Download PDF | Max Lieberman - The Medieval March of Wales_ The Creation and Perception of a Frontier, 1066-1283-Cambridge University Press (2010).
311 Pages
This book examines the making of the March of Wales and the crucial role its lords played in the politics of medieval Britain between the Norman conquest of England of 1066 and the English conquest of Wales in 1283. Max Lieberman argues that the Welsh borders of Shropshire, which were first, from ¢. 1165, referred to as Marchia Wallie, provide a paradigm for the creation of the March. He reassesses the role of William the Conqueror’s tenurial settlement in the making of the March and sheds new light on the ways in which seigneurial administrations worked in a cross-cultural context. Finally, he explains why, from c. 1300, the March of Wales included the conquest territories in south Wales as well as the highly autonomous border lordships. This book makes a significant and original contribution to frontier studies, investigating both the creation and the changing perception of a medieval borderland.
MAX LIEBERMAN is a post-doctoral researcher at the Historical Seminar of the University of Zurich.
PREFACE
This book sets out to solve a puzzle. It focuses on the period between the beginning of the Norman conquest of England (1066) and the English conquest of Wales (1283). This was when Norman and English knights and barons, having established themselves in England, encroached upon Welsh territory. It was also when the phrase ‘the March of Wales’ (Marchia Wallie) came to be widely used. However, that phrase appears not, at first, to have referred to the territories conquered in Wales (the territories known as the ‘Marcher lordships’ to modern-day historians of medieval Britain). Rather, the first ‘March of Wales’ seems to have been the Welsh border of the English county of Shropshire. It was only after a century and a half, from c. 1300, that all ‘Marcher lordships’, even those in south Wales, were normally included within the medieval March of Wales, the region known to contemporaries as Marchia Wallie.
This puzzle, along with some of the many others posed by the medieval March of Wales, has intrigued me for a number of years now. During that time I have benefited enormously from the help of others. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to record my thanks to them. This book is based on my Oxford DPhil. thesis, which was examined by Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards and Professor Huw Pryce. I am grateful to both for making my viva such a constructive occasion. Moreover, I found their corrections, comments and suggestions very helpful as I applied myself to revising my thesis for publication. Dr David Stephenson also read and commented on my thesis. Further, I thank Professor Christine Carpenter and Professor Rosamond McKitterick for their comments on my manuscript. Dr David Stephenson, Dr John Reuben Davies and Mr John Davies kindly sent me drafts and offprints of their articles. I am grateful to Mr M. D. Watson of the Shropshire County Council Archaeology Service, Mr C. J. Spurgeon and Mr J. R. Kenyon for their advice on castle-studies.
Collins Maps & Atlases kindly gave permission to publish the maps, which I prepared using Bartholomew mapping data.
I was able to complete this book thanks to the financial support I have received from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
I am very grateful to have been able to work on this book in Oxford and in Cambridge. For providing environments greatly conducive to study, I thank the Warden and Scholars of Merton College, Oxford, and the President and Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Finally, I would like to record my gratitude to the late Professor Sir Rees Davies, who supervised my D.Phil. thesis. The debt I owe to his work will be evident from the pages that follow. I also owe a great debt to his teaching and guidance.
INTRODUCTION
More than two centuries elapsed between the Norman conquest of England and the English conquest of Wales. One year after their victory at Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror’s knights and barons had launched their first raids across the Welsh border. Yet Wales was not brought under the direct control of the kings of England until 1282-3, when Edward I fought his second Welsh war, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native prince of Wales, was killed, and Llywelyn’s brother Dafydd was executed. In achieving dominion over Wales by military force, Edward I outdid his own campaigns of 1276-7 as well as all those of his Norman and Plantagenet predecessors. After William the Conqueror himself went on an expedition to St David’s in 1081, Wales was attacked by William IL in 1ogs and 1097 and by Henry I in 1114 and 1121. Stephen was prevented by civil war from campaigning in Wales, but Henry II led armies there in 1157, 1158, 1163 and 1165. Richard I preferred the Holy Land and France as arenas for military exploits, but Wales was invaded by John in 1211 and 1212, and repeatedly, between the 1220s and the 1260s, by Henry III or his deputies. Yet none of these campaigns led to a Norman or English ‘conquest’ of Wales, even though some may well have aimed at doing so, notably the one which failed in 1165 and the one which was abandoned in 1212.
Nevertheless, the two centuries after 1066 were an age of dramatic change in the political geography of Wales and the borders. In that time, roughly half of Wales was conquered, albeit haltingly and in a piecemeal fashion, by Norman and English military adventurers. Many of the knights and barons who swept into Wales after 1066, especially those who built their castles along the northern and western coasts, soon saw their ambitions thwarted in the face of native opposition. But many others succeeded in securing footholds and lands for themselves and their descendants, often in places where Welsh resistance was temporarily weakened by the loss of'a ruler or by rivalries between native dynasties.
