anything but the name is known, not even his pedigree,[2] and that means a great deal, or rather did so, till the Normans came into Wales and upset the ecclesiastical order there.

Achau y Saint was the Who’s Who of the Welsh Church. Now when an ecclesiastic founded a church and obtained land around it, constituting what we may call his parish, that church and parish became the hereditary property of his family. It was accordingly of first importance to establish who he was, and who were his blood relations. Thenceforth every pater-familias of his family had rights to land in the benefice, be he layman or cleric. All the land in the parish belonged to the family of the saint. To establish a right to land in it a man had to prove his descent; consequently, next to fixing the pedigree of the founder came the preservation of the genealogies of the descendants.

It did not in the least matter whether they were in Holy Orders or not, they had hereditary rights in the benefice. If among them there were one, two, or even a dozen, who were clerics, all these clerics were co-rectors—that is to say, they had their rights to land in the parish as kinsmen of the saintly founder. What they received in their clerical capacity were surplice dues. Gerald the Welshman, who lived in the twelfth century, speaks of it as an “infamous custom.” No doubt it did not work well. There was no responsible priest with the cure of souls. Some one or other of the tribe who was in sacred orders celebrated divine service and administered the sacraments, but all went on in a hugger-mugger way. Gerald speaks of parishes with several rectors. Even bishoprics passed from father to son. Archbishop Peckham, in his visitation in 1284, complained that this custom was ruinous to the well-being of the Church. As all the householders of an ecclesiastical tribe lived on the proceeds of the benefice, there was scarcely enough coming in to the share of the actual priest who ministered, to support him. The principle of co-ownership in land prevailed in the secular tribes, and it extended to the ecclesiastical tribes as well, that is to say, to those of the saint’s kin living about the church on Church lands. Gerald says:—

“The Church has almost as many parsons or parties as there are principal men in the parish, and the sons, after the decease of their fathers, succeed to the ecclesiastical benefices, not by election, but by hereditary right; and if a bishop should dare to presume to appoint or to institute anyone else, the people would most certainly revenge the injury on the institution or the instituted.”

It was probably to get rid of this mischievous custom that the Norman conquerors and the English barons who occupied castles in Wales turned such benefices as they could lay their hands on into vicarages under monasteries. Then the abbots or priors appointed some of their monks to minister in these parishes, and these men were entirely detached from all family ties in the place, and could attend to its spiritual charge and to that only. But till this new order of things came in—and it came in slowly and by degrees, and was forced on a reluctant people—the genealogies of the saints and of their kin were preserved with the utmost care. People were much more anxious to remember their pedigrees than the stories of the lives of the founders. The pedigrees were the title deeds to the enjoyment of valuable rights to land and other endowments.

In the Latin Church a saint was remembered for what he had done, for his holy life; in the Celtic Church all that was nothing—he was valued for the land he had acquired, and which he transmitted to his posterity.

In the Welsh Church, saints, bishops, abbots, clergy, as a rule, were married, and took care to transmit their benefices parcelled up among their sons. When the Latin ecclesiastics condescended to write the lives of the Celtic saints they suppressed this fact. Thus Gildas the historian, Abbot of Ruys, and a reformer of the Irish Church after the reaction to paganism that followed the death of Patrick and his devoted band, was a married man, and the father of some half a dozen children. He had two biographers. Neither says a word about this; each asserts that from boyhood he was “crucified to the world and the world to him”; that he “scorned transitory things,” and lived a life of severe self-abnegation. His son Cenydd, or Keneth, was a hermit in Gower, and he also had wife and family. But those terrible genealogies, so carefully preserved by the Welsh, tell us facts not quite in harmony with the statements of these “Lives,” just as parish registers and the wills in probate courts make sad havoc of some of the pedigrees of our gentle families as given in “Burke” and in county histories.

