2 Bizarre Celtic History Mysteries

Before he was a prince, Glendor was a comfortable country squire with a fairly impressive lineage behind him.

He was born around 1359, or possibly a little earlier, into a family that traced itself to the Princes of Powys in Wales through his father and the Princes of Dehobarth through his mother.

More than a century after Edward I's conquest, That pedigree got him respect from the poets, and not much else in terms of formal recognition.

What he actually owned were two fairly significant lordships in the northeast of Wales, and was perhaps the wealthiest natively Welsh lord at the time.

He seems to have spent several years at the inns of court in London, where the sons of gentlemen learned law.

He married Margaret Hanmer, the daughter of a judge on the King's bench, and in 1385 he rode with Richard II's army into Scotland.

The following year he testified in the famous heraldry lawsuit between the Scrope and Grosvenor families, giving his age as 27.

In March 1387 he was at sea with the Earl of Arundel, when the English fleet caught a Flemish wine convoy off Margate.

Several of Arundel's squires were knighted after that fight, but Glendore wasn't, which created a significant controversy.

R.R. Davies, the great modern historian of the revolt, noted that the wealthiest native landowner in Wales couldn't even get himself knighted in England.

That says something significant about Glendore's options for upward mobility in the English system, despite his princely pedigree and wealth.

After 1387, he essentially vanishes from the historical record for 13 years, and we don't have a good idea of what he was doing during that time.

What pulled him back into the spotlight was a property dispute with a neighbor that, more broadly speaking, became a dispute between the Celtic and the Anglo-Saxon Norman world.

Reginald Grey, Lord of Ruthen, was an English marcher baron with the ear of the new king, Henry IV.

Grey seized some land Glendore considered his own, and Glendore petitioned Parliament but was ignored.

Then, according to the accounts that survive, Grey held back a royal summons, ordering Glendore to serve on the Scottish campaign of 1400 until it was too late to comply.

This let Grey brand him a traitor in London in what is believed to be an attempt to grab even more land from the Welsh prince.