A good example is the Welsh kingdom of Morgannwg in south-eastern Wales. Norman raids began there under the leadership of Robert fitz Hamo, the lord of Creully in Normandy, probably after the killing in 1093 of Rhys ap Tewdwr, the king of south Wales. By means of the conquests Robert and his successors made in Morgannwg, they gradually established the lordship of Glamorgan. However, their position remained precarious throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Until the late 1260s, they failed to dislodge the Welsh rulers in the uplands to the north. Moreover, the Welsh threat to their acquisitions periodically grew acute, for instance when military leadership was provided by the rulers of Gwynedd, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (d. 1240) or his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282). Despite this, the lordship of Glamorgan survived until 1282-3, its lowlands by then bristling with castles and settled extensively by English immigrants. Meanwhile, in the borderlands adjoining Herefordshire, families like the Mortimers and the Braoses fought for generations to gain control of the Welsh principalities of Maelienydd, Elfael, Builth and Brecon. The Clares occupied Ceredigion early during the reign of Henry I, only to lose it to the Welsh in 1136-8. But lowland Glamorgan, the Gower peninsula, Pembroke Castle and parts of southwestern Wales remained in foreign hands from the late eleventh century onwards.
In the 1270s and 1280s, Edward I added liberally to these conquest lordships, rewarding the captains of his Welsh campaigns with Ceri, Cedewain, Chirk, Bromfield and Yale, Dyfiryn Clwyd, Denbigh, Cantref Bychan and Iscennen. The former Welsh kingdom of Powys descended hereditarily to a scion of the Welsh dynasty of southern Powys who sided with Edward I in the war against Llywelyn ap Gruffudd; it thereby became a Welsh barony held of the English king.' By 1284, when Edward I established his Principality of Wales in what had been the previously unoccupied northern and western part of the country, the remainder of Wales had been parcelled out into around forty castle-centred lordships varying widely in size and age. The conquest lordships created in Wales between the late eleventh and the late thirteenth centuries constitute the area known to modern-day historians as the March of Wales. After 1283, they formed an extensive patchwork of territories that separated England from Wales and also extended along the southern Welsh coast from Glamorgan to Pembroke.’
Wales was to stay divided until the end of the Middle Ages. While the Principality of Wales remained part of the private estates of the English crown, the Marcher lordships descended as hereditary domains of such families as Clare, Mortimer, Braose and Bohun, later also of Lancaster and Despenser. These families claimed quasi-regal jurisdiction within their Marcher lordships, as their predecessors had begun to do by the end of the twelfth century.’ The administrative and jurisdictional fragmentation of Wales and the March persisted throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, despite the fact that it entailed serious inconveniences and risks for the English royal government. This became glaringly obvious when it hampered the military response to the revolt of Owain Glyn DWr between 1400 and 1415.‘ Nevertheless, it was only in the reign of Henry VIII that the English crown set about integrating the March into the administrative and governmental system of England.The two parliamentary acts of 1536 and 1542 created a single dominion of England and Wales. They also abolished the Marcher lordships, either subsuming them within one of seven new shires or incorporating them into an existing English shire.°
The Marcher lordships were all compact, by contrast with the estates of baronial landholders in England, many of which were scattered over several counties. The same compactness was characteristic of a number of castle-centred lordships which directly adjoined or even overlapped with Welsh territory: the Mortimer castlery of Wigmore, for instance, or the lordships of Oswestry, Caus, Montgomery and Clun on the Welsh frontier of Shropshire, the largest inland county of England. These lordships are sometimes considered to be part of the March of Wales, even though they originated as tenurial blocks established mostly or entirely on English territory, rather than as conquests in Wales. For one thing, they are coeval with the very first Norman conquests in Wales. They are already recorded in Domesday Book, the great record of landholding in England in 1086. However, their appurtenance to the English shires became ever more debatable during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and during the later Middle Ages they escaped the reach of the administrative, fiscal and judicial institutions of the English kingdom, albeit to varying degrees. Henry VIII’s parlhamentary acts of 1536 and 1542 treated many of them in the same way as the Marcher lordships established in Wales, providing for their integration into the new Welsh shires or the English border counties.
The March of Wales can therefore be fairly precisely characterized for the purposes of the political and administrative history of England and Wales during the Middle Ages. The March consisted of the foreignheld lordships in Wales and the compact honors directly adjoining Welsh territory. It therefore expanded and contracted significantly as conquests in Wales were made and lost, especially before 1167, when Ireland became a new destination for knights in search of lands to conquer. The extent of the March was also determined by the degree to which the frontier honors were withdrawn from the reach of the English state.° After 1283, the March became more fixed in extent than ever before. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it drove a wedge between the Principality and the English counties, while also extending across southern Wales; but in 1§36—42 it was erased from the map of the political geography of the British Isles.’
