Now as to Yvain de Galles, the Rev. Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) in his Hanes Cymru, 'History of Wales,' devotes a couple of pages, 735-7, to Froissart's account of him, and he points out that Angharad Llwyd, in her edition of Sir John Wynne's History of the Gwydir Family [73], had found Owen Lawgoch to have been Owen ab Thomas ab Rhodri, brother to Llewelyn, the last native prince of Wales. One of the names, however, among other things, forms a difficulty: why did Froissart call Yvain's father Aymon? So it is clear that a more searching study of Welsh pedigrees and other documents, including those at the Record Office [74], has to be made before Owen can be satisfactorily placed in point of succession. For that he was in the right line to succeed the native princes of Wales is suggested both by the eagerness with which all Wales was represented as looking to his return to be the lord of the country, and by the opening words of Froissart in describing what he had been robbed of by Edward III, as being both lordship and principality--la signourie et princeté. Be that as it may, there is, it seems to me, little doubt that Yvain de Galles was no other than the Owen Lawgoch, whose adherent Gruffyd Says was deprived of his land and property in the latter part of Edward's reign. In the next place, there is hardly room for doubt that the Owen Lawgoch here referred to was the same man whom the baledwyr in their jumble of prophecies intended to be Henry the Ninth, that is to say the Welsh successor to the last Tudor king, Henry VIII, and that he was at the same time the hero of the cave legends of divers parts of the Principality, especially South Wales, as already indicated.
Now without being able to say why Owen and his analogues should become the heroes of cave legends contemplating a second advent, it is easy to point to circumstances which facilitated their doing so. It is useless to try to discuss the question of Arthur's disappearance; but take Garry Geerlaug, for instance, a roving Norseman, as we may suppose from his name, who may have suddenly disappeared with his followers, never more to be heard of in the east of Ireland. In the absence of certain news of his death, it was all the easier to imagine that he was dozing quietly away in an enchanted fortress. Then as to King Cadwaladr, who was also, perhaps, to have returned to this world, so little is known concerning his end that historians have no certainty to this day when or where he died. So much the readier therefore would the story gain currency that he was somewhere biding his time to come back to retrieve his lost fortunes. Lastly, there is Owen Lawgoch, the magic of whose name has only been dissipated in our own day: he died in France in the course of a protracted war with the kings of England. It is not likely, then, that the peasantry of Wales could have heard anything definite about his fate. So here also the circumstances were favourable to the cave legend and the dream that he was, whether at home or abroad, only biding his time. Moreover, in all these cases the hope-inspiring delusion gained currency among a discontented people, probably, who felt the sore need of a deliverer to save them from oppression or other grievous hardships of their destiny.