Dafydd ap Gruffydd: The Welsh Prince Who Was Hanged, Drawn and Quartered
Updated: Oct 27
On 3 October 1283, a man was tied to the tail of a horse and dragged through the streets of Shrewsbury to the gallows. A few months earlier he'd been calling himself Prince of Wales. By the end of the day his head was on its way to the Tower of London, and the rest of him had been cut into four pieces.
His name was Dafydd ap Gruffydd, often spelled Gruffudd. He was the younger brother of Llywelyn the Last, and the final member of the old royal house of Gwynedd to rule as an independent Prince of Wales. He's also remembered for something much grimmer. He was the first famous victim of the punishment that would become the English state's answer to treason for the next 550 years: hanging, drawing and quartering.
It's an odd fate for someone who'd spent a good chunk of his life fighting on the English side. Dafydd's story is one of the messiest in Welsh history, full of family feuds, switched loyalties and a final desperate gamble that cost Wales its independence.
Quick Answers
Who was Dafydd ap Gruffydd? The younger brother of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd and the last member of the royal house of Gwynedd to rule as an independent Prince of Wales, from December 1282 until his capture in June 1283.
How did he die? He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Shrewsbury on 3 October 1283, after a parliament summoned by Edward I condemned him as a traitor.
Was he the first person to be hanged, drawn and quartered? Not quite. Parts of the punishment had been used before, but he was the first famous political prisoner to suffer the full sentence, and his execution became the template for traitors in England.
Where was his head displayed? On a spike at the Tower of London, next to the head of his brother Llywelyn.
What happened to his children? His two sons were locked up in Bristol Castle for the rest of their lives, and his daughters were sent to nunneries in England.
Born Into a Family Feud
Dafydd was born around 1238, the third of four sons of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn and his wife Senena. His grandfather was Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, better known as Llywelyn the Great, who'd made Gwynedd in north-west Wales the most powerful kingdom in the country.
That should have been a good start in life. It wasn't. Gruffydd was Llywelyn the Great's eldest son, but he was illegitimate in the eyes of the Church, and the old prince chose his younger half-brother, Dafydd ap Llywelyn, as heir. The two half-brothers loathed each other. In 1241 Dafydd ap Llywelyn handed Gruffydd over to King Henry III of England, and young Dafydd and his little brother Rhodri were sent to the English as hostages too.
Gruffydd was locked up in the Tower of London. On 1 March 1244 he tried to escape by climbing down a rope made from knotted sheets and cloth. It broke, and he fell to his death. When his half-brother died two years later without an heir, Gwynedd was up for grabs, and Gruffydd's four sons, Owain, Llywelyn, Dafydd and Rhodri, were the obvious candidates.
Brother Against Brother
Welsh custom meant land was usually shared between sons, which was always a recipe for trouble. At first Owain and Llywelyn ruled together, but Llywelyn was by far the more able and ambitious of the two. In 1255 Owain and Dafydd teamed up against him, and Llywelyn crushed them both at the Battle of Bryn Derwin. Owain spent more than twenty years as his brother's prisoner. Dafydd got off lightly. He was released the following year and given lands of his own.
Over the next two decades Llywelyn turned Gwynedd into something close to a Welsh state. In 1267, under the Treaty of Montgomery, Henry III recognised him as Prince of Wales, the only time an English king ever formally accepted a native Welsh ruler with that title.
Dafydd, though, never seemed happy being the younger brother. In 1263 he went over to the English. Llywelyn took him back. Then in 1274 he was caught plotting with Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, the lord of southern Powys, to have Llywelyn murdered. When the plot came out, Dafydd fled to England and the court of the new king, Edward I.
Fighting for Edward I
Edward I was a very different king from his father. Tall, hard and utterly ruthless, he'd be remembered as Longshanks and, much later, as the villain of Braveheart. He and Llywelyn were soon at each other's throats, and Llywelyn's repeated refusals to come and pay him homage gave Edward the excuse he wanted.
