Offa and the Mercian Wars by Chris Peers Page A

Cynddylan’, or ‘Lament for Cynddylan’, relates the exploits of Cynddylan ap Cyndrwyn, who was king of Gwynedd’s southern neighbour Powys in the early seventh century and, like Cadwallon, was an ally of Penda. The poem is known only from a seventeenth-century copy, but it is believed to have been originally composed not long after its subject’s death (Rowland).
    Probably at some point prior to his alliance with the Mercians, Cynddylan had led a raid on a place known in Welsh as Caer Lwytgoed, which is generally identified with Lichfield, although at that time the settlement was probably still at the site of the nearby Roman ruins at Wall. As Professor Brooks has pointed out, the name ‘Caer’ implies a fortification or at least a defended camp, but there are no traces of such defences at Lichfield at this date, and Bede’s account of Saint Chad’s arrival there in the 660s implies that the site was then uninhabited.
    At Wall, however, Roman walls twelve feet high were still to be seen in the eighteenth century, and 1,000 years earlier they may still have been a formidable obstacle. It seems very likely, in fact, that Wall was the site of Penda’s capital in the early days of the kingdom. The Welsh hero of the attack on this place, we are told, not only carried off ‘fifteen hundred cattle’ and ‘four twenties of stallions’, but also attacked the ‘wretched bishop’ and the ‘book-keeping monks’. Relations between the English and Welsh Churches were bitterly hostile at this time. Bede tells us that the Welsh clergy refused even to eat from a vessel that an Englishman had touched, while retaliating by suggesting that the massacre of the Welsh priests at Chester in 605 was God’s punishment for rejecting the authority of Augustine and his Roman mission.
    The nature of Welsh armies in the early Middle Ages is difficult to reconstruct from the scanty sources, but they probably resembled their twelfth- and thirteenth-century descendants in being lightly armed, and better equipped for fighting in mountainous terrain than the English. In his discussion of the Saxon siege of the camp at Andredecester (probably Pevensey in Sussex) in 491, Henry of Huntingdon inserts a discussion of British tactics which, while reminiscent of those of his own contemporaries, is not obviously anachronistic for the fifth century. He says that the Britons outside the camp ‘swarmed together like wasps,’ harassing the Saxons with hit-and-run attacks, shooting from a distance with bows and slings and luring them into ambushes in the woods, where, being ‘lighter of foot’, they had the advantage.
    Henry’s description of the Battle of Beranbyrg, fought according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle between the Britons and the West Saxons in 556, also contrasts the British tactics with those of the Saxons. The latter attacked in a single compact body, while the Britons drew up in ‘nine battalions, a convenient number for military tactics, three being posted in the van, three in the centre, and three in the rear, with chosen commanders for each, while the archers and slingers and cavalry were disposed after the Roman order’. This last comment probably means with the cavalry on the wings and the missile troops shooting overhead from a rear rank, as was the practice in the later Roman legions. It is hard to know whether this account preserves a genuine tradition or is based on the tactics of the twelfth century, when Henry was writing, but it is interesting that he attributes to the Britons a deployment which in his own day was associated with the Anglo-Norman armies rather than the Welsh. Henry’s account of contemporary Welsh soldiers at the Battle of Lincoln describes them as armed only with knives, lacking order and unable to stand up to cavalry.
    Gerald of Wales, who wrote around the 1180s, described his countrymen as armed with very long spears,