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In Our Time
The Welsh Marches
00:52:08
How the Norman invasion of Britain created semi-independent warlord territories in Wales.
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- [00:00]
Rhin Emlyn
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
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- [01:03]
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- [02:10]
BBC Announcer
The Crossedoise Podcast Festival is back, bigger and better this year in Sheffield from Thursday the 2nd to Sunday the 5th of July 2026. BBC Sounds and Radio 4 Fringe are treating podcast listeners to to an exciting lineup of shows all for free, including In Our Time. We'll be recording at the Montgomery Theatre on the 4th of July with a special edition of In Our Time on Casablanca. That's Bogart and Bergman and much more. Visit Crossedwires Live Fringe for the full list of programmes and how to get free tickets. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program.
- [02:57]
Melvyn Bragg
Hello. In 1066, William the Conqueror knew that if he wanted to control England, he'd have to subdue the Welsh forces across the border in an area that became known as the Welsh Marches. Soon, more and more Norman warlords established, effectively, their own private kingdoms. Later, their bases for invading Ireland. These marcher lords built castles here where new towns grew up, new ways of life, with one law for the English and another for the Welsh. And I say here because we're at the Hay Festival and Hay on Wye is in these marches. Indeed, one of the very first castles was built here in Hay, just down the road. Well, with me to discuss the Welsh Marches are Irin Emlyn, lecturer in History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University, Helen Fulton, professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol, and Hugh Price, Emeritus professor of Welsh History at Bangor University. Can I have a big warm hey. Welcome for my guest? Deeply appropriate, thank you. So let me go first of all to Hugh Price. Hugh, I've sketched out a little bit about the marches, but can you give us some essential details? What were the Welsh Marches?
- [04:35]
Hugh Price
Well, I think the first thing to say is that the Marches were an essential part of the story of the conquest and colonization of Wales in the Middle Ages.
- [04:45]
Rhin Emlyn
The.
- [04:45]
Hugh Price
The Marches, in the sense we're going to talk about them, include, as it were, the border between England and Wales, which is more geographical use of the Marches, but extended right along the South Wales coast and into parts of Mid Wales and later on after the Edwardian Conquest, also parts of North East Wales. And these were essentially created by lords who fought their way, in many cases, into Wales, as we've heard. Hay was an early example of a lordship established in the late 1080s by a Norman, Bernard de Neuf Marche, who had lands in Herefordshire, and he led troops down the Wye Valley. They would have been responsible for building the Mott, which is not at the site of Hay Castle now, which is a bit later, probably from the 12th century, but near the church in Hay. And they continued. And eventually by the 1090s, Bernard takes over the Welsh kingdom of Brechiniog or Brecon. And at the same time, the powerful Welsh king of southwest Wales, Rhys ap Tudor, is killed. And after that, the Normans also go further into west and southwest Wales. So that's a further stage. So in a sense, Hay is part of an important sort of thread in the story of the making of the marches.
- [06:21]
Melvyn Bragg
So how did these marchal lords, how did they manage to accrue so much power in their hands, particularly their independence from the English king?
- [06:32]
Hugh Price
We don't really know exactly how they accrued that power. What is clear is that the power was very Extensive by the time the documentation really gives us details about it. In the 13th century, they claimed the right to wage private wars. They had rights of jurisdiction. There was a Law of the March, which is a hybrid between, if you like, English and Welsh law, and that's recognized in Magna Carta in 1215, and it says disputes in the March will be judged according to the law of the March and those in England by the law of England and those in Wales by the law of Wales. So clearly, though, there are lots of different lordships, and by the end of the 13th century, you have about 40 different marcher lordships. So it's very fragmented, it's very varied. At the same time, there's a concept that they have something in common, and they do have very extensive powers, including of jurisdiction. But they were under the King of England nevertheless. And there's a story relating to a lord who held lands very near to Hay, Walter Clifford in 1250, who for some reason was offended by a letter sent to him by King Henry III and forced the royal messenger to eat the letter made of parchment and the wax seal, which sounds extremely indigestible, but we only know about that because Walter was summoned before the king to answer for this act of defiance. He was threatened with being imprisoned, with being disinherited, and in the end, he had to pay a very large fine to be allowed to go free. So there were limits to the freedom of the Marcher lords.
