Qualla: Battle of Bryn Glas

Battle of Bryn Glas: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Percy Benzie Abery, CC0. On the morning of 22 June 1402, Sir Edmund Mortimer led his Herefordshire levies up a green hill called Bryn Glas near the village of Pilleth, on the very edge of Wales. Welsh archers waited for him on the slope, plainly visible. They were the target. Mortimer's men advanced uphill into longbow range, men-at-arms shouldering past their own archers to close with the Welsh. They never reached them. From a wooded valley to the left of the hill, Welsh reinforcements emerged - troops that Mortimer had not known were there. At the same moment, contingents of Welsh archers within Mortimer's own army turned, drew bows, and began loosing arrows at the men they had been fighting beside an hour earlier. By midday, Mortimer's army was destroyed. He himself was captured. Within the year he would marry Owain Glyndŵr's daughter, and the strongest claim to the English throne would be joined to the Welsh rebellion.

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Image: Percy Benzie Abery | CC0

Battle of Bryn Glas: Background to a Rebellion

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Paterson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Glyndŵr's war began in 1400 against a fragile English monarchy. Richard II had been deposed and murdered the year before by Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV. Wales still held many Ricardian sympathies. When Reginald Grey of Ruthyn, a favourite of the new king, seized some o...

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Image: Ian Paterson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Battle of Bryn Glas: Mortimer's Claim and Mortimer's Men

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Paterson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sir Edmund Mortimer was the brother of the late Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March, whom the childless Richard II had publicly named as heir to the throne in 1398. Roger had died the year before Richard was overthrown. Roger's young son, also named Edmund Mortimer (5th Earl of Mar...

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Image: Ian Paterson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Battle of Bryn Glas: The Trap

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MJB (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The site of the battle is on a small green hill above the village of Pilleth, just east of Wales near Knighton. St Mary's church on Bryn Glas was already there, with a spring-fed well in its grounds; it had been there long before the Welsh and the English came to fight around it....

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Image: MJB (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Bryn Glas: The Dead and the Captured

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Paterson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Among the English dead were Sir Walter Devereux of Weobley; Kinard de la Bere, three times Sheriff of Herefordshire; and Sir Robert Whitney, who was Henry IV's Knight-Marshal. Hundreds more fell on the slope and along the small valleys leading away from it. The English casualties...

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Image: Ian Paterson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Battle of Bryn Glas: The Tripartite Indenture

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Paterson, CC BY-SA 2.0. By November 1402, Mortimer had married Catherine, Owain Glyndŵr's daughter. He sent a public letter to his English tenants asking them to declare for either his nephew, the young Earl of March, or for Owain Glyndŵr as Prince of Wales. In 1405 he and Glyndŵr signed the Tripartite ...

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Image: Ian Paterson | CC BY-SA 2.0