Thus, modern-day historians of the medieval period mean by the term ‘March of Wales’ the congeries of lordships carved out in Wales between 1067 and 1283; and they sometimes include the compact frontier lordships within this ‘March’ as well. This historiographical terminology is based on a medieval precedent: the phrase Marchia Wallie. An early version of that phrase is found in the folios of Domesday Book. The expression becomes more common in the second half of the twelfth century. Then, in 1215, the authors of Magna Carta juxtaposed a ‘March’ to England on the one hand and Wales on the other. Writers in England and the March referred to the borders of Wales by other Latin terms as well.‘ But it does seem that in the voluminous records kept by the chancery and exchequer of the English crown the phrase Marchia Wallie acquired something of an official status. In view of this, and given that the modern historical category of the March of Wales refers to a relatively well-defined phenomenon, it might be expected that there was a contemporary concept of the March which corresponded to ours. However, the usage of the phrase Marchia Willie between the late eleventh and the early fourteenth centuries suggests that the medieval concept of the Welsh March was a malleable one.
It is possible to locate Domesday Book’s ‘March’ with some precision. The survey is arranged by counties, and the folios for Herefordshire state that both Osbern fitz Richard and Ralph de Mortimer held vills lying ‘in the March of Wales’.’ As Map 2 shows, the vills which were said to lie in this March were all located on the westernmost borders of Herefordshire, and formed a continuous territory through which ran Offa’s Dyke. It seems natural, therefore, to wonder whether Domesday’s ‘Marcha’ could be considered the precursor of the later March of Wales. However, unlike the later March, that of 1086 was not coterminous with lordships, or honors. Only part of the estates held respectively by Osbern fitz Richard and Ralph de Mortimer in 1086 were considered to lie in this March; their honors were not coextensive with the Domesday March, but overlapped with it. Ralph de Mortimer’s main concentration of lands lay in the Teme valley, around his castle at Wigmore (he also held a number of estates north of the Teme, in Shropshire, outside the area shown on the map). Osbern’s ‘Marcher’ estates formed a fairly compact group, but they were intermingled with Mortimer’s — in this respect, the tenurial pattern in Domesday’s March was similar to that generally found in the counties of England. Moreover, the focus of Osbern’s honor probably lay further east, at Richard’s Castle. Domesday’s ‘March’ was really a geographical description referring to the valleys of the river Lugg and of the Hindwell Brook.
We can be confident that the phrase Marchia Wallie first became more common during the 1160s. This certainty is due primarily to the nearcomplete survival of the Pipe Rolls, the annual accounts of the royal exchequer of England, from the second year of Henry II’s reign onwards. Since the Pipe Rolls record the accounts rendered annually by individual sheriffs, they reveal with some precision where the first twelfth-century March of Wales was thought to be located, which territories were subsequently included within the March, and when. The first ‘March’ of the Pipe Rolls was the Welsh border of Shropshire. In 1166, Geoffrey de Vere, the sheriff of Shropshire, accounted for £62 16d for ‘the 100 serjeants of the castle of Shrawardine and of the March’.'"® In 1168, Geoftrey de Vere received £100 ‘to guard the March of Wales’."' The following year, he accounted for the £29 4s he had spent on sustaining ‘serjeants of the March’. The sherifts of Shropshire accounted for payments for the same purpose in 1171, 1172 and 1174." The Pipe Rolls show that the ‘March’ was clearly soon thought to encompass the southern Welsh borders as well. In 1167, the reference to ‘the king’s castles in the March’ occurs in the Pipe Roll for Worcestershire, in 1173, ‘serjeants of the March of Wales’ are mentioned in Herefordshire, and in 1184, the Gloucestershire Roll shows Hywel, the lord of Caerleon, was remunerated ‘for maintaining himself in the king’s service in the marches of Wales’.'* However, the close link between the ‘March’ and the Shropshire—Powys borders is strikingly corroborated by a contemporary royal charter. It was before 1175, and probably after 1173, that Henry II confirmed Owain Fychan, a son of the king of Powys, Madog ap Maredudd (d. 1160), in the possession of Mechain and ‘five vills of the March’. Four of these vills certainly lay in Oswestry lordship in north-western Shropshire; the fifth may have been Sycharth, just across Offa’s Dyke from the others."
