"When Owain Glyn Dwr was declared prince of Wales by a few close associates at Glyndyfrdwy on 16 September 1400, he initiated a rebellion which was to become conscious of itself as a war of Welsh independence. But this was no new nation struggling to assert itself. Welsh autonomy could be traced back 1,000 years to the period after the Roman occupation, and Gerald of Wales, writing in the late twelfth century, remarked that the Welsh were noted for their love of of arms and the ferocity with which they defended their independence. By 1400, however that independence had long since been lost; it had been sapped and destroyed piecemeal by centuries of warfare, settlement, economic colonisation and legal imposition, beginning with the incursions of the Saxons in the fifth century and culminating in Edward I's conquest of the principality of Wales in 1283. Paradoxically, however, the vision of Welsh independence was broadest when its chances of being realised were at their bleakest. The Glyn Dwr revolt was a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to rekindle a sovereignty that had long since been extinguished, yet it nevertheless seared itself into the political and cultural psyche of southern Britain for centuries. Few educated minds in medieval Wales or England were unaware of the prophecies of Merlin, particularly after they were circulated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s: the Welsh longed for a son of prophesy to deliver them from their conquerors, and both they and the English saw in Glyn Dwr an attempt to restore the 'kingdom of the Britons' - the oldest surviving native polity in the Island of Britain - which had once held most of the island, and which aspired to do so again."

       Part of the introduction to David Moore's 'The Welsh Wars of Independence'