Ralph the Timid and the Last King of Wales
Was the Norman conquest the fault of a cowardly medieval knight?
History remembers the brave with a suitable epithet. Most people know the name of William the Conqueror as at the battle of Hastings he beat the Anglo-Saxon army of King Harold and changed the history of the British Isles. In the following century, we know of another Norman King, Richard the Lionheart. Can we think of him off as anything other than fearless with such a sobriquet? The records remind us of Edward the Black Prince or William the Marshal, who were named for their prowess in battle or their heroic deeds. How unfortunate is it then for Ralf of Mantes whom, more than a millennium after his death, is still known as Ralph the Timid.
As a young man, Ralph came to England from France with his uncle who would later become King Edward the Confessor. He married Agatha, the niece of Earl Godwin of Wessex, and became an Earl with lands in the present-day English Midlands. When Earl Godwin’s son Sweyn died on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Ralph also became the Earl of Hereford, a town on the border between Anglo-Saxon England and the small independent kingdoms of Wales.
It is at this time in the history of Hereford that we meet the only man to have been King of all of Wales, Gruffydd ap Llewellyn. Wales was a series of small independent kingdoms but the ruthless Gruffydd by bloody battles and strategic alliances with both Saxons and Danes managed to become the ruler of the entire nation of Wales.
Gruffydd formed an alliance with the Saxon Earl of Mercia and invaded Ralph’s lands. Ralph responded by calling up the local militia and arming his men as Norman knights on horseback. The Welsh King soundly defeated Ralph who gained the insulting monicker “the timid” as it was later claimed that he and his troops started a rout by fleeing the battle. It has also been argued that Ralph was ever after known as “the timid,” not so much for cowardice but because of his trust in cavalry over the more typical Anglo-Saxon battle techniques.
After winning the battle, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that in the year 1055, Gruffydd “burns down St Ethelbert’s minster and all the town of Hereford.”
Every British schoolchild knows the infamous date of 1066, the year of the Norman conquest, but history could have been radically different if the power politics of the Middle Ages had played out in another way. It was in 1062 that Gruffydd’s reign ended. Another of Earl Godwin's sons, the opportunist Harold Godwinson, the same Harold who was four years later to have an unfortunate incident with an arrow in the eye, took advantage of the instability following the death of Gruffydd’s ally the Earl of Mercia.
He launched a surprise attack on the Welsh King Gruffydd’s court at Rhuddlan. The political balance between the Welsh and Saxon kingdoms was destabilised, and although Gruffydd escaped, he was soon after killed, possibly by the son of an enemy he had beaten in his bid to control all of Wales. The power struggles that ensued ended not only the united state of Wales but ultimately Anglo-Saxon rule in these islands.
In 1066, during the battle of Hastings it turned out that under William’s leadership, the strategy of using Norman French cavalry to charge the shield wall of the Anglo Saxon defenders was in fact a far more effective battle tactic. So perhaps it was Ralph’s running away and not his use of horses that lost Hereford to the Welsh. It was, however, this defeat that set in motion the series of events that ultimately led to the end of Anglo-Saxon England.
