The Medieval Kingdom that was Erased from History

Grab Atlas VPN for just $1.83/mo +3 months extra before the SUMMER DEAL expires: get.atlasvpn.com/Cambrian It's good to be back, I hope you all enjoy. I also apologise for the occasional glitch, including the wacky (hopefully now blurred) map towards the end for a few seconds, I'm still getting to grips with the new software, diolch.

It's honestly such an existential thought to think there are like hundreds if not thousands of old kingdoms and civilizations with their own history, language, culture and glorious feats etc. Which we know nothing about and probably never will because all traces of their existence are gone.

The Pengwerns were forced south. Everywhere they settled, the locals forced them south. This is why there are no Pengwerns in the northern hemisphere.

These small lost kingdoms and forgotten wars of medieval Britain feel so much like Lord of The Rings lore. Its pretty easy to see where Tolkien got his inspiration from.

We often forget how irritating it must have been to be a simple farmer back then, you got a new ruler every couple of years and you’d worry whether the dude was nice or if he would make your difficult life even harder. I wonder if some people who were very isolated from the rest sometimes didn’t know that the ruler changed.

If there are this many strange and forgotten kingdoms in the relatively small area of Wales , it makes you wonder how many there are in larger and more populous areas like, say, Germany

The fact that using mistranslation, poetry and historical context has allowed modern historians to reconstruct the existence of an entire kingdom is absolutely incredible

I am living in the heart of Shrewsbury and I've seen 'Pengwern' written all over the place without ever knowing what it was... this video was quite an eye opener!

I find it fascinating how much we don't know about the 4th-6th centuries in Britain, it's this mystifying gap in the record, we go into it with Romanised Britons living in Roman towns and come out of it with a bunch of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh petty kingdoms. It must have been so insanely chaotic.

Im from Shropshire and super interested in local history. The mysteries around Pengwern have always infuriated me. Its so awesome that youve managed to put together some more satisfying answers.

I love historical cold cases like this. It’s not that there’s nothing to go off of, but there’s enough to where you can try and figure out what’s been lost to history without it being easily laid out for you, or without having to go off of so much conjecture that you end up in fantasyland. Cannot give enough credit for the historians who spend their lives putting it together and channels like these which make that research digestible for a modern audience. ❤

Subtitling renders Pengwern as Penguin. I'll have to go somewhere that I can turn up the volume to take this seriously.

I live pretty much at the foot of the Wrekin. You really can see a lot from up there! There's a story about the hill being built by a giant, who came from Wales to divert the river and drown the nearby towns. "He laid down hid shovel of earth, and made the Wrekin, and the dirt off his boots formed the Ercall." There's a couple of slightly differing versions, as there often is with such legends, but that's the gist. Interestingly, it is also geologically different from the surrounding area. There's certainly a lot of history in the area, thank you for introducing me to another story of the region!

The history books I've read have done little to no mention of Pengwern other than "it existed, probably" so this was extremely helpful - so thank you for another amazing video, I eagerly await more 😊

This kind of thing happened a lot back then, especially to smaller places like Pengwern. It’s still happening. Ask anyone on the street to point out Bohemia on a map. Ask them if they know anything at all about Bohemian culture or history, if they can name even one Bohemian king. Bohemia existed only 120 years ago and was hugely influential for centuries, and in our history textbooks, it’s like it never existed.

Powys being the countryside that broke off of pengwerns back when the legions left and the civitas actually makes a lot of sense with early names being closer to pagus which is latin for “country district”

You are quickly becoming one of the very best history related content creators on the entire site, in fact I'd be hard pressed to find someone who goes into such painstaking detail in such a high quality format as you do, great job mate.

The idea of taking mortal revenge upon someone who had killed a family member very much fits within the Anglo-Saxon quasi-legal concept of the Blood Feud, by which it was almost considered a duty. Thus reinforcing the motivation for Oswiu to ruthlessly go after Cynddylan.

I Live in Shropshire, Ludlow was also a major military strategic capital. Shropshire is the 'forgotten county' and its absolutely gorgeous.

Oh my god this is amazing. One question though, assuming that Pengwern and Mercia were allies, the attack on the monastery slayed one of the King of Mercia’s sons, would that signify the end of their alliance? It seems rather random if they were both still allied against Northumbria.