Guto'r Glyn

From various of his poems we know that Guto was large and physically strong, recognised for his courage and sporting prowess, wore a beard and had black hair (though he rapidly went bald, leading him to jokingly compare himself to a tonsured monk wandering the countryside).

Work as a drover led to an incident in which he lost the priest of Corwen's sheep, instigating a poetic controversy with his rival Tudur Penllyn.

[4] His finest and, to modern understanding, most powerful poems were written at the end of his long life and reflect on mortality, while he dismissed his earlier work as "babbling sweet nonsense continually" ("malu son melys ennyd").

From one of his poems, In praise of Oswestry, it is apparent he lived for some years in the Shropshire town of which he described himself "Long wedded here, a burgess am I" (i.e. a freeman of the borough).

[6] He spent his last years in blindness as a lay guest at the Cistercian abbey of Valle Crucis, near Llangollen.