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613: THE BATTLE OF CHESTER AND ‘KING CETULA’

THE BATTLE OF CHESTER, dated by some to 613 (though others prefer 615), and the Northumbrian massacre of monks from Bangor Is-coed that preceded it, were forgotten neither by victors nor vanquished. The result has been accounts of the conflict by English and Welsh almost from the day it was fought. Amongst the Welsh this includes Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155), Charles Edwards (1628–91?), and Theophilus Evans (1693–1767), with the second claiming that native princes fought back, killing more than a thousand of their foes and thereby avenging ‘the blood of the monks’ (gwaed y mynych), and the third asserting that those monks differed from later ones, being devout men who served God ‘in spirit and truth’ (mywn Yspryd a gwirionedd).1 Inventions enveloping the day are relayed by a nineteenth-century topographer, who repeated St Augustine’s warning that the Britons ‘would speedily find death by the swords of those to whom they had refused to preach the word of life’, and how this came true, for the English slaughtered over a thousand monks of Bangor and then ‘entirely destroyed the monastery, and committed its valuable library to the flames’.2 However, this paper deals not with old legend but modern discussion, especially of a mysterious King ‘Cetula’ who fell in the battle. Plummer quoted an Irish annal on the Northumbrian triumph: cecidit Solon mac Conain Rex Bretannorum et Cetula rex cecidit. Plummer identified the first as Selyf ap Cynan, King of Powys, yet confessed, ‘Who Cetula was I am unable to say’.3 Sir John Lloyd described the conflict with sober eloquence, observing that even Bede admitted the heavy Northumbrian losses. Lloyd added that Selyf ap Cynan, as ruler of Powys, was a ‘natural defender of the valley of the Dee’, but that Gwynedd took no part in the fighting. He said nothing on ‘Cetula’.4 Hugh Williams did not mention the battle, yet did reject the notion (first expressed by Henry VIII’s antiquary John Leland) that the fifthcentury heretic Pelagius came from Bangor Is-coed.5 A.H. Williams followed Lloyd in observing how Cadfan of Gwynedd (whose tombstone at Llangadwaladr in Anglesey shows dynastic