A Bodwell family story · Britain to the Llŷn Peninsula · legend to 1651
Forty-eight generations, from a legendary king to a boy on a ship
Somewhere in the family's papers is a line of descent that runs forty-eight generations deep — from Beli Mawr, a king of Britain said to have reigned around 100 BC, down to Henry Bodwell, who sailed for Massachusetts in the 1660s. It is, by any honest reckoning, two very different documents stitched into one. The first two-thirds are Welsh bardic legend: genealogy compiled centuries after the fact to root gentry families in ancient, native British nobility. The last third is something closer to real, documented history — sheriffs, MPs, a lawyer, and eventually a pirate scandal, all traceable in surviving records. Here's what the line actually says, generation by generation, and what's worth knowing about the people on it.
The pedigree opens with Beli Mawr, remembered in Welsh tradition as a king of Britain around the turn of the first century BC. His brother, by this account, was Caswallon — better known to history as Cassivellaunus, the British war leader who genuinely did resist Julius Caesar's invasions of Britain in 54 BC. That's about as close as this stretch of the pedigree comes to solid ground. The next eighteen generations — Lludd, Aflech, Assallach, Owain, and onward through names like Onwedd, Gorddyfyn, and Gwrddali — are the kind of obscure, patronymic chain typical of medieval Welsh genealogical tracts: plausible-sounding, largely unverifiable, and more valuable as tradition than as fact.
One name partway through is worth pausing on. Generation 21, Cunedda Wledig, is a genuinely significant figure in early Welsh history, even if the details of his life are contested: traditionally a fifth-century warlord who migrated south from the Brittonic-speaking region beyond Hadrian's Wall and founded the ruling dynasty of Gwynedd. The same tradition credits his granddaughter Eigr — the "fair Ygraine" of Arthurian romance — as the mother of King Arthur. That's a claim to enjoy rather than to lean on; it belongs to legend, not lineage.
From Cunedda, the line runs through the early rulers of Gwynedd: his son Einion Yrth, said to have reigned as king of Gwynedd and Anglesey from 369 to 443, then Caswallon Llaw-Hir ("Long-Hand"), and then Maelgwn Hir Gwynedd — a figure who genuinely does appear in the historical record. Maelgwn was condemned by name in the sixth-century monk Gildas's fiery polemic On the Ruin of Britain, which addresses him as "the island dragon" and accuses him of a litany of political sins. Being singled out by a contemporary, hostile chronicler is, oddly, some of the best evidence in this entire pedigree that a real person is being discussed. His descendants, Rhun Hir and Beli ap Rhun, continued to rule Gwynedd into the very end of the sixth century.
Two generations later, the line reaches Collwyn ap Tangno, Lord of Ardudwy and Eifionydd — the same ninth-century chieftain identified elsewhere in the family's records as founder of the fifth of the Fifteen Noble Tribes of Gwynedd, and the figure whose tribal arms the Bodwells and a cluster of related gentry families later carried. An old account preserved in the parish history of Whiteford and Holywell describes Collwyn's descendants as, for generations after him, "the noblest and best men in Efionydd and Ardudwy, next to the princes and their issue" — and records his arms exactly as the family's coat of arms is described today: sable, between three flower-de-luces a cheveron argent.
That same source explains why tracing a single "heir" through this period is so difficult: under British law of the time, a man's land was divided among all his children rather than passed to a single eldest son, so no one line was consistently favored or remembered above the others. The pedigree that survives is one reconstructed thread among many that could have been drawn.
This middle stretch of the pedigree is thinner on detail but includes at least one genuinely interesting figure: Einion ap Gwgan, generation 33, tentatively identified as a court poet active around 1215. A single poem attributed to him survives — a eulogy to Prince Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, better remembered as Llywelyn the Great — preserved in several medieval manuscripts and later published in The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales. The family's own notes are careful to flag that the identification needs further research, which is itself a useful reminder about how much of this line rests on educated best guesses rather than settled fact.
