469 – Robert of Rhuddlan

Welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie, and this is episode 469: Robert of Riddland.

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In the space of less than a year, the Norman barons had surged deep into Wales and were further entrenching themselves using castles and other fortifications.

The scribes recording this event paint a picture of conquest and occupation.

And make no mistake about it, that was absolutely the goal of the Normans.

However, the Welsh recognized there was a wrinkle in their plan.

The Normans were not at home here.

They didn't know the landscape, and they faced a foe who fought in a manner that they weren't accustomed to.

And at the end of the day, the Normans were also outnumbered.

So sure, the Horsebros might be able to take that hill over there and plonk a castle on it, and they might be able to march into a village and oppress the people living there.

But those pockets of occupation were just that

pockets.

And all over Wales, the Welsh were talking and were organizing in the many, many places where the Normans weren't.

But that isn't to say that Wales wasn't completely unoccupied.

And up in Gwynedd, the Normans were really tightening their grip.

But at the same time, that task had been anything but easy.

You might recall that Earl Hugh of Chester had entrusted the conquest of North Wales to his nephew, Robert, who had become known as Robert of Rivlin, thanks to being dug into the Welsh region like a French-speaking tick.

But accomplishing that task had been anything but easy or simple.

Robert had tried a variety of tactics throughout his years in North Wales to try and bring the region to heel.

And the one tactic that stands out the most was his alliance with a claimant to the throne of Gwynedd named Griffith Apkunin.

You might remember Griffith from episodes 442 and 443, but I'm going to give you a quick recap.

So Griffith was the son of the exiled Kunin Ap Iago, who in turn was the son of King Iago of Gwynedd.

And the key word here is exiled.

So Griffith was the grandson of a king who was so unpopular he was kicked out of the entire kingdom.

And so, that's why he, like his father and grandfather, was living in Ireland.

But, despite that small, embarrassing detail, Griffith's mom had raised him on stories of how his granddad was a king, and how his dad should have been a king, and how that meant that Griffith was born to be a king.

And this flattering idea clearly took root.

And so when King Blethen of Gwynedd died in ten seventy five, and an extended cousin named Trahern seized the throne, Griffith saw his chance and he crossed the Irish Sea and made a play for the throne.

But at the same time, this was a guy who was born in Ireland, and who had been raised in Ireland, and whose only claim to the throne was through his grandfather who was so unpopular he got kicked out to Ireland and even worse he brought with him a bunch of mercenaries from Ireland who you know made him look even more like one hell of an outsider so he had a bit of an uphill climb here and into this situation entered Robert

He approached the would-be king and offered support.

And by support, he meant a buttload of Norman soldiers.

And Robert wasn't just making a new friend with a fellow guy who shouldn't be here.

He was seizing an opportunity.

Because in one stroke, he could remove a hostile king, King Trehern, and install a friendly puppet ruler, the would-be King Griffith, upon the throne of Gwynedd.

And this would be a king who was just as foreign as he was.

And so he would need continued Norman support if he wanted to stay on the throne.

So you can see why Robert made the offer and Griffith who needed the help took it and with Robert's support he defeated King Trahern and seized Gwyneth.

But once in power, Griffith backstabbed Robert and his Normans, like immediately.

And not in a minor way either.

He rolled in, took them by surprise, and destroyed their castle at Rivlin.

The same Rhythlin which Robert had been using as a nickname.

And this would infuriate just about anyone.

But it seems like Robert really took it on the chin.

And so from this point forward, it appears that Robert made it his personal mission to make Griffith's life hell.

And there's really no good time to make that kind of enemy.

But Griffith had barely even sat on the throne, and already he had the eternal hatred of both Trehern and Robert of Ridlin.

That was incredibly bad timing, because it turned out that Griffith, well, now King Griffith, wasn't that great at controlling his Irish mercs, who had recently set about doing all the kinds of things that mercs often do.

And the Welsh, angered by the abuse that they were suffering at the hands of the Irish soldiers, immediately turned against Griffith, and, like his grandfather, he found himself exiled, and Trehern retook the throne.

But Griffith wasn't going to accept that fate and just retire to Ireland.

He was going to break that family tradition.

And so he returned to Wales, and this time he had a different supporter.

His name was Rhys Aptudor, and he was a claimant to the throne of De Highbarth.

And together they marched upon King Trehern.

But they weren't the only ones who could get allies.

Trehern had also been making friends, and his forces were bolstered by Norman troops, because apparently unnamed Normans, probably Robert of Rivlin, were still mad about that earlier betrayal.

But at the end of the day, Norman troops weren't enough, and Griffith and Rhys defeated their rivals, killed them in battle, battle, and seized control of both Gwynedd and De Highbarth.

