P1: Y CROES NAID INTRODUCTION - CAMPAIGNING MATERIAL.

http://anghofio.blogspot.com/2011/12/1282-great-betrayal-great-traitor.html

CASTELL MADRYN AND THE STOLEN NATIONAL TREASURES OF GWYNEDD 1283 – 1284.

THE CAPTURE OF DAFYDD III IN AREA OF ABERGWYNGREGYN MEHEFIN 1283 AND HIS EXECUTION BY MEANS OF BEING HUNG, DRAWN AND QUARTED ON 3 HYDREF 1283 IN SHREWSBURY IS VERY MUCH ASSOCIATED WITH THE DESIRE OF EDWARD I TO NOT ONLY CONQUOR GWYNEDD AND SUBDUE IT’S NATIVE PRINCES BUT ALSO TO LOOT THE ROYAL TREASURES OF GWYNEDD. AT START OF THE WAR OF 1282 – 83 LLYWELYN III HAD THE ROYAL TREASURES STORED AT CASTELL MADRYN ON THE LLEYN PENINSULAR IN KEEPING OF HIS ELDER BROTHER OWAIN. SUBSEQUENTLY WITH  DEATH OF LLYWELYN III (ABEREDW 11 RHAGFYR 1282) ANDLATER  HIS BROTHER DAFYDD III. DAFYDD III HAD TAKEN TITLE TYWYSOG CYMRU AND CONTINUED TO MOUNT MILITARY RESISTENCE TO  THE ENGLISH ARMIES ADVANCING ON GWYNEDD FROM THE SOUTH TOWARDS CASTELL Y BERE AND FROM THE EAST TOWARDS  CASTELL DOLWYDDELEN. FOR A SHORT WHILE DAFYDD III WITH HIS FAMILY AND LOYAL FOLLOWERS HAD USED BOTH CASTLES IN A RETREAT THAT WAS  TO CONCLUDE WITH HIS CAPTURE IN THE MOUNTAINS ABOVE ABERGWYNGREGYN ON OR ABOUT 28 MEHEFIN 1283 . AT THIS TIME DAFYDD III HAD WITH HIM THE SAID ROYAL TREASURES WHICH UPON HIS CAPTURE WERE DELIVERED  UP TO EDWARD I ALONG LATER WITH ‘Y CROES NAID’ HANDED OVER TO EDWARD I BY WELL REWARDED TREACHEROUS WELSH MONKS INTO WHOSE KEEPING THIS HOLY RELIC HAD BEEN GIVEN ON DEATH OF LLYWELYN III. PRIOR TO THIS EDWARD HAD BEEN BASED IN NEFYN WHILST HIS MEN SEARCHED FOR THE ROYAL TREASURES THEY THOUGHT WERE AT CASTELL MADRYN. PRESENT DAY ‘CASTELL MADRYN’ IS A CARAVAN PARK THE CASTLE ALONG WITH AN INDEPENDENT GWYNEDD AND THE ROYAL TREASURES LONG GONE. THERE IS NO PUBLIC DISPLAY OF THIS STORY AT THE SAID CARAVAN PARK OR INDEED IN AREA OF PEN LLEYN, AN URGENT MATTER TO BE PUT RIGHT I HOPE? WHY  NOT A CROES NAID TRAIL FROM CASTELL MADRYN TO CASTELL DOLWYDDELEN TO ABERGWYNGREGYN AND WHERE EVER ELSE REQUIRED TO TELL THE STORY IN FULL. INDEED WHY NOT AND THE SOONER THE BETTER FOR SAKE OF PRESENT DAY ‘CYMRIC CONSCIOUSNESS’ IN OUR STRUGGLE AGAINST CEREBRAL COLONIALISM.

                                                 GETHIN AP GRUFFYDD  Y PASG 2018.

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The Cross of Destiny

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Sometimes it’s the things that everyone knows that turn out to be the most puzzling – and also the most illuminating. A couple of years ago we had an interesting discussion on the medieval-religion Jiscmail list (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion) about the Croes Naid, the fragment of the True Cross which was the most valued part of the regalia of the Welsh kings of Gwynedd. The name has been variously translated as the Cross of Destiny or the Cross of Refuge (by the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, Wales’s equivalent of the OED: see http://anglonormandictionary.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/word-of-month-croes-naid.html and http://www.welsh-dictionary.ac.uk/ ). Seized by Edward I after his defeat of Llywelyn and Dafydd ap Gruffydd, it ended up in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where a carved boss still depicts its reliquary. But its journey there was anything but simple.

