Gruffydd, son of Llewelyn, who, by his tyranny, for a long time had
oppressed Wales; his wife took her mother's name of Nest, which the
English transmuted into Anne; by whom he had children, one of whom,
named Mahel, a distinguished soldier, was thus unjustly deprived of
his paternal inheritance. His mother, in violation of the marriage
contract, held an adulterous intercourse with a certain knight; on
the discovery of which, the son met the knight returning in the
night from his mother, and having inflicted on him a severe corporal
punishment, and mutilated him, sent him away with great disgrace.
The mother, alarmed at the confusion which this event caused, and
agitated with grief, breathed nothing but revenge. She therefore
went to king Henry I., and declared with assertions more vindictive
than true, and corroborated by an oath, that her son Mahel was not
the son of Bernard, but of another person with whom she had been
secretly connected. Henry, on account of this oath, or rather
perjury, and swayed more by his inclination than by reason, gave
away her eldest daughter, whom she owned as the legitimate child of
Bernard, in marriage to Milo Fitz-Walter, {46} constable of
Gloucester, with the honour of Brecheinoc as a portion; and he was
afterwards created earl of Hereford by the empress Matilda, daughter
of the said king. By this wife he had five celebrated warriors;
Roger, Walter, Henry, William, and Mahel; all of whom, by divine
vengeance, or by fatal misfortunes, came to untimely ends; and yet
each of them, except William, succeeded to the paternal inheritance,
but left no issue. Thus this woman (not deviating from the nature
of her sex), in order to satiate her anger and revenge, with the
heavy loss of modesty, and with the disgrace of infamy, by the same
act deprived her son of his patrimony, and herself of honour. Nor
is it wonderful if a woman follows her innate bad disposition: for
it is written in Ecclesiastes, "I have found one good man out of a