nt. Edward was
in need of such training, as the story of his early years shows. He
was only sixteen years of age in 1255, but in the Middle Ages men
lived short lives and matured very early. Edward was married in 1254,
and had much experience in war and statesmanship before he was
twenty. It was a wild time, and young Edward was among the wildest
spirits; as he rode through the country, accompanied by his two
hundred followers--mostly rollicking and arrogant foreign
adventurers--who robbed and devastated the land, and thrashed and even
mutilated passers-by for fun, people looked forward with great fear to
the accession of such a ruffian. A few years of responsibility, and
failure, soon changed him into the noblest and most law-abiding of the
Plantagenets. It was Wales which gave him his first lesson. He first
tried his hand at the reorganisation of the "Middle Country," making
it "shire-land," introducing the English law and administrative
system; the same policy was put in force in Cardigan and Carmarthen,
which formed one shire with a Shiremoot and the usual institutions of
an English county. Some Welshmen had already petitioned the king for
the introduction of English law into Wales, complaining that by Welsh
law the crime of the guilty is visited on the innocent relations. At
best it was a task which required very careful management, and Edward
and his advisers were as yet quite unfitted for it, prone as they were
to violent methods, having an insolent contempt for all customs and
habits which differed from those to which they were used, and all
classes except their own. The result is thus expressed by the Welsh
chronicler: After Edward returned to England, "the nobles of Wales
came to Llywelyn, having been robbed of their liberties and made
captives, and declared they would rather be killed in war for their
liberty than suffer themselves to be trampled on by strangers. And
Llywelyn was moved at their tears, and invaded the Middle Country and
subdued it all before the end of the week." In this work Llywelyn was
assisted by descendants of Rhys, the princes of South Wales, who in
Cardigan suffered from Prince Edward's policy in the same way as the
men of the Middle Country or Four Cantreds. This union of North and
South Wales is one of the special characteristics of the struggle
under Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. That the Welsh of the North should join
those of the South was, notes Matthew Paris, "a circumstance never
known