The standard fell. That was the moment everyone remembered afterwards - the royal banner of Henry II, the new young king of England, slipping from the hands of Henry of Essex in a Flintshire wood as Welsh warriors drove down through the trees. To anyone watching, it looked as if the king had fallen with it. Some of his men turned and fled. Some of his men, believing him dead, may have spread the word back to the main column. Henry was alive, but only barely, and only because Roger, Earl of Hertford, snatched up the banner and held the line. Two years into his reign, in July 1157, the king of England had walked into a Welsh ambush in the woods of Hawarden and learned a hard lesson about the country he had inherited.
Henry II had taken the English throne in 1154, ending two decades of civil war and inheriting an empire that ran from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. He was twenty-four, intelligent, restless, and impatient with anyone who had taken advantage of the chaos of his predecessor's reign to nibble at the edges of royal authority. In Wales, Owain Gwynedd had done exactly that. Since succeeding his father Gruffudd ap Cynan in 1137, Owain had pushed his kingdom eastward into the disputed lands of Tegeingl, the strip of country between the Clwydian Hills and the Dee estuary that the Normans had held for generations. By the time Henry was crowned, Welsh banners were flying within sight of Chester. The new king assembled an army at Chester in the summer of 1157 - by some estimates a third of all the knights in England - and marched west to put Owain back in his place.
Owain knew Henry was coming and chose his ground carefully. He fortified a position near Coleshill, probably somewhere on the high ground between Basingwerk and Hen Blas, and waited. Henry sent the bulk of his army straight at the Welsh line, but took a lighter flanking force himself through the dense woods of Hawarden, hoping to come around behind Owain's position and roll up the defenders. He did not know that Owain had read the move. Stationed in those woods, hidden among the oak and ash, were the prince's two sons - Dafydd ab Owain Gwynedd and Cynan ab Owain Gwynedd - with a force of Welsh warriors who knew every path and every clearing. When Henry's column passed beneath them, they came down through the trees. Eustace fitz John, Constable of Chester and one of the most powerful nobles in the north of England, was killed in the first rush. The fighting was close and confused and brief, and it left the king of England fighting for his life among the roots.
Henry of Essex, the king's hereditary standard-bearer, dropped the royal banner. Whether from terror, from a stumble, from a Welsh spear, the chroniclers disagreed. He himself later claimed - according to the testimony of the chronicler Jocelyn de Brakelond - that he had genuinely believed the king dead. The effect, whatever the cause, was disastrous. Word spread that Henry had fallen. Men began to turn. The whole flanking column was on the edge of collapse when Roger de Clare, Earl of Hertford, picked the standard up out of the leaf litter and held it high. The line steadied. Henry himself - whether he pushed through Owain's position, or whether he was forced back to regroup, accounts vary - somehow emerged from the wood alive. Owain, for his part, fearing a double envelopment, pulled his force back. The Welsh prince had bloodied the king of England and chosen to leave the field on his own terms.
Henry marched on to Rhuddlan and there received news that his second blow had also fallen short. A naval expedition under his half-uncle Henry FitzRoy, the illegitimate son of Henry I, had landed at Anglesey and been driven into the sea by local defenders. FitzRoy himself was killed. With two arms of his campaign broken, Henry came to terms. Owain surrendered Tegeingl back to royal control and restored his brother Cadwaladr's lands in Ceredigion - the concessions were real - but the Welsh chronicle Brut y Tywysogion records only a peace agreement, not the act of homage that English sources later claimed. Owain went on using royal titles for the rest of his life. In 1165, writing to King Louis VII of France, he boasted that he had inflicted more damage on Henry's army than the English would ever admit. The historian Huw Pryce reads that letter as a Welsh prince implicitly rejecting English overlordship. The ambush in Hawarden wood had bought him the room to say it.
Modern Ewloe is a quiet Flintshire village west of the Dee, just inside the Welsh border. The exact site of the battle has been debated for centuries; D.J. Cathcart King and Sean Davies argue for somewhere near Basingwerk Abbey, John Edwards for Hen Blas further east. A commemorative plaque was unveiled in 2008, a small marker for an event that came close to changing the course of English kingship. Ewloe Castle itself, the small Welsh keep whose ruins still sit in a wooded glen nearby, was probably not built until later in the twelfth century. But the woods are still there. Standing among them now, with the air heavy and green, it is easy to see why Owain chose this ground - and why, eight and a half centuries later, the Welsh remember the day they made an English king run.
Located at 53.20 degrees north, 3.07 degrees west, in Flintshire just inside the Welsh border. Best viewed from 2,500 to 3,500 feet. The Dee estuary lies immediately to the north; the wooded slopes around Hawarden and Ewloe are clearly visible against the lower-lying Cheshire plain. Hawarden Airport (EGNR) is only 2 nautical miles east-southeast - in fact, the airfield sits roughly on the ground where Henry assembled before the march. Liverpool John Lennon (EGGP) is to the north across the estuary; RAF Shawbury (EGOS) to the south.