In view of the geographical proximity of Domesday’s ‘March’ to Shropshire, one wonders whether a regional tradition preserved the usage of the term. The shift from marcha to marchia may have been due to the fact that the former was derived from Old English mearc/merc, while the latter was a Latinization of Old French marche.'° Given the spread of the French language in England between the eleventh and the twelfth centuries, this may plausibly explain why it was Marchia Wallie that became the dominant form, and remained so in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. If marcha and marchia were indeed derived from different languages, this raises the question of how far the two Latin terms might have had different meanings. Both Old English mearc and Old French marche could mean ‘boundary’; but the meaning of ‘border district’ is documented for marche alone.'? The evidence of Offa’s Dyke suggests that, in the eighth century, the Anglo-Saxons thought of their border with the Welsh as a line; so does the fact that, according to William of Malmesbury, Athelstan, king of England, fixed the Wye as the boundary between the Welsh and the English.'"* Yet perhaps it would be wise not to draw too strict a distinction between mearc, marche and their Latin derivatives. After all, it seems clear from Domesday Book’s usage that marcha could also mean a border district."
Possibly, a particular regional meaning of the term Marchia is suggested by the ecclesiastical re-organization of north-east Wales and the adjacent borders in the mid-twelfth century. In 1291, the diocese of St Asaph, alone among the four Welsh bishoprics, included a deanery of ‘Marchia’.*° The earliest evidence which establishes the boundaries of the diocese, the fiscal assessment of Welsh and English church lands known as the Norwich Valuation, dates to 1254.°' By then, the deanery of ‘Marchia’ encompassed Oswestry and Whittington lordships as well as territories to the west of Offa’s Dyke, to wit, the Tanat valley and surrounding uplands. The latter district clearly related to the Welsh commote of Mochnant and indeed by 1291 a new, eponymous deanery had been created for it. A new deanery of Cynllaith was also established between 1254 and 1291. As a result, at the end of the thirteenth century, the deanery of ‘Marchia’ comprised just the lordships of Oswestry and Whittington. The best explanation for the inclusion of these lordships within a Welsh diocese is the political situation of the 1140s and 1150s. The diocese of St Asaph was established, or perhaps re-established, in north-east Wales in 1141.** Oswestry Castle may have been in Welsh hands soon afterwards, and certainly was by 1149, or 1151 at the latest.» It is possible that the deanery of ‘Marchia’ was first created shortly after 1150,* and that it was already so named at the time.”
It is also, of course, conceivable that the term Marchia did not have any local or regional meaning, or that the usage of the English royal chancery and exchequer developed independently of such a tradition. The timing of the phrase’s first occurrence in the Pipe Rolls certainly points to a specific set of historical circumstances. Henry II led an unsuccessful campaign into Wales, by way of Oswestry, in 1165.°° And it was in the same year that Geoffrey de Vere was installed as sheriff of Shropshire and appears to have been placed in charge of a standing army of ‘serjeants of the March’. As has been mentioned, after the debacle of 1165, no English king led a campaign into Wales for almost fifty years. It seems indeed as if the concept of a Welsh ‘March’ gained currency precisely at a time when it became more widely accepted that a military stalemate existed on the Anglo-Welsh border.’
Given this timing, it may be that the twelfth-century Marchia Wallie came to be thought of as a military buffer zone, initially on the Shropshire borders, later all along the Anglo-Welsh frontier. The connotation of a disputed border territory was widespread at the time. None other than Gerald of Wales (c. 1146-1223), the author of invaluable ethnographic works on Wales and Ireland, described the frontierlands between English and Irish in Ireland as ‘those lands that were furthest inland and closest to the enemy, the so-called marches, which in truth could well take the name of “the lands of Mars” from the god of war’** This connotation, although based on an erroneous etymology, may also have inspired Domesday Book’s earlier use of ‘Marcha de Walis’. Osbern fitz Richard was the son of Richard fitz Scrob, who had been granted land in Herefordshire by Edward the Confessor, king of England, during the tosos.”? Richard is thought to have built the first motte in the British Isles, not far from the vills said in 1086 to lie ‘in Marcha de Walis’; he may have been among the Normans who were routed by the Welsh armies of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn in 1052.°° It is entirely possible that the Norman pioneers in Herefordshire were the first to see the Anglo-Welsh borders as a marche.
The idea of a militarized buffer zone is certainly consistent with the way in which march(i)a was used in other parts of Latin Europe at different periods. It was given the Latin gloss ‘regni extremitates’; it can be traced back as far as the sixth century, at which time it referred to the uncultivated land between two properties.*' The crucial shift in meaning occurred in the late eighth century, when the term began to be used in a new way, particularly in Charlemagne’s capitularies. It was then that it came to denote a border zone of the Carolingian empire for which particular legal and military arrangements had been made in order to provide for standing armies charged with the defence of the realm. The first such marches to appear in the sources are the ‘marka Tolosana’ and the ‘marca Hispaniae’. The local officers placed in charge of these were originally referred to as comites, confinii comites or limitis custodes; in the ninth century, the new-fangled term marchio appears.*”
It was in this sense, then, that the term first came to be applied to different regions of medieval Europe. As a result, it played various roles in the histories of the European countries. In the case of Denmark, the term is of obvious importance on a national level. In Austria, the marchae are thought to have been, originally, the wooded districts contrasting with the ferrae.** Thus, the Mark was synonymous with the Wald, the forest.