For Christmas my lovely husband gave me a book on the graveyards of the City of London (how well he knows me). I want to visit them all. We made a start on a recent visit by taking a line from Bunhill Fields to St Olave Hart Street. On the way we passed St Helen’s Bishopsgate: nice little graveyard, now a garden between high office blocks and in the shadow of the Gherkin.

People were coming out of the lunch-time Bible study – men in expensive tailoring, students in jeans, lots and lots of people. In we went. The church was still full and buzzing, people eating sandwiches, other tourists wandering around, a couple of meetings in the transept. Eventually a welcomer came up to us, answered a few questions and lent us a copy of the church guide book. (Yes, we did go and buy a copy of our own.) The welcoming strategy was Good – let people look around first, approach them with a welcome, ask a few open-ended questions, decide they were academics, offer some literature, let them get on with it. Then she discovered we were Welsh and introduced us to the minister. He is Welsh. He speaks Welsh. We still get everywhere.

St Helen’s (formerly the nunnery of St Helen) is one of the City of London’s few surviving medieval churches, with a stunning collection of medieval and post-medieval tombs and a remarkable claim in the guide book. We were told that in 1285 Edward I gave the church a cross called Neit which he had ‘found’ in Wales. So if the Croes Naid was in Bishopsgate, what was in Windsor?

Back home, I sent a hopeful email enquiry to the church. I was worried that relics and relic cults could be tricky for evangelical Anglicans but the current and previous building managers got back to me with encouraging speed. The guide book was based on the Survey of London volume – which referenced Edward I’s wardrobe accounts and the Rolls Series edition of his chronicles – then I found my notes from the earlier discussion on medieval-religion with some online articles and a few more references to edited texts. Back to the literature. I’m still happiest if I have some paperwork.

We still don’t know where the Croes was before it was surrendered to Edward I. In Celtic Britain and the Pilgrim Movement (p 100) Griffith Hartwell Jones says it was on Llywelyn’s body when he was killed, but he gives no source for this and the sources he quotes for the hand-over of the Croes don’t say where it was found. Personal reliquaries were common, and it is quite possible that Llywelyn would have wanted this precious relic as near to him as possible: but if he was killed by an English raiding party (and his body was subsequently mutilated and his head taken and placed on Traitor’s Gate in London) how did the relic remain in Welsh hands to be surrendered the following year? Other traditions suggest it was kept by the Cistercian monks of Aberconwy. It was certainly at Conwy that it was handed over to Edward. The Aberconwy community had been moved from Rhedynog-felen, near Clynnog, by Llywelyn’s grandfather Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, who wanted them nearer to his palace at Deganwy. Llywelyn ab Iorwerth himself took the monastic habit at Aberconwy shortly before his death and was buried there.

The Welsh Rolls of Edward I describe the Croes being handed over at Conwy by ‘Einion son of Ynor, Llywelyn, Dafydd, Meilyr, Gronw, Deio and Tegnared’: as a reward they were released from any other royal service. (Rot. Wal. 2 Edw. 1 m. 1; Rymer, Foedera, i, 63). On the other hand … according to the chronicle of William Rishanger, a monk of St Albans (online at https://archive.org/stream/willelmirishange00rish#page/104/mode/2up ), it was Dafydd ap Gruffydd’s secretary who brought the relic to Edward. This was presumably the Hugh ab Ithel who was given a scholarship at Oxford as a reward (Hartwell Jones found this in the royal wardrobe accounts for 1284). The royal warrant recording its surrender stated that the relic had been passed from prince to prince down to the time of Dafydd ap Gruffydd. It looks rather as though the relic had been in safe keeping somewhere, but not necessarily at Conwy, which was in Edward’s hands by the end of 1282. The rulers of Gwynedd had close links with the abbey of Cymmer and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was buried at Cwm-hir. Both are possible candidates.