And that?

Well, that didn't sit all that well with the Normans.

And I'm guessing that Robert of Rithland, in particular, was absolutely incensed.

And so they began an aggressive push back into Gwynedd.

And so Griffith pretty quickly was once again up against a wall.

And then Robert's uncle, Earl Hugh of Chester, reached out and invited the king to sit down and try and settle the conflict.

And King Griffith happily agreed.

But when he arrived, Earl Hugh wasn't there.

Instead, there were a bunch of soldiers who captured the Welsh king and chucked him into one of Hugh's prisons in Chester.

And at this point, Robert was probably all, f yeah, Uncle Hugh.

And then he, along with Uncle Hugh, surged into Gwynedd, occupied huge portions of it, built castles all over the place, and generally made a nuisance of themselves.

All the while, Griffith was rotting away in that prison in Chester.

And at this point, I'm guessing that Robert assumed he had won, and that Griffith would die in that prison, probably sooner rather than later, due to the appalling conditions of medieval prisons.

But it turns out that the Hiberno-Welsh king was surprisingly healthy, and so for the last dozen or so years, he he had been insisting on staying alive, which is just frankly rude.

And then, as salt in the wound, in 1093, Griffith had the temerity to escape.

Which brings us back to where we're at in the story.

And this tale comes to us from Orderk Vitalis.

So you know we're going to get some spilled tea here.

So Orderic opens up by telling us that Robert, who at this point was stationed at his castle of Deganway, was absolutely consumed with greed and a lust for power, and he was engaging in, quote, indiscriminate pillage and slaughter, end quote, in Wales.

So right off the bat, we're not looking at a hero here.

But it also means that he wasn't safely holed up in his castle.

Instead, based on the descriptions, it sounds like he was much closer to the area of probably Flandedno, where there would be more more Welsh people that he could push around.

But at the same time, he was still a French noble.

And so while Robert might have been driven by greed and ambition, he wasn't going to let that get in the way of his even bigger drive, namely, the desire for a comfy lifestyle.

So while his men were out there working, which I assume involved stealing lunches from the locals, Robert was catching up on his beauty sleep.

I kid you not, Orderick records that he was taking, quote, his noonday sleep, end quote.

And as Robert attended to his self-care, three ships landed at the base of Great Orm, and a large band of raiders hopped off.

Suddenly, Robert's siesta was interrupted by the sounds of chaos coming from the nearby community.

And this is why I'm assuming that he was in or near Thlandedno, because Great Orme was over three miles from Robert's castle.

And while medieval life wasn't as loud as our modern lives, three miles is still a very long way for a voice to travel, especially for it to travel far enough to wake you up from a nap.

And so, in a lucky break for Robert, he was close enough to know that something was going down.

But in a less lucky break, he left his armor back at the castle.

And he also only had a few of his men on hand.

You see, the tricky thing about occupation and suppression of the public is that it requires your forces to be spread out.

They need to be omnipresent to the population that's being dominated, which tends to work pretty well until there's a coordinated attack.

And now that there was one here, Robert needed fighters.

And so he dispatched messengers and ordered them to summon all of his vassals in the district to muster.

But, not wanting to lose time, and perhaps not wanting to get caught out by the raiders, Robert gathered the few soldiers that he had on hand and dragged his thankfully well-rested butt up to the top of Great Orme, so he could personally see what was going on.

And once at the top of the hill, he could see the raiders far below him, and they were driving cattle and even bound captive peasants onto their ships.

And given the details in Orderic's account, there also must have been some sort of heraldry on the ships or something else that was identifiable.

Because it became obvious that this wasn't just any raiding band.

These pirates were being led by Griffith fing Apkunen, the same guy who was supposed to be rotting away in Uncle Hugh's prison.

But instead, here he was capturing his peasants and stealing his cattle.

Robert lost it.

And he screamed at his men, demanding that they advance right now on Griffith and his Welsh raiders.

And his men were all, no, eh,

eh, no.

And, you know, for good reason.

They were terribly outnumbered.

And even worse, Robert and his band of bros weren't even wearing armor, which, you know, obviously, it was nap time.

So the fellas wanted to wait for reinforcements to arrive.

And at any rate, the tide was out, which means the ships were beached in the sand and they weren't going anywhere until high tide.

And besides, did they mention that they have no armor?

Robert needed to be chill for a minute.

But Robert was in no mood to chill.

He wanted blood.

And he roared at his men like a lion.

Like, literally, that's how Orderic describes Robert's behavior behavior on the hill.

But despite going full Mufasa, only one man, some poor guy named Osburn, agreed to join him in an attack.

So, you know, prudence would suggest that maybe Robert should wait.