As such, it designated a territory which had only recently been settled and brought under cultivation, and which still might develop into a fully fledged Land, or territory defined by its legal community of settlers. In this context, therefore, marcha complements the single most controversial key term in Austrian constitutional history. In high medieval northern France, one characteristic of marchae was their role as diplomatic arenas. The ‘march’ of Normandy was symbolized by the Gisors elm in the Epte valley, where parleys between the dukes of Normandy and the kings of France traditionally took place.** It is possible that there was a direct link between a Continental usage and the growth in fashion of the term in Britain from the 1160s. The ‘march’ of Normandy was of course closely familiar to the twelfth-century kings of England and their entourages, and perhaps they considered it to parallel the ‘march’ of Wales.*> Moreover, it is worth noting that in 1165, Matilda, Henry II’s eldest daughter, was betrothed to Henry the Lion, whose duchy of Saxony was at the time being hedged about by new Marken, such as the Mark of Brandenburg. Henry the Lion was married to Matilda in 1168, and in exile in England from 1182 to 1185 and in 1189. He failed to become margrave of Austria, but he was active in the German settlement of Slavic territory in Mecklenburg, to the north of Brandenburg.*° Conceivably, perceived parallels to the German-Slavic frontier further encouraged the use of marchia in the context of the Welsh borders in the later twelfth century. In any case, whether or not Continental usages of the term can help us understand why it appears in a medieval British context, they do illustrate that it carried certain fundamental connotations which could adapt to local circumstances.
There is certainly some overlap between the originally Carolingian meaning of the term — that of a border region under the command of a deputy — and the modern historiographical concept of the March of Wales as a collection of lordships. Moreover, as early as 1168, the English exchequer, in keeping with its use of Marchia for the region, referred to lords of the Anglo-Welsh frontier as marchisi.;7 The phrase barones Marchie, which begins to occur at the beginning of the thirteenth century,* suggests that the Marchia was indeed perceived as a region including, perhaps even coterminous with, the lands of an identifiable group of lords. In this respect, there is reason to believe that Marchia Wallie conveyed a similar meaning to both contemporaries and modern-day historians.
On the other hand, it seems clear that on one crucial point contemporary usage differed, initially, from that of the modern literature. As has been seen, the evidence suggests that the medieval ‘March of Wales’ was, at first, the Welsh border of Shropshire; it then came to be applied to the Anglo-Welsh frontier more generally. Moreover, the border lordships in westernmost Shropshire continued to be considered ‘Marcher’. Thus, the castles of Oswestry and Clun were explicitly referred to as lying in the March in 1272;in 1306, the sheriff of Shropshire was dispatched to ‘the liberty of Oswestry in the March of Wales outside the county’.*? However, for some considerable time the medieval concept of the March does not seem to have included the conquest lordships in south Wales. Gerald of Wales, who was a clerk at the royal court from 1184 to about 1196, would have been familiar with the geographical terminology used by the chancery and exchequer, if indeed he did not play a role in shaping it. To him, south Wales, where he was born and spent his childhood, was apparently not, or at least not unequivocally, part of the March of Wales. Pembroke, he wrote, sometime between 1208 and 1216, lay in Wales; and so did Glamorgan (the diocese of Llandaf).!° Monmouth, on the other hand, according to a text he penned in the late 1190s, was situated in the March of Wales.*!
In fact, the case is not always so clear-cut. In Gerald’s writings, as elsewhere, it is sometimes impossible to be certain whether or not references to Marchia in a Welsh context referred to the entire March of Wales as understood by modern-day historians. In 1194, in a well-known passage on the military prowess of his kinsmen from south Wales, Gerald referred to those kinsmen as ‘gens in Kambriae marchia nutrita’.“” A famous example may serve to illustrate further the difficulties of determining the extent of the medieval March of Wales. In Magna Carta, in 1215, King John proclaimed:
If we have disseised or deprived Welshmen of lands, liberties or other things without lawful judgment of their peers, in England or in Wales, they are to be returned to them at once; and if a dispute arises over this it shall be settled in the March by judgement of their peers; for tenements in England according to the law of England, for tenements in Wales according to the law of Wales, for tenements in the March according to the law of the March. The Welsh are to do the same to us and to ours.
