I’m standing in a green chapel, the ancient church of Slebech. Grass and soft moss cover the floor where worshippers once gathered. Walls lead up to the open sky, and the only hymns are sung by massed choirs of birds. A mutilated font is filled with fallen leaves and rainwater. It hasn’t seen a baptism for centuries. The crumbling window arches no longer remember glass. A simple wooden cross overlooks the tidal Cleddau Ddu river, where a ship once waited for Owain Glyndŵr to finish his prayers before setting sail for the East.
Facts are slippery things. The best are evidence-based, attested to by reliable people. Others are taken on faith or on the word of people who prove fallible. Either way, facts are infinite. If we tried to take them all into account we couldn’t decide anything; we’d be overwhelmed. We have to select those we deem relevant, or fill gaps with conjecture. Thus we move from description to narrative to myth. So when I say that Slebech was where Glyndŵr took his last steps on Welsh soil, I’m myth-building: constructing a sense-making narrative from the best available facts.
The Hospitallers
Where’s Slebech, you ask? Some know it as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hamlet in Pembrokeshire, along the A40 from London to Fishguard and the Rosslare ferry. Turn off the main road, though, and you’ll find a magical place. Slebech Park Estate is a hotel in what was once one of the most important places in Wales. It’s since fallen into obscurity. “Nobody knows we’re here,” says one of the staff, ruefully.
This was the West Wales headquarters of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem: the Hospitallers. They were warrior monks, a military order formed in 1099 to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. They swore allegiance to Christ as embodied in the poor, not to any worldly leader. Their mission was to provide shelter, food, and medical care to the poor and needy, regardless of faith. Suppressed in Britain by Henry VIII, their legacy survives in the St John Ambulance brigade. Slebech was one of their more important British bases.
By the time Glyndŵr was born in the mid-14th century, the Order was struggling. Driven out of the Holy Land, they were based on the island of Rhodes. From there, in addition to their original mission, the brother knights (of noble birth) and brother sergeants (commoners) defended the Christian kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean against the forces of Islam.
Glorious camellias with abundant pink flowers stand below Slebech’s broken tower, held together by curtains of ivy, on this February morning. As I listen to the tapping of a distant woodpecker in the stillness and watch early morning mist arise from the river, it truly feels like a place of refuge.
A sanctuary from time immemorial
The Hospitallers also served pilgrims in Wales. Slebech was an important stop on the way to St David’s, to which two pilgrimages equalled one to Rome. From here, they managed pilgrim hospices in bandit-infested mid-Wales. These were badly run-down in Glyndŵr’s time. The need to support Hospitaller work in the East meant all available resources – including their substantial Welsh revenues – were sent there. Very little was invested locally.
Glyndŵr and the Hospitallers knew or knew of each other. Hospitaller estates in North Wales, including Ysbyty Ifan, were managed from Halston Hall in Shropshire, just a few miles from Glyndŵr’s home at Sycharth. Halston was probably the ‘Nillystan Trevan’, the “sanctuary from time immemorial” in Rhonabwy’s Dream. This was written down in Glyndŵr’s lifetime for his ally, the soldier-seer Hopcyn ap Thomas ab Einion. The Hospitallers did indeed have the right to give sanctuary to fugitives.
We have no known facts about Glyndŵr’s later years, but we can conjecture. His rebellion was petering out by 1412, when he was last reliably seen. He had lost his lands and strongholds, his army was defeated and dwindling. What would a reasonable man do? Surrender, and accept Henry V’s offer of a pardon? Too humiliating. Fight on? That would risk being captured alive, and perhaps an excruciating, shameful traitor’s death.
Flee to France, like Owain Lawgoch in an earlier generation? Too uncertain, with Henry already claiming the French throne. Perhaps go into hiding with his Scudamore in-laws in Herefordshire? Again, risky, should the political winds change. Anyway, Glyndŵr was still in his prime, and nobles of that period were often active well into their 80s. It would mean decades of isolation, boredom, and inactivity, and for a man who had ruled a nation and commanded armies.
Glyndŵr the brother knight
There was, though, a solution: to join the Hospitallers as a brother knight. They had an unquestionable right to offer him sanctuary. He knew them of old as a neighbour, and as a prince. They wouldn’t care that he was a rebel. Their only concern would be that, as a Christian Prince of Wales, he hadn’t interrupted their work. Indeed, they would surely have enthusiastically welcomed him.
In 1402, as his rebellion gathered momentum, the Hospitallers suffered a massive defeat when their stronghold of Smyrna was overrun by the armies of Timur, emperor of Central Asia, whose capital was in distant Samarkand. Their main redoubt was now Bodrum, in modern Türkiye, and they were desperately short of fighting men. Glyndŵr’s skills and experience were urgently needed.
So perhaps he rode with a party of his new brother monks through Wales to Slebech. Tonsured, clean-shaven, wearing black Hospitaller robes, he would have been unrecognisable. From Slebech, he would leave Wales with the ebbing tide, away to Asia, beyond the reach of English revenge. His rebellion had failed but he could still die with honour as a soldier of Christ. Or in old age, in the care of his fellow warrior-monks. Even better, his son Maredudd could then accept Henry’s pardon and live freely – which indeed he did, in 1421.
He goes on to talk about how myth often stands in for history when people aren’t able to direct their own lives.
Darren Chetty, on Raymond Williams’ 1975 BBC Radio 3 broadcast Welsh Culture.
Making sense at Slebech
Did it happen this way? It fits the known facts as well as any other account. It’s plausible – and more inspiring. Owain Glyndŵr, rebel Prince of Wales, got away in the end, and died with honour in Asia.
What of Slebech? The fact is that, for four centuries, much of the wealth of Wales was exported from here. How do we interpret this, though? That’s up to us. It’s tempting to say that it’s just another example of our long history of being exploited. Everything changes, everything stays the same.
Or we could be positive, acknowledging that the Welsh were as pious as any other nation in Christendom. And that, through Slebech, they played their part in a pan-European endeavour. Not of conquest, but of sustaining poor and weak pilgrims of all nations and all faiths. Which is preferable?
Facts are useful, but a sense-making narrative is essential. If, today, the facts about Wales seem dismal, and Glyndŵr is a ghost for whom we long, what really matters is the narrative we construct from them. What story will you tell to inspire us?