In 1277 Edward invaded Wales with a huge army, and Dafydd rode with him against his own brother. Llywelyn was forced to accept the humiliating Treaty of Aberconwy, which stripped him of most of his lands outside Gwynedd. Dafydd was rewarded with lands in north-east Wales and, in 1278, the manor of Frodsham near Chester. Edward also arranged his marriage to Elizabeth Ferrers, daughter of the Earl of Derby and a distant relative of the king himself.
On paper Dafydd had done well. In practice he was bitter. He'd been promised more than he got, and he and plenty of other Welsh lords quickly found that life under English officials and English law was a lot harsher than they'd been led to expect.
Palm Sunday, 1282
On Palm Sunday, 22 March 1282, Dafydd struck. He attacked Hawarden Castle near Chester, killed several of its men, including a knight called Fulk Trigald, and took its lord, Roger Clifford, prisoner. Within days, risings broke out across Wales and English-held castles were under attack.
It's not clear whether Llywelyn knew it was coming, but he couldn't sit it out. He joined the revolt, and the two brothers, after all those years of fighting each other, ended up side by side against the most formidable king in Europe.
Edward's response was overwhelming. He sent armies into Wales from several directions, and a fleet to take Anglesey, the island that kept Gwynedd fed. Then on 11 December 1282, Llywelyn was killed in a skirmish near Cilmeri, close to Builth Wells, apparently after being lured away from his army. His head was cut off and sent to Edward, and it ended up on a spike at the Tower of London wearing a crown of ivy, a jibe at an old prophecy that a Welshman would one day be crowned in London.
Seven Months as Prince of Wales
With Llywelyn dead, Dafydd took over as Prince of Wales. He tried to keep the war going from the mountains of Snowdonia, and was still issuing letters as prince from Dolbadarn Castle in May 1283. But the English were closing in. Castell y Bere, one of the last Welsh strongholds, fell in April, and Dafydd was being hunted from valley to valley.
On 22 June 1283 he was finally caught in a bog called Nanhysglain on the slopes of Bera Mawr, in the mountains above Bethesda, along with his younger son Owain. He was badly wounded. Edward later said Dafydd had been taken by men of his own tongue, which many have read as a hint that he was betrayed by his own side. His wife, his elder son Llywelyn and his daughters were rounded up soon afterwards.
Trial at Shrewsbury
Edward wanted more than a quick death. On 28 June he sent out writs summoning a parliament to Shrewsbury to decide Dafydd's fate. Barons, knights and men from towns across England were called to sit in judgement on a man Edward didn't see as a defeated enemy prince at all, but as a traitor. This was someone he'd sheltered, rewarded, knighted and married into the edges of his own family, and who'd then turned on him.
At the end of September 1283, Dafydd was condemned to death. He's often described as the first person tried and executed for high treason against an English king, although treason wasn't properly defined in law until the Treason Act of 1351. What made his case stand out was the sentence. According to the Annals of Dunstable, one of the chronicles that recorded it, every part of it was matched to a specific crime:
Drawn to the gallows behind horses, because he'd betrayed the king who had knighted him.
Hanged for killing Fulk Trigald and other English nobles.
His entrails burned because he'd committed his crimes during the week of Christ's Passion, which made them sacrilege.
His body cut into pieces and sent around England, because he'd plotted the king's death in many parts of the realm.
Execution Day, 3 October 1283
The sentence was carried out in Shrewsbury on 3 October. Dafydd was tied to a horse's tail and dragged through the streets to the place of execution. He was hanged, but cut down while he was still alive. His belly was cut open, and his entrails were pulled out and burned in front of him. Then his head was cut off, and his body was hacked into quarters.
The man who did it was Geoffrey of Shrewsbury, who was paid 20 shillings for the job. That was decent money at the time, and nobody bothered to record what it was like to earn it. If you've ever wondered what that kind of work was like day to day, we've looked at the life of a medieval executioner.
The chroniclers don't agree on exactly where the pieces went. The Lanercost Chronicle says his right arm, with a ring still on its finger, went to York, his left arm to Bristol, his right leg to Northampton and the rest to Hereford. The London annals list Bristol, Northampton, York and Winchester instead. Either way, the message was obvious, and it was aimed at England as much as Wales.
