f Gaunt, for whose
son Henry, generally called Bolingbroke, he formed one of his violent
friendships. Bolingbroke, on becoming King Henry the Fourth, not only
restored the crooked little Welshman to his possessions, but gave him
employments of great trust and profit in Herefordshire. The insurrection
of Glendower against Henry was quite sufficient to kindle against him the
deadly hatred of Dafydd, who swore "by the nails of God" that he would
stab his countryman for daring to rebel against his friend King Henry,
the son of the man who had received him in his house and comforted him
when his own countrymen were threatening his destruction. He therefore
went to Machynlleth with the full intention of stabbing Glendower,
perfectly indifferent as to what might subsequently be his own fate.
Glendower, however, who had heard of his threat, caused him to be seized
and conducted in chains to a prison which he had in the mountains of
Sycharth. Shortly afterwards, passing through Breconshire with his host,
he burnt Dafydd's house--a fair edifice called the Cyrnigwen, situated on
a hillock near the river Honddu--to the ground, and seeing one of Gam's
dependents gazing mournfully on the smouldering ruins he uttered the
following taunting englyn:--

"Shouldst thou a little red man descry
Asking about his dwelling fair,
Tell him it under the bank doth lie,
And its brow the mark of the coal doth bear."

Dafydd remained confined till the fall of Glendower, shortly after which
event he followed Henry the Fifth to France, where he achieved that glory
which will for ever bloom, dying, covered with wounds, on the field of
Agincourt after saving the life of the king, to whom in the dreadest and
most critical moment of the fight he stuck closer than a brother, not
from any abstract feeling of loyalty, but from the consideration that
King Henry the Fifth was the son of King Henry the Fourth, who was the
son of the man who received and comforted him in his house, after his own
countrymen had hunted him from house and land.

Connected with Machynlleth is a name not so widely celebrated as those of
Glendower and Dafydd Gam, but well known to and cherished by the lovers
of Welsh song. It is that of Lawdden, a Welsh bard in holy orders, who
officiated as priest at Machynlleth from 1440 to 1460. But though
Machynlleth was his place of residence for many years, it was not the
place of his birth, Lychwr in Carmarthenshir