with the officers of justice came and seized all his goods, which,
according to his own account, filled nine sacks, and then drove him
out of the town. The bard in a great fury indited an awdl, in
which he invites Reinallt ap Grufydd ap Bleddyn, a kind of
predatory chieftain, who resided a little way off in Flintshire, to
come and set the town on fire, and slaughter the inhabitants, in
revenge for the wrongs he had suffered, and then proceeds to vent
all kinds of imprecations against the mayor and people of Chester,
wishing, amongst other things, that they might soon hear that the
Dee had become too shallow to bear their ships - that a certain
cutaneous disorder might attack the wrists of great and small, old
and young, laity and clergy - that grass might grow in their
streets - that Ilar and Cyveilach, Welsh saints, might slay them -
that dogs might snarl at them - and that the king of heaven, with
the saints Brynach and Non, might afflict them with blindness -
which piece, however ineffectual in inducing God and the saints to
visit the Chester people with the curses with which the furious
bard wished them to be afflicted, seems to have produced somewhat
of its intended effect on the chieftain, who shortly afterwards, on
learning that the mayor and many of the Chester people were present
at the fair of Mold, near which place he resided, set upon them at
the head of his forces, and after a desperate combat, in which many
lives were lost, took the mayor prisoner, and drove those of his
people who survived into a tower, which he set on fire and burnt,
with all the unhappy wretches which it contained, completing the
horrors of the day by hanging the unfortunate mayor.

Conversant as I was with all this strange history, is it wonderful
that I looked with great interest from the wall of Chester in the
direction of Mold?