- [08:15]
Melvyn Bragg
Helen Fulton, let me come to you. So the lords have their lands here and their interests in this region, but they had interests all over the place. How would you characterize them?
- [08:29]
Helen Fulton
They were the great magnates of their day. They were earls and dukes, people who'd been ennobled by William the Conqueror and his successors. So these were very large land owners. So they had estates in the March, but they also had estates elsewhere in England and increasingly in Ireland as well. From the later 12th century, they held lands in Ireland as well. So, for example, Hay and Brecon and Radnor were owned for a long time by the very powerful de Breus family in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. And that family of de Breuses, a Norman family, also owned lands in England, France and Ireland. And later on in the 15th century, the town of Oswistry, which formed its own little center for a Marcher lordship around Oswestry. That town and the lands around it were owned for a long time by the Fitzallan family, the earls of Arundel. And they owned Oswistry from about the late 12th century, right through to the 16th century in an almost unbroken line. And they were a very powerful family, the Earls of Arundel. And of course, they owned Arundel Castle in West Sussex near Brighton, and also very large amounts of land in Norfolk and Suffolk. So they're another example of one of these powerful Marcher lords families that also owned lots of land elsewhere.
- [09:57]
Melvyn Bragg
So we're covering about 400 years here, and that's a long time in which relationships evolve and go off in various directions. So this relationship between the rulers and the ruled. Can you tell us about a poet, Iolo Goch, and his poem to Edward iii, written in what was perhaps a golden period for the lords?
- [10:24]
Helen Fulton
Yes, it was written in the late 14th century, and it's a very interesting example of a praise poem written in Welsh to an English monarch. In the late 14th century, Welsh court poetry was a very vibrant and dynamic cultural phenomenon. And we have a very, very large body of court poetry in Welsh, surviving, mostly written to Welsh patrons, but also increasingly during the 14th and 15th centuries, written to marcher lords and their families. But the poem to Edward iii, I think, is quite unusual, being written to an actual monarch. And I think the whole point was not that Edward III was ever going to read it or understood any Welsh, but the idea was to show him that the Welsh was supportive of the King's efforts during the Hundred Years War. So the poem mentions the seizure of Calais, for example, in 1347, Edward III seized Calais, and in fact, the English owned Calais right up until the middle of the 16th century. So that was a major military victory. So the poem praises Edward for his military prowess. The poet says, callon a llauvron at Leo, the heart and breast of the lion. He says, angel da angwelld eir, a good angel in the thick of battle. And the poet also calls him Erir Guinsor, the Eagle of Windsor, because Edward was born in the castle at Windsor. So the poem really makes a lot of Edward's military prowess as a way of showing that the Welsh appreciated. Many Welsh fought in the Hundred Years War on behalf of the King. And the idea of the poem was to celebrate Edward's successes in those battles.
- [12:13]
Melvyn Bragg
Reyn Emlen, let's go back to the beginning again. Who were the most powerful forces in Wales when the marcher lords first started to invade?
- [12:25]
Rhin Emlyn
Well, Wales in the 11th century was a country of many kings and many kingdoms across the whole country. So there was a sense of. Of a common Welsh identity. Although the Welsh would have called themselves Britons in the 11th century rather than Welsh. But there was this sense of Welsh identity across the country, but that wasn't reflected politically. So you had different kings, different kingdoms. We might know some of the names now as the names of counties like Gwynedd and Powys and Glamorgan and so on. So there were these kingdoms, but they changed all the time. There was a period of flux in Welsh politics as a kingdom depended on the personal power, the aggressive personality of the king himself. Now, before the Normans arrived on the borders of Wales, there had been one powerful king, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, who had managed to unite the whole of Wales under his control. But a few years before the Battle of Hastings, we had Harold Godwinson, of course, who was defeated at the Battle of Hastings, invaded Wales, thus led to the collapse of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn's kingdom. Incidentally, Harold Godwinson also married Griffith ap Llywelyn's wife, Ealdgydd. So poor Ilgith was Queen of Wales then, Queen of England. And that really left a power vacuum in Wales, where you had a number of kings, a number of kingdoms then, trying to vie for power against one another. So it's quite a turbulent time and, of course, 1066 complicated matters even further.