His head was bound with iron to stop it rotting, taken to London and put on a spike at the Tower, next to his brother Llywelyn's.
Not Quite the First
Dafydd is often described as the first person ever to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but that's not quite right. Bits of the punishment had been used before. In 1242 William de Marisco, a nobleman turned pirate who'd been linked to a plot against Henry III, was drawn, hanged, disembowelled and quartered in London. Walter de Scoteney was drawn and hanged in 1259 for poisoning.
What made Dafydd different was who he was. He was a prince of royal blood and the most high-profile political prisoner in the kingdom, and his execution was staged as a deliberate piece of state theatre. After Shrewsbury, the full ritual became the standard punishment for men convicted of treason in England.
It wasn't the same everywhere. In France, quartering usually meant tying the condemned man to four horses and pulling him apart while he was still alive, which is what happened to Robert-François Damiens after he stabbed Louis XV in 1757. The English version was, if anything, more drawn out.
Five Hundred Years on the Statute Book
After Dafydd, hanging, drawing and quartering became the English state's go-to sentence for traitors. The Scottish leader William Wallace suffered it in London in 1305. So did the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot in 1606, and several of the men who'd signed Charles I's death warrant after the monarchy was restored in 1660. Women convicted of treason were burned instead, because cutting up a woman's body in public was thought indecent.
Some of the last men ever sentenced to it were Welsh as well. After the Chartist Newport Rising of November 1839, John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones were condemned in January 1840 to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Their sentences were commuted to transportation to Australia. The punishment was finally abolished in 1870.
The End of Independent Wales
With Dafydd dead, independent Wales died with him. Edward's Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 brought the lands of Gwynedd under the English crown, with English-style counties, sheriffs and law. He ringed north Wales with enormous stone castles at Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris, some of the most impressive fortresses ever built in Britain. He was quick to make use of Welsh fighting men too, and Welsh archers would become a key part of English armies for generations.
Dafydd's family was dealt with just as thoroughly. His sons were locked away in Bristol Castle. Llywelyn, the elder, died there in 1287 or 1288. Owain, the younger, lived on as a prisoner for decades. In 1305 Edward ordered a wooden cage bound with iron to be built to hold him at night, and he was last heard of in 1325. Dafydd's daughters, and Llywelyn's only child Gwenllian, were sent to nunneries in England, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. Edward wanted to make sure there would never be another prince from the house of Gwynedd.
He even took the title for his own family. In 1301 Edward made his son, Edward of Caernarfon, Prince of Wales, and the heir to the English, and later British, throne has usually held it ever since.
The idea of a Welsh prince didn't die so easily, though. A little over a century later, Owain Glyndŵr would be proclaimed Prince of Wales and lead the last great Welsh rising against English rule.
A Complicated Legacy
Dafydd ap Gruffydd isn't the most heroic figure in Welsh history. He switched sides, plotted to have his own brother killed and helped an English king invade his own country. But he also started a war he must have known Wales was unlikely to win, kept fighting in the mountains for months after his brother was dead, and paid for it in the most horrible way the English crown could come up with.
For more than 500 years afterwards, the traitors who went to the scaffold in England followed a path that was first marked out for him, in the streets of Shrewsbury.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into the end of independent Wales? These are worth a look.
A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain by Marc Morris. A brilliant, readable biography of the king who conquered Wales and destroyed Dafydd.
The Welsh Wars of Independence by David Moore. The story of Wales's fight against the English from the Romans to Glyndŵr, with Llywelyn and Dafydd at its heart.
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Sources
Dictionary of Welsh Biography: Dafydd ap Gruffydd (died 1283), prince of Gwynedd
All About History: The execution of David, Prince of Wales, in the chronicles
Davies, John. A History of Wales. Penguin, 2007.
Prestwich, Michael. Edward I. Yale University Press, 1997.
Carr, A. D. Medieval Wales. Macmillan, 1995.
