Welsh Journals

'the Welsh'). Nevertheless, the deployment of the new title represented at the very least a deliberate rhetorical strategy designed to exalt Owain and claim a paramount position for him in relation to other Welsh rulers.73 Whatever models may have influenced the choice of the word princeps, the title can be interpreted as a response to the devaluation of the language of kingship in a country where there was a plurality of kings. In a Welsh context, the crucial distinguishing feature of princeps was that, to begin with, the title was held by only one ruler, literally the chief ruler of Wales. Moreover, while sufficiently elastic to be an appropriate term for a wide variety of rulers, it conveyed, thanks ultimately to its Roman imperial associations, a dignity which trans- cended-or perhaps more accurately subsumed-the royal status embodied in the term rex. 74The use in the second letter to Louis of the genitive plural form Waliarum (instead of Waliae) arguably underscored the Wales-wide authority which Owain claimed by implying that he was prince of all regions of Wales, including both Nortwalia and Sutwalia; this was certainly the point of the style 'prince of the Welsh' (princeps Wallensium), inferred from the Becket correspondence.75 It was surely the exalted status it conveyed which explains why princeps caught on as a title amongst major native Welsh rulers by the 1180s, a development which arguably led to its becoming devalued in turn.76 Nevertheless, when combined specifically with Wallia the title retained its potency, and recognition as 'prince of Wales' by the English crown remained a fundamental ambition of Owain's thirteenth-century successors in 73 Cf. Jones Pierce, Medieval Welsh Society, pp. 29-30. 74 Cf. Richter, 'Political and Institutional Background', pp. 45-6, and, especially, Crouch, Image of Aristocracy, pp. 85-93. 75 This use of the plural form Waliae is not unique to Owain: see, for example, The Charters of the Anglo-Norman Earls of Chester, c. 1071-1237, ed. G. Barraclough (Record Soc. of Lancashire and Cheshire, CXVII; Manchester, 1988), nos. 64, 84 (and cf. Nortwaliarum in no. 28); Recueil des actes de Henri II, ed. L. Delisle and E. Berger (Paris, 1916-27), I, 390; Gir. Camb. Op., VI, 15, 59 (Itinerarium Kambriae I. 1, 5); William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Chronicles, ed. Howlett, I, 106, 107. It is possible that the use of the plural forms Waliae and Waliarum was modelled on the use by classical authors of the plural form Galliae (genitive Galliarum) to denote the provinces of Gaul. 76 Richter, 'Political and Institutional Background', pp. 45-7; J. B. Smith, 'Treftadaeth Deheubarth', in N. A. Jones and H. Pryce (eds.), Yr Arglwydd Rhys (Cardiff, 1996), pp. 33-5.