f Edward's captains, who had passed the Menau with a detachment;[*]
but Lewelly, being surprised by Mortimer, was defeated and slain in an
action, and two thousand of his followers were put to the sword.[**]
David, who succeeded him in the principality, could never collect an
army sufficient to face the English; and being chased from hill to hill,
and hunted from one retreat to another, was obliged to conceal himself
under various disguises, and was at last betrayed in his lurking-place
to the enemy.

{1283.} Edward sent him in chains to Shrewsbury; and bringing him to
a formal trial before all the peers of England, ordered this sovereign
prince to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, as a traitor, for defending
by arms the liberties of his native country, together with his own
hereditary authority.[***] All the Welsh nobility submitted to the
conqueror; the laws of England, with the sheriffs and other ministers of
justice, were established in that principality; and though it was long
before national antipathies were extinguished, and a thorough union
attained between the people, yet this important conquest, which it had
required eight hundred years fully to effect, was at last, through the
abilities of Edward, completed by the English.

{1284} The king, sensible that nothing kept alive the ideas of military
valor and of ancient glory so much as the traditional poetry of the
people, which, assisted by the power of music and the jollity of
festivals, made deep impression on the minds of the youth, gathered
together all the Welsh bards, and from a barbarous, though not absurd
policy, ordered them to be put to death.[****]

* Walsing. p. 50. Heming. vol. i p. 9. Trivet, p. 258. T
Wykes, p. 110.

** Heming. vol. i. p. 11. Trivet, p. 257. Ann. Waverl. p.
235.

*** Heming. vol. i. p. 12. Trivet, p. 269. Ann Waverl. p.
288 T Wykes, p. 111. M. West. p. 411.

**** Sir J. Wynne, p. 15. crown; and henceforth gives a
title to the eldest son of the kings of England.

There prevails a vulgar story, which, as it well suits the capacity
of the monkish writers, is carefully recorded by them; that Edward,
assembling the Welsh, promised to give them a prince of unexceptionable
manners, a Welshman by birth, and one who could speak no other language.
On their acclamations of joy, and promise of obedience, he invested in
the principality his second son, Edward, then an infant, who had been
born