Dafydd was still alive when the Croes was handed over. In September he suffered the horrific death of a traitor, being hanged, drawn and quartered, the four parts of his body sent to the four quarters of the kingdom and his head placed on the Tower of London. All this rather puts paid to Edward’s claim to have ‘found’ the relic in Wales. This was more than a simple surrender: it was forcible translation of the relic, on a par with Edward’s ‘acquisition’ of the Stone of Scone a few years later.

Edward took the Croes to London in the spring of 1285 and carried it in a great procession to Westminster Abbey on 30 April (Flores Historiarum iii, 63). A few days later, on 4 May, with another great procession, he took it to St Helen’s Bishopsgate and presented it to the community of nuns there (Chronicles of the Reigns of Edw. I and Edw. II (Rolls Series) i pp 93-4). We have no idea why the nuns were the recipients of this stunning piece of royal generosity: it may have seemed appropriate, as the community was dedicated to St Helen, mother of Constantine and finder of the Cross. The first mention of St Helen in connection with the Croes Naid was not until 1354, when Edward III petitioned the Pope for a relaxation of penance for those visiting St George’s Chapel. In the petition he said that the chapel contained a cross brought by St Helen and destined for England. It is possible that this reflects an earlier tradition linking the Croes with Helen: she appears in Welsh legends, including the Dream of Macsen Wledig in the Mabinogion. In his Historia Regum Britanniae Geoffrey of Monmouth had included the story that Helen brought a fragment of the True Cross to Britain, but did not identify it as the Croes Naid.

But Edward’s generosity was a fragile thing, and the Croes did not stay in Bishopsgate. The priory was still being described as thepriory of Holy Cross and St. Helen in 1299 (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol9/pt1/pp1-18#fnn33 ), but by 1296 Edward had reclaimed the relic. That year, he took it on his Scottish campaign, and it was on the Croes that Wishart, bishop of Glasgow, was forced to swear fealty to the king. Edward may initially have intended to ‘borrow’ the Croes, but once it was back in his custody he hung on to it. We can trace its movements round southern and eastern England in the royal wardrobe accounts for 1300 (online at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=C4QPAAAAIAAJ&pg=PR1&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false ): at Windsor on 2 Feb (p. 28), at Stratford Langthorne Abbey on 3 April (p. 32), at the Dominican friary at Stamford (Lincs) on 3 May (p. 35) and in the chapel of Wisbech Castle (Cambs) on 19 May (p. 36). On each of these occasions Edward offered money to the Croes and to a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. Was this another relic which had been surrendered to him in Wales, or had he acquired it elsewhere? The Croes went north to the Scottish borders in the autumn of 1300: in September it was at the abbey of Holm Cultram, near the Solway Firth. Edward took it to Scotland again on his final campaign in 1307. After his death it was kept in the Tower of London until Edward III gave it to Windsor.

It is just possible that the Croes was returned to Wales for a while. A story in the collection of miracles of St Thomas Cantilupe describes an incident in Conwy in 1303. (Susan Ridyard and Jeremy Ashbee have just finished a study of the story as part of a larger work on the miracles of St Thomas Cantilupe. Susan Ridyard has kindly sent me the final draft of this fascinating study, with all its circumstantial detail of everyday life and social tension in what was still a garrison town.) A small child fell into the castle ditch and was thought to be dead. According to some of the subsequent depositions a burgess of the town vowed to St Thomas that if the child recovered he would go on pilgrimage to St Thomas’s tomb in Hereford. Immediately the boy recovered. But an alternative version of the same story credited his recovery to the Holy Cross of the church of Conwy ‘for which God very often works miracles in the town’. The Holy Cross of Conwy may have been one of Wales’s many miracle-working rood carvings, though it is surprising that no poetry mentioning it survives. Alternatively, it could be a memory of the Croes Naid, recalling either its time at Aberconwy Abbey or its return to Wales on one of Edward’s visits. The last of those visits, though, was in the spring of 1295 (according to the List & Index Society’s Itinerary of Edward I). By 1303 the Croes was back in England. It is still possible, though, that what Conwy had was a contact relic, possibly something that had housed the Croes and still retained some of its power.