- [14:03]
Melvyn Bragg
So the Normans come in and fairly soon after they start establishing the March lands, they actually use these territories as a launch pad to invade Ireland. Why was that?
- [14:18]
Rhin Emlyn
Well, they'd had a hundred years or so of trying to conquer Wales. They'd managed successfully at the beginning, but the Welsh learned how to fight back. And after a while, Wales seemed to harden it, to crack, I suppose, to many of these Marcher lords. And they looked across at Ireland and when the opportunity arose, there was an exiled king of Ireland, King of Leinster, who invited the Normans to help him to invade his country. And so they thought, well, Ireland might be an easier prospect than what they were facing in Wales.
- [14:49]
Melvyn Bragg
So, Hugh Price, just as a follow up to that, I've heard a lot of Irish historians argue to me that Ireland was the first colony, the first colonisation experiment of the English. But arguably, with the March of Lords, you could say that Wales was the first colony. What do you think of that?
- [15:07]
Hugh Price
Well, you could certainly argue that. I think that that's a century earlier, in a way, sort of late 11th rather than late 12th century. And I know from personal experience that Irish historians are very wedded to this idea that they're the first colony. I'm not sure it's that productive, a sort of debate to have, really, what is, I think Interesting is that the Marchalons who go to Ireland have had experience of similar kind of warfare. And indeed one of the great spokesman, Gerald of Wales, the ecclesiastic and writer, made the point that because they were used to that kind of terrain and that kind of warfare, they were the most suitable to conquer Ireland and they should be sort of treated better by the King on account of that.
- [15:52]
Melvyn Bragg
So staying with you, Hugh, within the Marches there was a sort of two tier life. There was one law in areas known as the Welshries and another law in the English rees. What were these re's?
- [16:08]
Hugh Price
Well, we're talking about the organization of, I think, the majority of Marcher lordships. And what you tend to have was the lower lying land where you'd have the castle, the borough, sometimes the priory, church, which were the sort of key sort of symbols, if you like, of Marcher domination. And then you may have some low lying agricultural land that they're all inhabited by settlers really. And then higher up the Welsh they remain, or some may have been forced to move and they have mainly a pastoral economy, keeping cattle and so on. And there are big differences in the Englishries. They're organized more like English sort of manors. They the tenants pay rents and perform services on an individual basis. But say, if you take the Lordship of Hay, where there is actually a survey in 1340, we know that. Well, first of all, the English and Welsh are listed always separately. There's a very sharp ethnic distinction. And secondly, the Welsh who live in these scattered vills up in the Black Mountains, some of them as high as 2,000ft up, you know that they pay a communal payment of cattle every other year of 24 cows, which is based on a sort of traditional Welsh payment. So that's a nice illustration of the difference there. Whereas nearly all the names in the Englishry are English and you know, they become a target of Angelindor later on, for example.
- [17:41]
Melvyn Bragg
So, and this persists, this the urban concentration of English, then the rural concentration of Welsh and Welsh speakers?
- [17:51]
Hugh Price
Well, to some extent. I mean, there was a rural element to the Englishries in as much as that. Like in a lot of other situations in Europe, you get peasant colonists coming in and clearing more land and trying to grow crops of a sort of more agrarian economy. And they come in and do that, or they're reclaiming land from the sea or whatever. Whereas, yeah, in the upland it's the Welsh. And so that does have a certain amount of ongoing influence though in the late Middle Ages sometimes this changes. For example, in Glamorgan, where The Normans had, you know, taken over the Vale of Glamorgan, the low lying land, by the 15th century, there seems to be a movement of Welsh, speaking of Welsh people, into the lowlands there. So the picture is very diverse.