Beddgelert is visited annually by a crowd of tourists, who drop a tear on the grave of Llewelyn’s faithful hound. Who Celer was, who has given a name to the place, is not known. Llewelyn may have had a dog called Kill-hart, as we shall see presently, that was true and dear to him, and the beast may have been buried here—that is possible enough; but the story of the death of Gelert, killed by his master in mistake, is not true—it is an importation. The full legend as connected with Beddgelert appears first of all in Jones’s Musical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (ed. 1794, p. 75) about a dog, Cylart, at Beddgelert. Then came Spencer’s poem, Beth-Gelert, or the Grave of the Greyhound, which was first printed privately as a broadsheet in 1800, when it was composed. He says: “The story of this ballad is traditionary in a village at the foot of Snowdon, where Llewelyn the Great had a house. The greyhound named Gelert was given him by his father-in-law, King John, in the year 1205.” This is taken straight out of the note of Jones, date and all. We may well inquire what was Jones’s authority. The legend had found its way into Wales at least in the sixteenth century, for there is an englyn, in a MS. written in that century, to Llewelyn’s hound, Kilhart, “when it was buried at Beddgelert”; and the legend occurs as one of the pseudonymous Allegories, or Fables of Catwg Ddoeth, in the Iolo MSS., written about the same century, and, as all the other documents there, in the South Welsh dialect. It is there entitled, “The Man who killed his Greyhound.” It is therein connected with a man “who formerly lived at Abergarwan.” The tale—infant in cradle, a greyhound, a wolf—is given complete, and one of the popular sayings it gave currency to—“As sorry as the man who killed his greyhound”—is found in most collections of Welsh proverbs. As to the allegories of Catwg Ddoeth, the collection was itself an importation from the popular mediÆval volume The Sayings of Cato the Wise, and it was foisted on S. Cadog of Llancarfan.

With respect to the grave of the greyhound at Beddgelert, Professor Rhys says that there are still alive old men there who remember and can testify to having seen the cairn erected by the landlord of the Goat Inn.

We have, then, the story traced so far. It was brought into Wales in one of the popular collections of tales that circulated in the Middle Ages; then it was applied to some man, nameless, at Abergarwan, in South Wales. Then it attached itself to Llewelyn; Jones took the englyn, invented the date and the fable that it was presented by King John to Llewelyn. Next, Spencer composed the ballad which at once became popular, and finally the innkeeper at Beddgelert manufactured the grave of the dog. But let us go a little further back, and track the still earlier history of the tale.

It appears first of all in the Pantschatantra, a collection of stories made in Sanskrit (in India) some centuries before the Christian era. It was translated into Syriac under the title of Kalilah and Dimna. This was rendered into Arabic under the Calif Almansor (754-775), and by this means spread and became a popular story-book throughout the Mussulman world. It was translated into Persian in or about 1150, and into Greek by Simon Seth about 1080, and by John of Capua into Latin about 1270. In Spain it had been rendered out of Arabic by Raymond of Beziers in 1255, and it became a source of many collections of tales, as that of the Seven Wise Masters and the Gesta Romanorum, that circulated in the Middle Ages throughout the Western world.

The story of the faithful beast slain by its master through a hasty conclusion that it had devoured his son is found in Thibet, in Russia—almost everywhere in Asia and in Europe.

In its original form in the Pantschatantra it stands thus:—

“The wife of a Brahmin had an ichneumon in the house, as well as a child. One day she was about to go to the well to draw water, and she said to her husband, ‘Look sharply after the baby whilst I am away, lest the ichneumon do it a mischief.’ But the man went off begging, and neglected his charge. In the meanwhile a venomous black serpent approached the crib, and the ichneumon flew at it and killed it. Then the creature ran out, with its mouth bloody, to meet the woman as she returned from the well. When she saw the animal with its jaws dripping with gore she rushed to the conclusion that it had killed her son, and threw the pail at it and crushed the life out of it.”

An ichneumon was not an animal known in Europe, and so the translators changed it into any beast that they thought would serve—as a cat, a weasel, or a dog—and some vaguely describe it as a “domestic beast.” The oldest form of the local legend is found in a MS. dated 1592. This relates that the Princess Joan, natural daughter of King John, and wife of Llewelyn the Great, brought a noble staghound with her from England, and that the dog was one day fatally wounded by a horn-thrust when on a chase. In another MS. of the same period the dog is called Kilhart, and this seems to have been its real, an English, name, “Kill-hart.”

Capel Curig takes its designation from S. Curig; he departed by Cornwall to Brittany. In Cornwall and Wales the Latin clergy speedily displaced him from the churches he had founded, and put Cyriacus, a boy martyr of Tarsus, into his room.

But he has been better respected in his adopted land. At Perros-Guirec is his oratory on a rock in the bay, to which he was wont to retire from visitors and troublesome distractions, to read, meditate, and pray. The tide flows around the rock, so that Curig was cut off from interference by dancing waves. The wonderful spire of Kreisker at S. Pol de LÉon is attached to a chapel that he is reported to have founded, and it is regarded as the finest in Brittany.