By the fourteenth century the names start attaching to real civic offices. Einion ap Gruffydd, generation 37, served as High Sheriff of Carnarvon from 1354 to 1356; his son Ifan ap Einion held the same office in 1389. These are the kinds of appointments that turn up in actual administrative records, not just bardic memory — the pedigree is visibly shifting, generation by generation, from legend toward history.
The surname itself doesn't appear until generation 42: John Bovel ap Madog, who lived in the time of Henry VIII and was, according to family tradition, the first of the line to formally take the name Bodvel, around 1558 — the family settling into a fixed English-style surname just as the old Welsh patronymic system (son of, son of, son of) was falling out of everyday use across Wales.
His descendants are where the pedigree turns genuinely colorful. Generation 44, recorded here as Sir John Wynn but identified in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography as John Wyn ap Hugh of Bodvel, carried the royal standard for the Earl of Warwick against the Norfolk rebels at the 1549 Battle of Dussindale — the climax of Kett's Rebellion. Family tradition holds that his horse was killed under him and he was himself wounded, yet he kept the great standard of England aloft. For that service he was richly rewarded with offices and land, including the grant of Bardsey Island. He then, according to the same record, turned the island into the depot for a highly organized piracy operation, using his public office to shield himself from prosecution — not the ending one expects from a loyal standard-bearer's story, but apparently a well-documented one.
Was rewarded with the grant of Bardsey Island, which he was alleged in 1569 to be using as the headquarters of a highly-organized nest of pirates.
His son, Hugh Gwyn Bodvel (generation 45), had his own brush with power: imprisoned for opposing the Earl of Leicester in his role as ranger of Snowdon Forest, and investigated in 1578, while still in custody, over his relationship with an exiled brother-in-law suspected of Catholic sympathies. No incriminating evidence was found. He later reconciled with Leicester, was elected MP for Caernarvonshire in 1589, and served as High Sheriff that year and again in 1597.
The next Henry Bodvel (generation 46) took a quieter, more professional path — a lawyer practicing in both London and Wales, later deputy vice-admiral for North Wales. Records from the reign of Edward VI show him, alongside a Robert Bodvel, receiving grants of former priory lands in Carnarvonshire in 1548. His son, another Henry Bodvel (generation 47), died in 1656 — and is, by the family's own account, the father whose early death set in motion the chain of events that sent the next generation across an ocean.
The line ends — or rather, turns into the story told elsewhere on this site — with Henry Bodwell, born in April 1651 at Bodvel, Carnarvonshire, and died June 1, 1745, in Methuen, Massachusetts. He is the same Henry whose father's death, and whose stepfather's alleged scheme to keep him from his inheritance, is said to have put a thirteen-year-old boy alone on a ship to America. Everything else on this site — Bodwell's Falls, the family's service at Fort William Henry and Bunker Hill, the houses in Methuen and Lawrence, the branches that pushed on to Ohio, Maine, Ontario, and California — starts with him.
For reference, here is the complete forty-eight generation pedigree as recorded in the family's papers, legend and documented history together:
The pedigree shifts noticeably around the fourteenth century, from bardic tradition to names that show up in actual sheriffs' rolls, parliamentary records, and land grants.
Cassivellaunus (generation 2), Cunedda (21), and Maelgwn Gwynedd (24) are all figures with some genuine historical footing, even where the exact generational placement is a matter of medieval reconstruction rather than certainty.
Between generations 37 and 46 alone, the line produced two High Sheriffs of Carnarvon, an MP, a court poet (tentatively), a lawyer, a deputy vice-admiral — and, by most accounts, a pirate.
Pedigrees like this one were compiled to make a point as much as to record a fact: that a family belonged among the old nobility of Wales, whatever the documentary gaps along the way. Read in that spirit — part genuine record, part inherited claim — it's less important whether every one of the first thirty names can be proven than what the whole shape of the thing says: a family that told itself, generation after generation, that it came from somewhere, and was going somewhere else.