- [18:36]
Melvyn Bragg
In fact, Helen, as I said with this, we're looking at a period of around 400 years. Was there a culture emerging in the Marchlands which was distinct from either Welsh or English culture?
- [18:52]
Helen Fulton
Yes, I think there definitely was. It's most visible in the 14th and 15th centuries, I suppose, sort of second half of the period of the Marcher Lordships, where a very distinctive culture began to emerge. And it's really what you might call a border culture, as you might expect. So it has things in common with other border areas even today. So multilingualism and a certain amount of multiculturalism was evident. Intermarriage was very common. So people might have had a primary allegiance to being either English or Welsh, but actually their family, going back a few generations, was very enmeshed in both English and Welsh. Most people were bilingual or multilingual. There was a sense of community, a sense of territory, of who owned what land. It was really important to know where the jurisdictions were. So there was a very particular kind of culture because of the people who lived in the borders that found expression through the kind of poetry, prose, the manuscripts, the churches, the monasteries. The way in which society was organized was quite distinctive to the March.
- [20:05]
Melvyn Bragg
And the Marcher lords respected Welsh culture and Welsh traditions or not.
- [20:12]
Helen Fulton
Well, the Marcher lords themselves were probably a bit far removed from Welsh culture, but the sort of lower level of English gentry certainly appreciated Welsh culture. They were the ones who mostly intermarried with Welsh people. And it's clear from the manuscript evidence that English speakers were almost as keen on preserving Welsh language culture as were Welsh speakers.
- [20:38]
Melvyn Bragg
Helene Hughes mentioned the Magna Carta, I mean, which I found astonishing that they actually specify a legal system which is separate from both Wales and England and presumably on an equal footing. To what extent did that develop to the Marches becoming a state within a state over that long longue, dure, as it were?
- [21:01]
Rhin Emlyn
Yeah, it is an interesting situation which they found themselves in. Obviously the King of England is there is their overlord, and yet their lordships fall outside of the kingdom of England in many ways. So they hold power. By the 13th, 14th centuries, they hold power which elsewhere is exercised by the king. So the exercise of justice, they're the universal landlord. Everyone holds their land from them and the Lordship. They also have the power to wage war, to have their private armies, have treaties with Welsh rulers to fight wars against one another, which wouldn't be thinkable in their English territories. And there was all sorts of other powers which were usually held by kings. So whether that's raising taxes, establishing boroughs, they have the right to royal fish, so such as sturgeons and porkpoise and other things. All these minor details which color the image of the type of power that they had. And you see this encapsulated in a number of different examples. I mean, here was already referred to one of the best examples of Walter Clifford, who sort of had the messenger eat the seal. Another example, the 14th century of John Charlton, Lord of Powys, whose mantra seemed to have been I am Pope, I am King, I am bishop and abbot in my land. So in the sense that the king has no right to exercise justice in his lordship. I suppose what complicates matter as well, though, is that the king could also be a marcher lord, so he could be king, but also certain lordships fell into royal hands. And so the king had these rights as a marchal lord in certain parts of Wales, rather than as king in a sense.
- [22:44]
Melvyn Bragg
I think I ought to explain for our audience here in Hay that the chronicler who relayed that story about the messenger having to eat the seal was one Matthew Paris. I'm not entirely sure whether it's the same Matthew Paris who presents great lives, but who knows?
- [23:06]
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- [25:40]
Melvyn Bragg
So 1282, Hugh, is obviously a very important date. 1282 to 1284, because Edward the First subdues the rest of Wales outside of the marches. What changes for the marcher lords once the rest of Wales is under the control of the English king?
