14 Facts About Madoc

However, it attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era, when English and Welsh writers wrote of the claim that Madoc had come to the Americas as an assertion of prior discovery, and hence legal possession, of North America by the Kingdom of England.

Madoc story remained popular in later centuries, and a later development asserted that Madoc's voyagers had intermarried with local Native Americans, and that their Welsh-speaking descendants still live somewhere in the United States.

The Madoc story has been the subject of much speculation in the context of possible pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact.

Madoc's purported father, Owain Gwynedd, was a real king of Gwynedd during the 12th century and is widely considered one of the greatest Welsh rulers of the Middle Ages.

Madoc's reign was fraught with battles with other Welsh princes and with Henry II of England.

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Gwyn Williams in Madoc, the Making of a Myth, makes it clear that Madoc is not mentioned in any of Owain's surviving manuscripts.

Madoc legend attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era, when Welsh and English writers used it to bolster British claims in the New World versus those of Spain.

Dee went so far as to assert that Brutus of Troy and King Arthur as well as Madoc had conquered lands in the Americas and therefore their heir Elizabeth I of England had a priority claim there.

Several attempts to confirm Madoc's historicity have been made, but historians of early America, notably Samuel Eliot Morison, regard the story as a myth.

Madoc's legend has been a notable subject for poets, however.

The most famous account in English is Robert Southey's long 1805 poem Madoc, which uses the story to explore the poet's freethinking and egalitarian ideals.

Fittingly, Southey wrote Madoc to help finance a trip of his own to America, where he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge hoped to establish a Utopian state they called a "Pantisocracy".

John Smith, historian of Virginia, wrote in 1624 of the Chronicles of Wales reports Madoc went to the New World in 1170 AD with some men and women.

Smith says the Chronicles say Madoc then went back to Wales to get more people and made a second trip back to the New World.