The Brothers of Gwynedd

About The Brothers of Gwynedd

Edith Pargeter's second major historical quartet, written under her own name rather than her Ellis Peters pen name, dramatizes the real thirteenth-century struggle of the Welsh princes of Gwynedd to hold Wales independent against the expanding power of the English crown. Narrated by Samson, a fictional clerk and confidant in the household of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the four novels — Sunrise in the West (1974), The Dragon at Noonday (1975), The Hounds of Sunset (1976) and Afterglow and Nightfall (1977) — trace the brothers of Gwynedd through decades of shifting alliances, betrayals and warfare, culminating in Llywelyn's death and the definitive English conquest of Wales under Edward I.

Pargeter's grounding in real medieval history — the same rigor she'd later bring to Brother Cadfael's Shrewsbury — is at its most ambitious here, covering genuine political and military history across an entire national struggle rather than a single detective's patch. It's a substantial commitment (the quartet runs well over a thousand pages combined) but stands as one of the more respected fictional treatments of medieval Welsh history, valued for treating Llywelyn and Wales's cause with genuine sympathy rather than as an English footnote.