Till within his hall the flag-reeds tall And the long green rushes grow.
The ogress continued in words which made the clerk see how completely he had been caught in his own net:
Then take thy bride to thy cloistered bed, As by oath and spell decreed, And nought be thy fare but the pike and the dare, And the water in which they feed.
The clerk had succeeded in restoring peace at the king's banqueting board, but it was the peace of the dead;
For down went the king, and his palace and all, And the waters now o'er it flow, And already in his hall do the flag-reeds tall And the long green rushes grow.
But the visitor will, Dovaston says, find Willin's peace relieved by the stories which the villagers have to tell of that wily clerk, of Croes-Willin, and of 'the cave called the Grim Ogo'; not to mention that when the lake is clear, they will show you the towers of the palace below, the Llynclys, which the Brython of ages gone by believed to be there.
We now come to a different story about this pool, namely, one which has been preserved in Latin by the historian Humfrey Lhuyd, or Humphrey Llwyd, to the following effect:--
'After the description of Gwynedh, let vs now come to Powys, the seconde kyngedome of VVales, which in the time of German Altisiodorensis [St. Germanus of Auxerre], which preached sometime there, agaynst Pelagius Heresie: was of power, as is gathered out of his life. The kynge wherof, as is there read, bycause he refused to heare that good man: by the secret and terrible iudgement of God, with his Palace, and all his householde: was swallowed vp into the bowels of the Earth, in that place, whereas, not farre from Oswastry, is now a standyng water, of an vnknowne depth, called Lhunclys, that is to say: the deuouryng of the Palace. And there are many Churches founde in the same Province, dedicated to the name of German [8].'
I have not succeeded in finding the story in any of the lives of St. Germanus, but Nennius, § 32, mentions a certain Benli, whom he describes as rex iniquus atque tyrannus valde, who, after refusing to admit St. Germanus and his following into his city, was destroyed with all his courtiers, not by water, however, but by fire from heaven. But the name Benli, in modern Welsh spelling Benlli [9], points to the Moel Famau range of mountains, one of which is known as Moel Fenlli, between Ruthin and Mold, rather than to any place near Oswestry. In any case there is no reason to suppose that this story with its Christian and ethical motive is anything like so old as the substratum of Dovaston's verses.