This Man, Whose Surname Gam Signifies
Crooked, Was A Petty Chieftain Of Breconshire.
He was small of
stature and deformed in person, though possessed of great strength.
He was very sensitive of injury, though quite as alive to kindness;
a thorough-going enemy and a thorough-going friend. In the earlier
part of his life he had been driven from his own country for
killing a man, called Big Richard of Slwch, in the High Street of
Aber Honddu or Brecon, and had found refuge in England and kind
treatment in the house of John of Gaunt, for whose son Henry,
generally called Bolingbroke, he formed one of his violent
friendships. Bolingbroke, on becoming King Henry the Fourth, not
only restored the crooked little Welshman to his possessions, but
gave him employments of great trust and profit in Herefordshire.
The insurrection of Glendower against Henry was quite sufficient to
kindle against him the deadly hatred of Dafydd, who swore "by the
nails of God" that he would stab his countryman for daring to rebel
against his friend King Henry, the son of the man who had received
him in his house and comforted him when his own countrymen were
threatening his destruction. He therefore went to Machynlleth with
the full intention of stabbing Glendower, perfectly indifferent as
to what might subsequently be his own fate. Glendower, however,
who had heard of his threat, caused him to be seized and conducted
in chains to a prison which he had in the mountains of Sycharth.
Shortly afterwards, passing through Breconshire with his host, he
burnt Dafydd's house - a fair edifice called the Cyrnigwen,
situated on a hillock near the river Honddu - to the ground, and
seeing one of Gam's dependents gazing mournfully on the smouldering
ruins he uttered the following taunting englyn:-
"Shouldst thou a little red man descry
Asking about his dwelling fair,
Tell him it under the bank doth lie,
And its brow the mark of the coal doth bear."
Dafydd remained confined till the fall of Glendower, shortly after
which event he followed Henry the Fifth to France, where he
achieved that glory which will for ever bloom, dying, covered with
wounds, on the field of Agincourt after saving the life of the
king, to whom in the dreadest and most critical moment of the fight
he stuck closer than a brother, not from any abstract feeling of
loyalty, but from the consideration that King Henry the Fifth was
the son of King Henry the Fourth, who was the son of the man who
received and comforted him in his house, after his own countrymen
had hunted him from house and land.
Connected with Machynlleth is a name not so widely celebrated as
those of Glendower and Dafydd Gam, but well known to and cherished
by the lovers of Welsh song. It is that of Lawdden, a Welsh bard
in holy orders, who officiated as priest at Machynlleth from 1440
to 1460. But though Machynlleth was his place of residence for
many years, it was not the place of his birth, Lychwr in
Carmarthenshire being the spot where he first saw the light.
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