The treaty of Aberconway, which Edward dictated, reduced Llewelyn to the position of a petty North Welsh chieftain, which he had held thirty years before.  He gave up the homage of the greater Welsh magnates, and resigned all his former conquests.  The four cantreds thus passed away from his power, and even Anglesea was only allowed to him for life and subject to a yearly tribute.  He was compelled to do homage, and ordered to pay a crushing indemnity, twice as much as the expenses of the war.  But Edward was in a generous mood.  After Llewelyn’s personal submission at Rhuddlan, the king remitted the indemnity and the rent for Anglesea.  It was a boon to Llewelyn that the treacherous David received his reward not’ in Gwynedd itself but in Duffryn Clwyd and Rhuvoniog, two of the four cantreds of the Perveddwlad.  Llewelyn’s humiliation was completed by his enforced attendance at Edward’s Christmas court at Westminster.  Next year, however, he received a further sign of royal favour.  He was allowed to marry Eleanor Montfort, and Edward himself was present at their wedding.  But on the morning of the ceremony, Llewelyn was forced to make a promise not to entertain the king’s fugitives and outlaws.

The treaty of Aberconway left Edward free to revive in the rest of Wales the policy which, when originally begun in 1254,[1] had, like a rising flood, floated Llewelyn into his wider principality.  The lords marchers resumed their ancient limits.  Princes like Griffith of Powys and Rhys of Drysllwyn sank into a position which is indistinguishable from that of their Anglo-Norman neighbours.  David, in the vale of Clwyd had no better prospects.  The heirs of lower Powys were put under the guardianship of Roger Mortimer’s younger son, another Roger, who, on the death of his wards by drowning, received possession of their lands, and henceforth, as Roger Mortimer of Chirk, became a new marcher baron.  Meanwhile Edward busied himself with schemes for establishing settled government in the conquered territories.  To a man of his training and temperament, this meant the establishment of English law and administration.  He could see no merits in the archaic Welsh customs which regarded all crimes as capable of atonement by a money payment, treated a wrecked ship as the lawful perquisite of the local proprietor, and hardly distinguished legitimate from illegitimate children in determining the descent of property.  He convinced himself that the land laws of Wales were already those of Anglo-Norman feudalism.  He subjected the cantreds of Rhos and Englefield to the Cheshire county court, and breathed a new life into the decayed shire organisation of Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire.  Flint and Rhuddlan dominated the two former, Aberystwyth and Carmarthen the latter.  Round the king’s castles grew up petty boroughs of English traders, who would, it was believed, teach the Welsh to love commerce and peaceful ways.

    [1] See page 76.