- [26:00]
Hugh Price
I think the biggest change is that they are now faced with a much more stable situation. I mean, in the 12th and 13th centuries, there'd been quite a lot of toing and froing. Welsh rulers had recaptured some of the areas like Ceredikion in West Wales, which had initially been taken by the March and son and a lot of warfare as well as intermarriage and, you know, all sorts of connections. But anyway, it's been stabilized and I think that's important and gives them a greater opportunity perhaps to further develop their lordships and their power in them. But also an important result of the conquest is that Edward rewards some of his friends and followers with new marcher lordships carved out of the sort of eastern part of the old principality of Gwynedd. So in northeast Wales, so you have the lordship of Ruthyn or Dufferin Clwyd, Lordship of Denbigh, Bromfield and Yale and so on. So these are new creations and they in turn have new settlers coming in both to the countryside and to the towns there. So the marches in fact expanded and the fragmentation of Wales is in a sense increased. But now, instead of there being what was called before the conquest, Purrawalia or Welsh Wales and Marchia Wallie, the March of Wales, now you have the royal Principality of Wales, if you like, the Principality of North Wales and South Wales, and then the March of Wales. So the configurations change, and that's the
- [27:28]
Melvyn Bragg
territory that is given to the Prince of Wales as well. This is when this. This emerges. It seems slightly counterintuitive, Helen, that at this point, after Edward I's military victory, that it becomes a sort of golden age for the Marches. And yet I'm struggling a bit with that, because once the rest of Wales is conquered, then the function of the Marches as a sort of, you know, aggressive invading or defensive force seems to disappear. So what changes would you see when you looked around after Wales becomes attached to the crown of England?
- [28:12]
Helen Fulton
I think after 1282, the march has become less of a frontier, less of a military zone, and more of a settled, more urbanized zone. And I suppose one of the main cultural changes was the rise of towns, because Edward I built these enormous castles around the north of Wales, like Flint and Conwy and Caernarfon. And of course, it's ironic that the castles that tourists want to come and see in Wales were actually built by the English to keep the Welsh firmly in their place. But they've become very much associated with the Welsh landscape now. But with the castles came towns, and towns further down the eastern border and around the south coast began to grow, and trade and commerce grew, grew in the 14th century, so that a lot of Welsh people were more aware of the advantages of urbanization. There was still a lot of discrimination against the Welsh. They weren't always allowed to trade in the towns, but they could go in to buy from the towns or they had their markets just outside the towns. So there was a greater awareness of the kind of goods that could be bought in towns. There was a long period of time, as Hugh said, After 1282, I think the Welsh sort of realized the game was up, really. Now that England managed the principality, the Marcher lords were managing the lordships, there was very little space for the Welsh to really mount any serious rebellion. Though, of course, when you come to 1400, that's exactly what Owen Glyndure did.
- [29:44]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes. And Herdin, what were Welsh people doing after Edward assumes power? How did they respond to this? What happens to Welshness in this period?
- [29:59]
Rhin Emlyn
Yeah, well, interesting. I mean, you've already referred to the fact that this is your period of flourishing of Welsh culture. In many ways, in a sense, there was peace, which allows some of these things to develop. And I suppose there were opportunities as well. There was lots of discrimination and prejudice against the. The Welsh in The Marches, but for those of high status, what we call the Chelwyr, the squire in Wales, the leaders of Welsh society, those of them who are willing to work with the regime, whether that's, you know, in the principality with the King of England. But in the Marches, where they're marchal lords, there were positions that they could have to serve their martial lords. And I suppose they were necessary for the martial lords. There was necessary for martial lordship to have these people to connect the lords to the communities over which they had rule, people who could move smoothly from Welsh society to English society and could flourish and have opportunities from that. Recently I've looked at a family called the Cuffin family in the Lordship of Chirk in Oswistry in that area, and they managed to successfully have power underneath the rule of the Fitalan lords. One interesting example, a man called Hoelka Finn, who was a cleric, had the patronage of his Marcher lords to maintain, to have power in the Church, to have these positions in the Church, and to become a wealthy landowner as well. Another family closer to this area is the dynasty, the descendants of a man called Hoelap Meyrig. David Stevenson has written a book on this recently, tracking the history of the family from obscure minor Ichelwehr serving the Mortimer dynasty, the Bowen dynasty of Marchal lords serving the Crown, and ultimately some of them becoming minor Marcher lords themselves or joining the Herefordshire gentry. So the Clanvo family of Hergescourt, near Kington, is one of these families. So there were opportunities for those who were willing to grasp the opportunity and those who had a bit of luck as well.