But no, two guys was more than enough for Robert.

And so the two of them, quote, scrambled down the mountainside, end quote, armed with nothing more than a sword, a shield, and lapel de Vide.

Meanwhile, down on the beach, Griffith and his fellows were watching this whole thing perplexed.

Are they really launching an attack?

With two people?

Dressed in casual daywear?

But as they got closer, it became quite clear that, yep, that was exactly what they were going to do.

So the raiders shrugged, grabbed their spears, and waited.

As soon as the Normans were in range, they hurled those spears.

Osborne was killed on the spot.

But Robert managed to hunker down behind his shield quickly enough to avoid being impaled you know, at least at first.

But at the same time, he was one dude hiding behind a shield, and there were a lot of Welshmen, and they still had plenty of spears.

Now Robert may have hoped that they would advance upon him so that he could fight them with his sword, but that would have been stupid.

So the raiders just kept chucking spears at him.

And watching this, from on top of the hill, Robert's men saw their commander curl behind his shield, trying to take shelter under this barrage of spears, like Hans Solo crouching in a doorway on Endor.

Except, this was real life, and in real life, that doesn't work.

And so they could only look on as the inevitable happened, and Robert was pierced by a spear, and then another,

and then he collapsed.

And only then did the Welshman advance upon the Norman commander.

He was out of sight for a moment, obscured by the crowd.

And then some one lifted up his head.

They carried it to the lead ship of Griffith's fleet, and they tied it to the mast as a trophy.

The Norman soldiers were horrified and enraged, but they knew that if they attacked, they would suffer the same fate as Osborne and Robert.

So all they could do is sit there as Griffith and his men continued to load captives, cattle, and stolen booty onto their ships.

And then the tide began to rise, and their beat ships began to be freed.

And only then, finally,

did the Norman reinforcements arrive.

And thankfully, these guys were armed, armored, and in numbers sufficient to launch an attack.

But Griffith and his men were already putting out to sea.

But no matter, the Normans had ships too, and they were in no mood to quit here, so they rushed to their own ships and gave chase.

And soon, out at sea, Griffith and his men heard the sound of men screaming in French, and they turned around to notice that they were being followed.

But Griffith and his men were pirates.

They knew these ships and these seas, whereas the Normans, bless'em, were horsebros.

There was no chance that they would catch up.

This just wasn't where their experience lay.

But they did seem pretty upset.

So Griffith decided to throw them a bone and soothe their anger.

Well, not so much a bone as a skull, chucking Robert's head into the sea.

And Orderic says that after collecting Robert's head, the Normans turned their ship around and headed back to shore.

Now, we're gonna pause here because this detail raised a question in my mind.

A question that resulted in a bunch of online searches that absolutely put me on some kind of watch list.

Do severed heads float?

And eventually I found the answer on Reddit, because of course I did.

Someone had actually done the math, and so unless Robert's head was lacking in density, it wouldn't have floated.

Not even in seawater, which is denser than freshwater.

And honestly, when it comes to density, Robert's charge down Great Orme suggests that he was probably among the most dense men in all of England.

So, unless the Norman army included gifted freedivers, Orderic must have gotten something wrong here.

And I should note that Orderk wasn't a fan of Griffith.

So he might have been burnishing this story a little bit and adding in a beheading tale to really hammer home that Griffith was a jerk.

But at the same time, he would need to explain why Robert's body later had a head when it was buried.

Or maybe there really was a beheading, but it wasn't quite as cinematic as Orderic felt it should be.

Or maybe they never got the head back, and they needed to do a bit of switcheroo before the burial.

I really don't know, but today I learned that human heads don't float.

And now you know that too.

Which is more than we could say for Orderic.

But however it happened, Robert's remaining soldiers brought his body to Chester, where it was interred at a monastery that was constructed by his uncle, Earl Hugh Lupus.

And Earl Hugh,

whew,

he was not pleased about this.

Not at all.

And neither was King Rufus.

Now, we have records of Rufus residing at Gloucester in the spring, summer, and winter of 1093, which means he was sitting on the border of Wales during all of the Norman advances into Wales during that year.

And yet, we don't have any records of him actually going into Wales for those campaigns, nor do we have any records of him organizing a response to the killing of Robert of Rivlin.

And the only explanation that makes any sense to me about this is that he was still sick.

Whatever had taken him down earlier does appear to have been quite serious, and it seems likely that it either persisted or left him debilitated in some way for quite some time.

And his lack of involvement in Wales seems very much like a sign of that, because I find it very hard to imagine that Rufus would have missed the chance to march on Wales or march on Scotland.

And so something must have kept him at home.

So that's my take on it.

But whatever the reason, the king didn't go into Wales, and instead Rufus gave Earl Hugh command of North Wales.

