The great Palatine Earldom of Chester, a kingdom within the kingdom,
was ruled before 1100 by Hugh the Wolf, of Avranches, who conquered
for a time the north coast of Wales. In Anglesey he built a castle,
and kennelled the hounds he loved so well in a church, to find them
all mad the next morning. The stories of his savage mutilation of his
Welsh prisoners show that he merited the name of "the Wolf." Yet he
was the friend of the holy Anselm, and died a monk. The struggle
between Chester and Gwynedd for the possession of the Four Cantreds,
the lands between the Conway and the Dee, was almost perpetual during
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the fortune of war
continually changing. With the extinction of the old line of the Earls
of Chester (1237) and the grant of the earldom to Prince Edward
(1254), a new era opened for Wales.

Further south, in the Middle March, along the upper valleys of the
Severn and the Wye, the great power of the Mortimers was growing. They
had already stretched out a long arm to grasp Gwerthrynion. But the
greatest expansion of their power came later, under Roger Mortimer,
grandson of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, friend of Edward I. in the wild days
of his youth, persistent foe of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd; and soon the
Mortimer lands embraced all Mid-Wales and reached the sea, and a
Mortimer was strong enough to depose and murder a king and rule
England as paramour of the queen. Savage as the Mortimers were, they
were mild compared with one of their predecessors. Robert Count of
Bellesme and Ponthieu, the great castle builder of his time, became
Earl of Shrewsbury and Arundel in 1098. Men had heard tales of his
ferocity on the Continent--how he starved his prisoners to death
rather than hold them to ransom; how, when besieging a castle, he
threw in the horses to fill up the moat, and when these were not
enough he gave orders to seize the villeins and throw them in, that
his battering rams might go forward on a writhing mass of living human
bodies. These tales seemed incredible in England, but the men of the
Middle March believed them when they were "flayed alive by the iron
claws" of the devil of Bellesme. In his rebellion against Henry I. the
princes of Gwynedd supported him, till their army was bought over by
the lying promises of the king; but the day when the Earl of
Shrewsbury surrendered to King Henry and the whole force of England
was a day of deliverance alike to England and to Wales.

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