Owain ap Thomas ap Rhodri (d. 1378), known in Welsh as Owain Lawgoch — Owain of the Red Hand — was a legitimate great-nephew of Llywelyn the Last and the most credible claimant to the Principality of Wales for much of the fourteenth century. He spent his adult life as a mercenary commander of considerable reputation in the service of the French crown, leading expeditions against England and launching two abortive attempts to land in Wales with French backing. He was assassinated near Mortagne-sur-Gironde in 1378 by an English agent named John Lamb, hired specifically to remove him before he could land in Wales and ignite a rising.
The story
The Welsh refused to accept his death as final. A sleeping-hero legend grew up around Owain that closely mirrors those attached to Fionn mac Cumhaill in Ireland and King Arthur in England. The most vivid version of the tradition was recorded in Cardiganshire: a farmer named Dafydd encountered a stranger who led him to a stone step beside a bush and told him to dig. Steps led down into a vast lamp-lit cave where a giant red-handed man lay asleep among silent warriors. The stranger identified the sleeper as Owain Lawgoch, 'who sleeps until the appointed time; when he wakes he will be king of the Britons.' A bell hung in the cave was not to be rung on pain of death. A lake at Aberllefenni in Gwynedd was historically known as Llyn Owain Lawgoch, and Carreg Cennen Castle in Carmarthenshire carries a separate oral tradition of a sleeping prince in its caves — the pin for this entry is placed there.
The legend draws specifically on the injustice of Owain's death by treachery — murdered by an assassin rather than killed in honest battle — to explain why his rest cannot be permanent. As a direct male-line descendant of the old Welsh royal house, he represented the unfulfilled promise of an independent Wales, and the sleeping-king tradition allowed that promise to persist across the centuries. The tradition is distinct from the better-known Owain Glyndŵr sleeping-king legend, which attaches to different sites and a different historical moment; Graham Watkins's study of the sleeping prince of Carreg Cennen is among the more recent scholarly examinations of the specifically Carmarthenshire version.