What do we know about Gerald of Windsor, first husband of Nesta Ferch Rhys, Welsh princess and lady of Carew? Not a great deal on first glance, but a dig around allows us to discover details hiding beneath the surface – and I always enjoy a good dig around.
Although we have no date for Gerald’s birth, we know he was a younger son of Walter of Windsor, the constable of Windsor Castle in Berkshire, one of the most important royal fortresses in southern England. Gerald would have grown up here with his siblings including two older brothers, and would have absorbed the modus operandi of running a great castle. He would have had access to excellent training in arms and the best equipment. Although a younger son and of the service-nobility rather than the high baronage, he would have had the tools for advancement at his fingertips.
Gerald came to South Wales with Marcher lord Arnulf de Montgomery, son of Roger Earl of Shrewsbury, as one of his hearth knights, and at some point after 1093 became constable of Pembroke castle and responsible for the general hinterland. On first arriving in 1093 following the death of the prince of the region Rhys ap Tewdwr in battle, there was no castle at Pembroke and Gerald must have been present at the inception of the Norman edifice, and probably oversaw the building of the first timber tower and palisade. Certainly by 1096 the new stronghold was sufficiently secure to withstand a siege by the Welsh. Gerald attempted to persuade his attackers, that their assault was pointless, intimating that he was well supplied with a full storehouse, to which end he cut up a pile of bacon flitches and threw them over the palisade at the Welsh to prove his point. He also sent a letter to Arnulf de Montgomery declaring that he had supplies to last throughout the winter and made sure it was intercepted by his enemies, giving them the wrong impression. The story is reported in the Welsh mediaeval work the Brut y Tywysogion, a chronicle of Welsh history written between the years 682 to 1332. Gerald’s cunning saved the day and Pembroke was only one of two fortresses to hold out in South Wales during the Welsh onslaught on the Normans in 1096.
A few years later, the Montgomery family rebelled against the new king of England, Henry I, who had come to the throne after his older brother, William Rufus’s ‘accidental’ death while hunting in the New Forest. At this point Gerald was no longer constable of Pembroke, but Henry reinstated him, and it is probably around this time that Gerald married Nesta, Rhys’s beautiful daughter, (known as the Helen of Wales) presumably to give him sanction and authority to rule in South Wales. Wedding into the blood of Rhys ap Tewdwr also ensured that future generations had a claim on that bloodline. Pembroke castle belonged to the crown, and Carew was the family caput. Gerald and Nesta’s eldest son went by the title of William of Carew. Nesta and Gerald had five children during their marriage: William, Angharad, Davydd, Maurice and Gwladus. All went on to have productive and successful lives – see my blog on Nesta’s biography here. https://elizabethchadwick.com/blog/the-kings-jewel-finding-nesta/
Gerald had a son by an unknown mistress who has left no trace in history. We know nothing of the child either, other than that he was a boy and just possibly may have been called Walter the same as Gerald’s father.
The Brut y Tywysogion tells us that a Welsh Prince, Owain. son of Cadwgan ap Bleddyn of Powys became enamoured of Nesta somewhere around 1109, and, learning that Gerald and his family were staying at their castle of Cenarth Bychan (very possibly modern Cilgerran) together with all their worldly goods he made a plan to raid the castle and do his worst. The Brut tells us that he entered the castle by surprise at night and that Nesta, thinking quickly, ordered Gerald to hide down the latrine shaft rather than be killed. Owain meanwhile, plundered the castle and abducted Nesta and the children. The insult and the outrage caused by the attacks sent a storm throughout the Welsh marches. Owain’s father Cadwgan, currently lord of Cardigan, found himself implicated for failing to prevent his son’s reckless behaviour and swiftly fled to exile in England. Owain fled too, taking ship for Ireland, the usual bolt hole for Welsh princes when matters became dicey at home. Presumably Nesta was restored to Gerald at this stage as part of a peace agreement. The Brut makes no mention of the actual event ; it does say though, that the children were returned as a gesture of appeasement. The Brut adds that Owain had sexual intercourse with Nesta – willingly or not on her part we don’t know, but we do know that at some point after the abduction, she returned to Gerald and that they went on to have several more children, so the abduction was no block to marital relations.
Owain’s hasty departure for Ireland following the abduction, left his father Cadwgan to deal with the brunt of the Norman anger. However, Owain returned at a later point with his fierce cousin Madog ap Rhirrid, and took to raiding his enemies’ lands, burning, plundering, and capturing people to be sold in Dublin, where the Hiberno Norse had a prospering slave market and were eager for merchandise of all kinds, be it plundered goods, or captured men, women and children. One of Owain and Madog’s attacks resulted in the death of William of Brabant, an official of senior importance among the Flemish and Brabancon immigrant communities who had settled in South Wales under the protection and encouragement of Henry I, following catastrophic floods in their own lands. The deed solidified the wider displeasure of the English crown.
To Gerald, Owain was now a marked man, and he eventually got his revenge in 1116. Owain, having managed to make his peace with King Henry was fighting for him on campaign, attempting to rid South Wales of Nesta’s brother Gruffydd Ap Rhys. Gruffydd, now a young adult had returned to Wales from Ireland in 1112, having been spirited away as a small boy ahead of the Norman attacks of 1193. For a time he stayed with Nesta and Gerald, before going north to his father’s former allies in Gwynedd. He began agitating against the Normans, although not in Nesta and Gerald’s territory.
Owain, currently a Norman ally, set out to deal with Gruffydd whom he viewed as a rival for territory. Owain and Gerald were supposedly fighting on the same side, but when their troops clashed in the forests of Twyi not far from Carmarthen, Gerald and his Fleming’s brought Owain down and killed him. The Brut says that Owain attacked first, but was hampered by the plunder he had seized along the way as he had raided and burned indiscriminately.
Following his death, Owain’s territories were divided among surviving male relatives and the strength of Powys diminished. Nesta’s brother Gruffydd settled down in the Cothi Valley, married the daughter of Gruffydd ap Cynan of Gwynedd, and raised a family, although on occasion he continued to cause trouble. He was never to rise to great heights but his son Rhys stood on his shoulders and led the Welsh revival, ruling from Cardigan during his lifetime as the renowned Lord Rhys. He is still celebrated today for his statesmanship and dedication to the Arts and is one of the many giants of native Welsh history.
What happened to Gerald after the events of 1116 is one of history’s unanswered questions. He disappears from the records after this point, and some historians place this as the date of his death and think that he might himself have been injured during his fight with Owain ap Cadwgan. However, we know Nesta remarried following his death, and the earliest mention of this is in 1130, fourteen years later, when she was appears as the wife of the sheriff of Pembroke, a Fleming called William Hait. Her son by Hait, also called William, appears in the records as Lord of llansteffan. The marriage did not last long though, and Nesta married a third time to Stephen, the Constable of cardigan, and also bore him a son – Robert who also took part in the Cambro-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 1160’s.
There was a Welsh uprising in 1127, and some historians believe that this is when Gerald may have died, which makes more sense of the timeline to me. Had he died in 1116 Nesta would have been remarried rapidly for the security of the territory, for Gerald’s son and heir at this point would only have been in his early teens. A date nearer to 1130 for Gerald’s death seems to fit more closely with the known history, by which time his eldest son would have been in his 20s and capable of ruling the family estates. If this is indeed the case, then Gerald and Nesta would have been married for the best part of 25 years.
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