Cadwallon ap Cadfan

Cadwallon ap Cadfan was king of Gwynedd and one of the most formidable British rulers of the early seventh century. The son of Cadfan ap Iago, he emerged during a period when the Northumbrian king Edwin was extending power across northern Britain. Welsh and English traditions preserve very different memories of Cadwallon, but both agree that his struggle with Northumbria became a major interstate war involving Britons, Anglo-Saxons and the Mercian ruler Penda.

In 633 Cadwallon and Penda defeated Edwin at the Battle of Hatfield Chase, where the Northumbrian king was killed and his kingdom temporarily fractured. Cadwallon then campaigned widely in Northumbria and was portrayed with particular hostility by Bede, whose account reflects the perspective of Cadwallon’s Christian Northumbrian enemies. His success was short-lived. In 634 Oswald of Bernicia defeated and killed him at the Battle of Heavenfield near Hadrian’s Wall. The sparse, partisan evidence makes the scale and character of Cadwallon’s rule difficult to reconstruct with certainty.

In Nicola Griffith’s Menewood, The novel dramatizes the destruction of Edwin’s Northumbrian supremacy at the Battle of Hatfield Chase and the campaigns associated with Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon ap Cadfan.