The Scots have managed to get the Stone of Scone back but the Croes Naid was almost certainly destroyed during the reign of Edward VI. Does it matter? Should the Welsh still feel sore that a scrap of wood was taken from Conwy when we lost so much else as well? Supposing it turned up at Windsor … or supposing we found the famous statue of the Virgin Mary, hidden at Penrhys … or the bones of St David … what would it mean to us now?

This entry was posted in Welsh history and tagged Bishopsgate, Croes Naid, London, relics on March 21, 2015 by madeleinegray2013.

MYSTERY OF THE ROYAL CHALICE

In 1890 two men working in the area around Dolgellau in North Wales discovered this pair of objects in a crevice between rocks.¹ Encrusted with soil and plant matter, the objects were not at first identifiable. Removing the accumulated debris, however, revealed a gilt silver chalice and paten, vessels meant to hold the wine and bread during celebration of the Eucharist in Christian liturgy. Based on stylistic and iconographical evidence, experts dated the objects to the thirteenth century. The paten bears a six-lobed indent and engraved decoration of the Evangelists and of Christ enclosed in a circular band inscribed with the Trinitarian formula, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” The chalice has foliate decoration around its foot, a lobed and engraved knop, and shallow bowl, and is marked with the name of a possible donor or maker.

Here is a very rare survival of medieval sacred metalwork in the British Isles. Campaigns of liquidation during the Reformation sent most older church plate into the crucible. Few precious metal objects endured the rapacious confiscations of Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1541). Parish churches were allowed a single chalice and paten, but most of these were later converted to communion cups under pressure from Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. Taking seriously the restoration of the cup to the laity in 1558, which allowed all worshippers, rather than only priests, to fully participate in Communion, meant making a functional and aesthetic, as well as doctrinal, break with past ritual. Diocese by diocese, communities brought their chalices to local goldsmiths, who melted them down and made from their raw material simple standing cups. While these Elizabethan examples remain numerous, their predecessors are uncommon in the extreme.²

So how did this medieval chalice and paten come to rest in the soil of Merionethshire? They may simply have been stolen at some point and hidden by thieves unable to return to claim them. But thieves of church plate usually rushed to sell off their loot or convert it into bullion as quickly as possible. The fact that the Dolgellau finds remain intact suggests that they were hidden with an expectation of future recovery. A few anecdotes from the Dissolution record attempts by members of religious orders to physically hide precious metalwork from commissioners, rather than merely liquidating it in advance of collections, as many did.³ Cymer Abbey in nearby Llanelltyd may have been the original home of the chalice and paten and its Cistercian brothers those responsible for hoarding them away in a moment of crisis.

This small act of resistance is an important clue to the history of confessional change in Britain. Unlike on the Continent, where reform was driven by populist movements and political jockeying that varied intensely by region, English monarchs attempted to make the switch to a new faith swift, systematic, top-down, and universal. Their reforms gratified those already seeking a break from the customs of the late medieval church. But over the centuries material evidence has accrued indicating that some Christians did not give up their long-standing modes of worship so easily. In hopes that they might one day return again to pre-Reform piety, they buried sculptures and altars on church grounds, walled up crosses and relics, and converted functional objects to secular use to save them.⁴ The Dolgellau finds may have been hidden in response to the threat of seizure or destruction, evidence that some may have wanted to retain the old forms, if not simply the old treasure, of the church. The organized conversion of chalices to communion cups under Elizabeth—a literal re-formation—confirms that the vessel’s shape signified a confessional stance.

The formal properties were, to put it another way, symbolically dense; they had strong cultural meaning for their users and beholders. The vessel’s material, on the other hand, was highly alienable, susceptible to being sold, pawned, or converted into currency because of its monetary value. Anthropologists use the spectrum between these endpoints, “symbolically dense” and “alienable,” to describe peoples’ attitudes and actions toward possessions.⁵ The more symbolically dense an object is, the more culturally and personally valued, the more resistant it becomes to alienation. An object’s position on the spectrum can change with context, of course, and the Reformation is a prime case in which religious possessions like relics and cult statues long considered to be “inalienable” quite rapidly lost their sacred value for many.

