of his lordship over the princes of the south, Llewelyn ap Jorwerth aimed steadily at securing the means of striking off the yoke of the Saxon.  It was in vain that John strove to buy his friendship by the hand of his natural daughter Johanna.  Fresh raids on the Marches forced the king to enter Wales in 1211; but though his army reached Snowdon it fell back like its predecessors, starved and broken before an enemy it could never reach.  A second attack in the same year had better success.  The chieftains of South Wales were drawn from their new allegiance to join the English forces, and Llewelyn, prisoned in his fastnesses, was at last driven to submit.  But the ink of the treaty was hardly dry before Wales was again on fire; a common fear of the English once more united its chieftains, and the war between John and his barons soon removed all dread of a new invasion.  Absolved from his allegiance to an excommunicated king, and allied with the barons under Fitz-Walter—­too glad to enlist in their cause a prince who could hold in check the nobles of the border country where the royalist cause was strongest—­Llewelyn seized his opportunity to reduce Shrewsbury, to annex Powys, the central district of Wales where the English influence had always been powerful, to clear the royal garrisons from Caermarthen and Cardigan, and to force even the Flemings of Pembroke to do him homage.

[Sidenote:  Llewelyn and the Bards]

England watched these efforts of the subject race with an anger still mingled with contempt.  “Who knows not,” exclaims Matthew Paris as he dwells on the new pretensions of the Welsh ruler, “who knows not that the Prince of Wales is a petty vassal of the King of England?” But the temper of Llewelyn’s own people was far other than the temper of the English chronicler.  The hopes of Wales rose higher and higher with each triumph of the Lord of Snowdon.  His court was crowded with bardic singers.  “He pours,” sings one of them, “his gold into the lap of the bard as the ripe fruit falls from the trees.”  Gold however was hardly needed to wake their enthusiasm.  Poet after poet sang of “the Devastator of England,” the “Eagle of men that loves not to lie nor sleep,” “towering above the rest of men with his long red lance,” his “red helmet of battle crested with a fierce wolf.”  “The sound of his coming is like the roar of the wave as it rushes to the shore, that can neither be stayed nor hushed.”  Lesser bards strung together Llewelyn’s victories in rough jingle of rime and hounded him on to the slaughter.  “Be of good courage in the slaughter,” sings Elidir, “cling to thy work, destroy England, and plunder its multitudes.”  A fierce thirst for blood runs through the abrupt, passionate verses of the court singers.  “Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken in heaps,” bursts out a triumphant bard; “St. Clears, with its bright white lands, it is not Saxons who hold it now!” “In Swansea, the key of Lloegria, we made widows of all the wives.”  “The dread Eagle is wont to lay corpses in rows, and to feast with the leader of wolves and with hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers with keen scent of carcases.”  “Better,” closes the song, “better the grave than the life of man who sighs when the horns call him forth, to the squares of battle.”