By identifying the ‘March’ as an area with its own law, this clause effectively places that region on a par with England and Wales. On the other hand, the first instance of Marchia in the clause may not refer to a region at all, but to a border. The phrase ‘in Anglia vel in Wallia’ also suggests that the ‘March’ was not quite equivalent to these other two geographical entities. However, ‘in Anglia vel in Wallia’ only appears as an addition at the foot of one of the four surviving originals of Magna Carta (Ci). It seems that in 1215 there was still some uncertainty about the status of ‘Marchia’ relative to ‘Anglia’ and “Wallia’. Moreover, it is impossible to tell from Magna Carta alone exactly how far Wales, England and the March were thought to extend.
Throughout the thirteenth century, royal clerks continued to be somewhat ambiguous about whether or not the conquest lordships in south Wales were part of the March. In 1216, William the Marshal, the earl of Pembroke, was referred to as one of the ‘barons of the March’;* but this does not prove conclusively that Pembroke was considered to be a Marcher lordship, since the Marshal was also lord of Chepstow on the Anglo-Welsh border. Ten years later, on 10 July 1226, Henry III wrote to the Marshal’s son, also William, requesting him to deliver up the castles of Carmarthen and Cardigan, since the king proposed ‘to stray into the March of Wales’. This may be read as a possible indication that those castles, though in south Wales, were considered to be Marcher.*° It should be noted that in the following month Henry headed not to south Wales, but, once again, to Shrewsbury and Oswestry, there to negotiate with Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and other Welsh rulers.‘7 On the other hand, the rebellion of Richard Marshal, which was largely restricted to the south of Wales, was in 1233 referred to as having taken place in the March.** One clear instance dates to 1268: in that year Henry III granted Payn de Chaworth two weekly markets ‘at Cydweli in the March of Wales’. There is no reason to believe that English royal officials were always entirely confident about the location of places in Wales and the borders. However, they probably knew where Cydweli was, given its proximity to the English kings’ stronghold at Carmarthen. It may well be that by the 1260s, a century after Henry II’s expedition to Wales, the idea that south Wales was part of Marchia Wallie was gaining ground.
On the other hand, at around this time, in c. 1250 X 1259, Matthew Paris marked a ‘Marchia’ in red ink on the most detailed of his four maps of Britain,*° locating it just to the north of the Severn. South Wales is also marked in red, with a gloss that seems to be inspired by the writings of Gerald of Wales.*' Given that Roman cartographical concepts and techniques were unknown in medieval Europe, Matthew’s maps are astoundingly accurate in their proportions.** That is not to say that he did not err in filling in the topographical details: for instance, the river to the north of the ‘Marchia’ should of course be the Dee, but to judge from the position of Carlisle and the Roman walls, Matthew took it for the Eden.* Also, the erasion and re-marking of ‘Cludesdale’ would suggest that he was unsure about the difference between the rivers Clwyd and Clyde. He correctly identified the Severn, however, and perhaps his placing of the ‘Marchia’ of Wales may be explained by the usage of the phrase Marchia Wallie which was current in England at the time he drew his maps.
We begin to gain a clearer picture from the 1230s onwards. It was then that the royal chancery started producing inquisitions post mortem, which conveniently group the estates of deceased magnates under geographical headings. Since they also contain escheats of Welsh territories, they are a particularly useful class of document for determining the perceived extent of the March. The inquisitions post mortem suggest that a distinction continued to be drawn between the lordships in the March and those in south Wales until as late as the fourteenth century. Between 1284 and 1307, places identified by escheators as lying in the March of Wales included the Vale of Montalt on the Cheshire borders, Magor (west of Caldicot on the southern coast of Gwent) and Mathern, which lies just to the east of Magor and where there was a Welsh knight’s fee held of the lordship of Chepstow.* In the same period, the following were identified as lying in Wales: Bronllys and Glasbury in the lordship of Brecon; Radnor, and Bleddfa just to its north; the commotes of Gwrtheyrnion and Maelienydd; in south-east Wales, Merthyr Mawr, a Glamorgan knight’s fee just to the north of Ogmore; and, in south-west Wales, the commotes of Iscennen and of Ystrad Tywi, as well as those of Perfedd and of Hyrfryn, where stood the castle of Llandovery.°°