For the person or persons who hid the Dolgellau plate, though, these objects were likely still worthy of protection. The chalice and paten made the central rite of the Mass physically possible and materially sanctified and connected daily ritual to a long tradition of worship. Vivid testaments both to the moment of their making in the thirteenth century and to the moment of their rescue and hiding in the sixteenth, the Dolgellau finds of 1890 thus map two critical points in the material history of Christianity in Britain, from the peak of monastic life in the Middle Ages to its virtual demolition three centuries later.

Notes

1. For a recent catalogue entry on the set, see Timothy Schroder, Renaissance Silver from the Schroder Collection (London: The Wallace Collection, 2007), 46-49.

2. Charles Oman gives a comprehensive account of these events in English Church Plate, 597-1830 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 129-144.

3. Though Oman argues that monks would likely have regarded a resurgence of their orders in England pessimistically, English Church Plate, 116, 117.

4. Sarah Tarlow, “Reformation and Transformation: What Happened to Catholic Things in a Protestant World?,” in The Archaeology of Reformation, 1480-1580, eds. David R. M. Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (Leeds: Maney, 2003).

5. See discussions in Annette B. Weiner, “Inalienable Wealth,” American Ethnologist 12, no. 2 (1985): 210-227 and “Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects,” American Ethnologist 21, no. 2 (1994): 291-403.

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Citation Guide

1. Allison Stielau, "The Dolgellau Chalice and Paten," Object Narrative, in Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2014), http://mavcor.yale.edu/conversations/object-narratives/dolgellau-chalice...

Stielau, Allison. "The Dolgellau Chalice and Paten." Object Narrative. In Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2014). http://mavcor.yale.edu/conversations/object-narratives/dolgellau-chalice...

A GRANDMOTHER descendant of a prospector who found hidden treasure which was claimed by the Crown wants it returned to North Wales.Meiriona Jones is campaigning for a 13th century chalice and paten, discovered at Abbey Cymer, near Dolgellau, to “come home” and be put on public show.

Yesterday the mum-of-five told how her granddad Ellis Jones and friend Griffith Griffith working as gold prospectors found the treasure, believed to have been hidden by monks, in the abbey. But after a series of transactions, the treasure was claimed by the Crown and now belongs to the Queen. The chalice, a ceremonial cup, and paten, a plate for bread to celebrate Eucharist, are kept at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. Now Ellis Jones’s grand-daughter, Meiriona Jones, 75, better known as Iona, wants them to be returned to Dolgellau and put on public show. Mrs Jones, a 75-year-old retired nurse brought up in Corwen and who has lived in Denbigh and Caernarfon, now lives at Borth, near Aberystwyth. She said: “Neither of them received any recognition or reward for finding the treasure. It’s not fair. “The treasure should be returned to Dolgellau so that people in North Wales who can’t afford to travel to Cardiff can see it. “To have it on show in Dolgellau near where it was found would be great. “It’s like the Mold cape which should also be returned to where it was found and not kept in the British Museum in London.

“It’s a shame that my grandfather’s treasure has now been taken by the Crown because it was he and his friend who found it.” The treasure was believed to have been hidden to prevent them falling into the hands of King Henry the VIII during his dissolution of the monasteries. The story goes following their find, two strangers called on Griffith and Jones claiming they had no right to the treasure and warning they might get into serious trouble if they kept them. Griffiths and Jones were persuaded to hand them over to the strangers who then sold them for 50 shillings. Hearing of this transaction, the workmen’s boss, TH Roberts of Dolgellau, bought them back. News of the discovery soon spread and on June 14, 1890 an article appeared in the Illustrated London News, sparking a controversy that continues today. The Crown stepped in and claimed the valued chalice and paten to be treasure trove and if they were not handed in, legal steps would be taken.

According to the story, Mr Roberts would not give way. Then in 1892, the treasure came up for sale at Christie’s and was sold for #710, and re-sold a little later for #3,000 to a Baron Schroder. The publicity stirred the Crown to start legal action, seeking to prove the vessels were indeed treasure trove – not simply abandoned but rather concealed on purpose. When found in 1890 the chalice and paten lay close together and did not seem to have been thrown hastily. Baron Schroder died on May 10, 1910, and left the treasure to the Crown. A home had to be found for the cup and plate. Abbey Cymer itself was in ruins, so, in keeping with the personal wish of the King of England, George V, the treasure found a safe haven at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, where it is still kept now.