Edward postponed his attack on Philip in order to throw all his energies into the reduction of Wales.  The levies assembled at Portsmouth for the Gascon expedition were hurried beyond the Severn.  The king held another parliament and exacted a fresh supply.  Criminals were offered pardon and good wages, if they would serve, first in Wales and then in Gascony.  Before Christmas about a thousand men-at-arms were mustered at various border centres under the royal standards, while every marcher lord was busily engaged in putting down his own rebels.  Before so great a force the Welsh could do but little, and the spring saw the extinction of the rebellion.  But there was hard fighting both in the south and in the north.  Edward himself undertook the reconquest of Gwynedd.  He was at Conway before the end of the year, and in his haste he threw himself into the town while the mass of his army remained on the right bank of the river.  High tides and winter floods made the crossing of the stream impossible, and for a short time the king was actually besieged by the rebels.  Conway was unprepared for resistance and almost destitute of supplies.  The garrison thought it a terrible hardship that they had to live on salt meat and bread, and to drink water mixed with honey.  They were encouraged by Edward refusing to taste better fare than his troopers, and declining to partake of the one small measure of wine reserved for his use.  William Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, conveyed his troops across the estuary and raised the siege.  Yet the insurgents were still able to fight a pitched battle.  About January 22, 1295, Warwick found the Welsh established in a strong position in a plain between two woods.  They had fixed the butts of their lances into the ground, hoping thus to resist the shock of a cavalry charge.  Improving on the tactics of Orewyn bridge, the earl stationed between his squadrons of knights, archers and crossbowmen, whose missiles inflicted such loss on the Welsh lines that the cavalry soon found it safe to charge.  The Welsh were utterly broken, and never in a single day did they suffer such enormous losses.  Even more important than its results in breaking the back of Madog’s insurrection, this battle of Maes Madog—­or Madog’s field, as the Welsh called the place of their defeat—­is of the highest importance in the development of infantry tactics.  The order of the victorious force strikingly anticipates the great battles in Scotland and France of a later generation.  In obscure fights, like Orewyn bridge and Maes Madog, the English learnt the famous battle array which was to overwhelm the Scots in the later years of Edward’s reign and prepare the way for the triumphs of Crecy and Poitiers.