Owen Glyndwr is recognized today as one of the great figures of Welsh history, the leader of a revolt which commanded widespread support and presented a serious threat to English authority in the early years of the fifteenth century, and a hero who has come to embody Welsh aspirations to nationhood. Although he has been the subject of substantial academic study, much about him remains enigmatic, and he is a source of continual fascination. However, his status has not always been so high, and for over three centuries after his death he was the subject of legend but also a cause of shame for some of his countrymen. Thomas Pennant's account of his life in the first volume of his Tour in Wales was a major contribution to the historiography of Glyndwr and led to his rehabilitation as a national hero in the nineteenth century. This article will consider his use of a wide range of historical sources to shape his life of Glyndwr within the context of travel writing.

Born about 1359, Glyndwr spent much of his life as a prosperous landowner in north- east Wales, having trained in the law and done military service in Scotland in the 1380s. His revolt began with an attack on the town of Ruthin in September 1400, and spread throughout Wales in the following years, reaching its height in the years 1404 to 1406 when Glyndwr had support from France and was able to hold parliaments at Machynlleth and Harlech. From 1407 onwards the king's forces gradually reestablished control, but resistance was not finally suppressed until 1415, which is the probable year of Glyndwr's death.

Glyndwr had received relatively little attention in published histories of Wales before Pennant's time, partly because of the tendency to regard the later Middle Ages as a mere interlude between the age of the independent Princes and the Tudor Acts of Union. The brief account of his rebellion in David Powel's Historie of Cambria (1584), closely followed by William Wynnein his History of Wales (1697), is in a neutral chronicle style, in places openly critical of its effects.