As there was then war with Scotland, hostages were taken from the Welsh chiefs, and were kept in English castles for several years. But the last lesson had proved effectual. The Welsh settled down peaceably on their lands and generally adopted the English customs. Except a few great lords, their gentry were still the representatives of their old families. Only five men in all had received the last punishment of the law for sanguinary rebellions extending over eighteen years of the King’s reign. Of any massacre of the bards, or any measures taken to repress them, history knows nothing.
Never was conquest more merciful than Edward’s, and the fault lies with his officers, not with the King, if many years still passed before the old quarrel between Wales and England was obliterated from the hearts of the conquered people.
JAPANESE REPEL THE TARTARS
Kublai Khan, the first of the Mongol emperors who reigned at Peking, and Kameyama, the ninetieth emperor—as reputed—of Japan, are supposed to have come to their respective thrones in the same year, 1260. At this period the Japanese rulers (mikados) were mere puppets in the hands of their shoguns—hereditary commanders-in-chief of the army—and the shoguns themselves were tools of the regents of the Hojo dynasty.
Corea had lately been made tributary to the Tartar or Mongol power, when some of the Coreans in the service of Kublai Khan suggested to him that his way was now open to Japan, 1265. Next year Kublai selected a chief envoy whose name, as Parker says, appears in Chinese characters precisely the same as that of Sir Robert Hart, and whom the author of the narrative immediately following, in order to avoid uncouth names, designates as “Hart.” By this envoy Kublai sent a letter to Japan, and this act was the beginning of the execution of his designs against that country, formed upon the advice of the Coreans. In this letter the Mongol Emperor called upon Japan to return to the vassal duty which for centuries, he claimed, she had formerly owned to China. —EDWARD HARPER PARKER
The King of Corea, who had meanwhile been instructed