However, at the beginning of the reign of Edward II, there was some uncertainty about the situation of Pembroke. The headings ‘Marchia’ and “Marchia Wallie’ were added as an afterthought to the inquisitions made in 1307 into the lands of Joan de Valence, countess of Pembroke.°*° Thereafter, it became more normal to consider the lordships in south Wales as Marcher: in 1317, the inquisition post mortem of Nicholas d’Audley was entitled “Llandovery in the March of Wales’, even though in 1299 that castle had been considered to lie in Wales.’ The inclusion within the March of lordships in south Wales was to prove enduring: in 1375, Glamorgan and the county of Pembroke were understood to be ‘in the March of Wales adjacent to Gloucestershire’. In post mortem inquisitions, this method of identifying sections of the March by the county on which they abutted remained standard for the rest of the medieval period.*? Indeed, the last post mortem inquisition to refer to the March of Wales was ordered and held in 1538-9, that is, after the first of the Acts of Union which identified and then abolished all the Marcher lordships, including those in south Wales.®° It should be noted, however, that the old geographical nomenclature did not disappear overnight.”' The inquisition post mortem, compiled in 1324, of Aymer de Valence, eleventh earl of Pembroke, son of the aforementioned Joan, records that he held no lands in north Wales, but then lists under the heading of south Wales his lordships of Upper Gwent, Pembroke, Haverfordwest and Oysterlow (Ystlwyf).°° Abergavenny and Painscastle were deemed to lie in the March in 1313 and 1315 respectively, but Abergavenny was placed in Wales in 1325.) In the first years of Edward III’s reign, Pembroke county, as well as commotes in Ceredigion and in the lordship of St Clare, were found to lie in Wales, and so, more surprisingly, were Ewyas Lacy, and Talgarth in the lordship of Brecon.” As we have seen, phrases like Marchia Wallie appear in two of the key documents of English medieval history, Domesday Book and Magna Carta. Just like Wallia itself,°’ Marchia Wallie acquired considerable importance in high medieval political and legal discourse. It is a testament to that importance that the Welsh, too, began to refer to part of their country as the ‘March’. The expression appears to have been communicated to the Welsh rulers early in the thirteenth century, through diplomatic channels as it were. The March is not mentioned in King John’s treaty of 1201 with Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, nor in the three agreements reached three years after Magna Carta between Llywelyn and Henry II]’s minority government. This is perhaps surprising, given that on both occasions the application of English and Welsh law was discussed.°° But, by around 1230, at the very latest, the ‘Marches’ were part of normal discourse in cross-border communications.” In 1233, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth himself mentioned Henry III’s ‘bailiffs of the March’, the earliest reference to the March to occur in the surviving Welsh acts.°* Thereafter, the dominant concept of the March, from a Welsh point of view, would appear to have been that of Magna Carta: the March as a region with its own law, like England and Wales. It is in that legal context that “Marchia’ is contrasted to ‘pura Wallia’ in the letter addressed to Archbishop Pecham in October 1282, in which Llywelyn ap Gruffudd aired his grievances against Edward I and his men.
In geographical terms, the usage of Marchia by the Welsh rulers and their scribes broadly parallels that found in English documents. In 1218, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth seems to have had no doubt that Cardigan and Carmarthen lay in south Wales.”” Well after the initial Welsh acceptance of the term Marchia, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, writing to Henry III, explicitly distinguished ‘barones de Marchia’ from ‘ballivi vestri et barones de Sudwallia’.”" There is no instance in the documents which have come down to us of a Welsh ruler identifying a part of south Wales as lying in the March. If Welsh usage conformed to that of twelfth- and thirteenthcentury English scribes in that respect, it did not become as standardized. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd frequently referred to ‘Marches’ in the plural.” It is apparently consistent with this that there is also one striking document in his name which twice refers to the ‘Shropshire March’.” This linguistic coinage is not paralleled in the surviving Welsh acts for any of the other border counties. It may suggest that the Powys—Shropshire borders, for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, were just one of several ‘Marches’. On the other hand, it possibly shows that the borders of Shropshire, the area around the ford of Rhyd Chwima over the Severn, had a quintessentially ‘Marcher’ character from the Welsh point of view as well.” Moreover, it indicates that in Welsh usage the imported concept of the ‘March’ was adapted and refined, very possibly as a result of a familiarity with local and regional circumstances which was greater than that of the English chancery and exchequer scribes.
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It would appear, then, that the medieval concept of the March did approximate to the modern historical category — but only belatedly, and somewhat inconsistently. Indeed, the first twelfth-century ‘March of Wales’ was a part of the Welsh borders where there were no conquest lordships at all. The frontier lordships on the borders of Shropshire, as has been seen, covered mostly territory that was uncontestably shire-ground in the eleventh century. Thus, the history of the medieval concept of the March of Wales presents a puzzle. That concept originally referred to a section of the borders where hardly any Welsh territory was conquered after 1066. But over the years it came to embrace both the frontier honors and the English-held lordships in Wales.