But that appointment was a bit of a poison pill, because while we can quibble over the buoyancy of recently severed heads, one thing that is not in dispute is the fact that the Northern Welsh thought that what Griffith had just done was fing awesome.

And I know, right now you're probably thinking to yourself, really?

He was taking Welsh slaves and stealing Welsh cattle.

Why would the Welsh think that was cool?

Well,

probably a couple reasons.

First, it was in a region that was controlled by Robert of Rithlin, and they hated Robert of Rithlin.

And it's a pretty common thing for people to blame the public for the tyrants who are ruling over them.

Or so I'm told.

There's also the fact that the idea of a broad Welsh national identity was still catching on.

There had only been one king of all of Wales, and a lot of folks in Wales weren't convinced that that was a great idea in the first place.

People were still pretty regional, clannish even, and almost all of the Welsh weren't from Flandidno.

Conversely, these Normans were all over the place, and no one was pleased about that.

And this Griffith Afkunig guy was out there lopping off heads and making them into pool toys.

So the Welsh were pretty thrilled about that.

And so were Griffith's Irish friends.

You know, not because they had any interest in being freedom fighters, but because there were good raiding opportunities in a war like this.

And so Griffith's army swelled.

And he began laying siege to Norman fortresses faster than Earl Hugh could respond.

And Castel Apathliniog was one of the fortresses that fell to Griffith's army, with over a hundred Normans reported being killed within it.

And when that castle fell, Anglesey was liberated, and it became a bastion of rebellious activity.

The Normans weren't invincible after all, nor were their wooden Mottenbailey castles.

And the Northern Welsh, under their newly reinstalled King Griffith Apkunin of Gwynedd, had cracked the code, and Earl Hugh was rapidly losing control of pretty much the entirety of northern Wales.

And the central and southern Welsh began to take notice and started making plans of their own.

But life marches on, and it doesn't pause just because things are getting hard to follow.

And that was the case in the late 11th century, too.

And so, while all of this was going on, back in Normandy, Duke Robert was having a hell of a time.

You see, he was surrounded by a murderous group of backstabbing jerks.

And this was a group that you might have even heard of.

They went by the gang name, the Norman Barons.

And they were launching rebellions, one after another.

And Robert couldn't even take solace in the times when they weren't rebelling, because that just meant that they were probably planning their next rebellion.

It was an absolute mess.

And that's before you get into all the problems that were being caused by Robert's neighbors, which even included the King of France.

So Duke Robert was barely hanging on.

And here is the thing that was really eating away at him.

Rufus was supposed to be helping him out with this.

He swore he would, in fact.

There were oaths and a whole treaty hammered out detailing how he was supposed to help.

But where was he?

Vacationing in Gloucester?

This was ridiculous.

So Duke Robert sent a messenger to Rufus, who arrived in court during the king's Christmas celebration.

And the messenger, probably sweating a little, told this famously violent and unstable king that his brother, Duke Robert of Normandy, quote, would no longer observe the peace which they had concluded between them.

Moreover, he called him perfidious and perjured if he would not fulfill the agreement which had been made between them in Normandy.

⁇

So basically, get your ass over here and help or buckle up for another war, you lying dick.

Happy Christmas!

But speaking of war, Scotland had one too.

See, Duncan, the son of Malcolm Canmore and, more critically, the Norman sympathizer, had marched into Scotland at the head of an Anglo-Norman army, intent on deposing his uncle, the newly installed King Donald III.

Now, King Donald was not without supporters.

And so when he heard of his nephew's arrival, he mustered an army and he met them in battle.

Now, unfortunately, I couldn't for the life of me find a detailed account of that battle.

But the records agree that Duncan and his Anglo-Norman army prevailed in in the field, and Donald was forced to flee into the highlands.

And this allowed Duncan to bring his forces to Schoon, where he was soon crowned as King Duncan II.

Though, thanks to those oaths of fealty that he swore before he even set out on this campaign, he was less King Duncan II and more of Under King Duncan II, subject to Rufus.

And remember, the Scots were so irritated by foreign influence in their politics that they had even ousted all of Malcolm's sons.

And they were sons who were born in Scotland and had been raised in Scotland and who understood Scottish culture.

Whereas this new King Duncan II had been raised in Normandy, was a literal Norman knight, was the sworn vassal of the Norman King of England, had seized control of Scotland through the use of English and Norman troops, and was now continuing to use those troops to subdue the Scots and cement his hold on the kingdom, meaning his Norman lords hold on the kingdom.

And uh,

well, the Scots had some opinions about that.

And so did Duncan's uncle, Donald.

And plans were being hatched.

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Thanks for listening.