This seems particularly strange since it involved the conceptual merging of two distinct kinds of marches. The march of the Carolingian type, with defensive border commands situated on the ‘hither’ side of the frontier, corresponds to the compact blocks of mainly English territory found in westernmost Shropshire. On the other hand, the conquest territories in Wales parallel the Roman limes, which commonly consisted of a network of client territories situated on the far side of the border line.” It might be argued that since these two concepts are incompatible, the medieval concept of the March of Wales must have come to refer to a ‘no-man’s land’ lying between the respective boundaries of England and of Wales. This latter concept could conceivably have gained ground after 1284, once the tripartite structure of Principality, March and English counties had become established. In any case, the history of the March indicates that a specific medieval frontier might be conceptualized and demarcated in quite different ways at different times. This provides a complementary perspective on other historical frontiers, particularly on the other political boundaries of medieval Europe.”
It is safest to start with the simple fact that the phrase Marchia Wallie was coined at all — and contrasted with pura Wallia. At the most basic level, this suggests that a region was understood to exist which was separate both from Wales proper and from England.The question that needs to be asked, then, is how far the creation of the Welsh March was perceived as the making ofa region. The task of understanding the medieval concept of the March of Wales clearly involves investigating what characteristics were considered to be typically ‘Marcher’ at different times. Nothing illustrates that task better than the issue of ‘Marcher’ liberties. The Marcher lords’ claim to quasi-regal immunity has been inextricably linked to the concept of the March of Wales at least since the sixteenth century. The link is evident, for instance, in the writings of George Owen of Henllys, an Elizabethan lawyer and antiquary who acquired the lordship of Cemais in northern Pembrokeshire and whose interest in the origins of his lordship went hand in hand with his concern to establish his own claim to Marcher immunity.” Marcher liberties did tie together the lordships of south Wales and those which were withdrawn from the English border counties. However, if it is accepted that Marcher liberties only became an issue in the thirteenth century,” it follows that they cannot have been among the distinctive characteristics of the March at the time the phrase Marchia Wallie was coined. The challenge, then, is to identify other features which might have set the March apart from Wales on the one hand and from England on the other.
The early history of the phrase Marchia Wallie reveals a unique opportunity for identifying such ‘Marcher’ characteristics. The borders between Shropshire and Wales, and those borders alone, were identified by contemporaries as the ‘March of Wales’, from the time when that expression gained currency, and may indeed have been newly coined, to the time when it included foreign-held lordships in south Wales. Studying the Welsh borders of Shropshire, therefore, is the single most promising way of tracing how the medieval concept of the March originated and developed. As far as that concept is concerned, there is a good chance that what was true of the Shropshire borders was true of all the area identified as ‘Marcher’. If the lordships on the Welsh borders of Shropshire displayed common features which distinguished them from the county on the one hand and Wales on the other, those features may well reveal the meaning, or meanings, of the phrase Marchia Willie.
It is true that allowance needs to be made for the possibility that the concept of the March changed and the Shropshire borders simply continued to be included out of habit. In such a case, the characteristics of the Shropshire frontier would cease to reflect reliably the medieval concept of the March. Moreover, given the great political fragmentation and geographical diversity of the Welsh borders, let alone Wales, it is far from evident that Marchia Willie was always a name for a region displaying certain uniform and distinctive characteristics. It cannot be assumed from the outset that there were such characteristics at all; or, to put it differently, that the March was ever perceived to exist as a region with its own identity, in the sense that it was thought to display its own, typical features. The only way not to prejudge that issue is to leave open the possibility that Marchia Wallie referred to a district believed to exist in a negative sense only, one that could be assigned neither to Wales nor to England: a region whose only distinctive and typical characteristic was its great diversity and fragmentation.
Thus, even if the Shropshire borders formed a region in themselves, it is conceivable that they were included in the later Marchia because they were not thought to belong to either England or Wales, rather than because of more positive similarities to other parts of the March. However, caveats notwithstanding, a study of the Shropshire borders holds out great promise. It is abundantly clear that those borders are of central interest to the history of the Marcher concept. But, what is more, the Shropshire borders offer an especially effective way of addressing one of the chief challenges in writing the history of the March of Wales. That challenge consists in the dilemma that studies of individual lordships, or even groups of lordships, risk not revealing what was common to the March as a whole, while studies of the whole March that are to remain manageable can consider less local and regional variation.”
Since the Shropshire borders were apparently taken to be the original Marchia Wallie and also continued to be included within that category, the ways in which they changed between 1066 and 1283 may mirror the development of the wider March of Wales during that period more faithfully than any other section of that March. Certainly, concentrating on the lordships of westernmost Shropshire will reveal the differences as well as the similarities between them. This book, then, will focus on the part of the Welsh borders that seems first to have been, and always to have belonged to, the medieval March of Wales. In doing so, it will discuss how far the history of the Welsh frontier of Shropshire between the late eleventh and the early fourteenth centuries provides a paradigm both for the coining of the phrase Marchia Wallie and for the making of the wider March of Wales. Indeed, this book aims to contribute to frontier studies more generally, by shedding light both on how a specific medieval frontier was created and on how it was perceived by successive generations.
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