- [32:02]
Melvyn Bragg
Helen, you wanted to come in there?
- [32:03]
Helen Fulton
Yes, I wanted to pick up Rhine's point about opportunities for cultural expression as well. And the 14th century was really the time of the great manuscript anthologies written in Welsh but also in other languages as well. Very characteristic of the March were these multilingual manuscript anthologies. The most famous of them is probably the Red Book of Helgest, which some of the audience might have heard of, and it's really an anthology of pretty much most of the canonical medieval Welsh literature that we still have surviving poetry, prose, law, chronicles, little bits of Latin in there as well, but basically a Welsh manuscript written in Glamorgan under the patronage of a Welsh gentry person, Hopkin A.P. thomas. So other manuscript anthologies, like Peniarth 50, were written in Latin, English and Welsh. So all these languages in the one manuscript, including a lot of prophecy, which was clearly a very popular Marcher genre because it's found in many Marcher manuscripts and Many of the manuscripts that we think of as belonging to England, especially those written in the West Midlands, actually belong to the March, because the March spilled over what is now the modern border. The modern border wasn't there. And so the Marcher Lordship spilled over what we think of as the border between Wales and England. So many of the English manuscripts from the West Midlands actually arose out of and were directed to a Marcher audience.
- [33:37]
Melvyn Bragg
Hugh in fact, all of you have mentioned the castles, but can you tell me roughly how, how many castles there were any of you?
- [33:47]
Hugh Price
Well, there were hundreds. I mean, it's thought to be one of the most densely sort of castellated areas of, I think, Europe, really, certainly in Britain, because of the history of conquest and doing and froing. So, yeah, I wouldn't put a number on it.
- [34:02]
Melvyn Bragg
So in the hundreds, hundreds and hundreds, there's someone who's almost a distillation of the cultures in the Marches, and that's Gerald of Wales. What does he tell us, Hugh?
- [34:12]
Hugh Price
Well, I think Gerald is really interesting. He's of sort of mixed parentage, so his grandmother was nest a daughter of this King Rhys I mentioned a bit earlier, who was killed in 1093 on his mother's side. So he's partly Welsh. He's related to the Welsh Prince of South West Wales, but his father is Lord of Manabeer in southern Pembrokeshire, quite a small Marcher Lordship. But his relatives and him have a lot of connections with the Welsh still. And Gerald clearly thought that their sort of hybrid, their mixed ancestry was a great plus. You know, they celebrated the Welsh side of it. One of his uncles, Robert Fitzstephen, according to Gerald, he writes a book about the conquest of Ireland in which his relatives have the starring sort of role. But he, he has Robert give a speech, or he puts a speech in his mouth before a battle in Ireland, and he addresses his followers and he says, well, we get our courage from the Trojans, who are believed to be the ancestors of the Britons, and thus the Welsh and our skill in arms from the Gauls, the French. And so we've got this ideal combination, and he's sort of celebrating that. And another source for that, the conquest of Ireland, a French poem says how the marchers in Ireland would invoke St. David in battle. You know, so they were. And indeed, Gerald had an uncle who was Bishop of St. David's and he himself famously hoped to become bishop and Indeed Archbishop of St David's but that's another story. But I think as a voice for the sort of the hybridization of the march. He's really significant, Helen.
- [35:51]
Melvyn Bragg
We've already heard from Helen a mention of Owen Glendor. And for those of you who would like to find out more about him, there's an entire program on in our time devoted to Glendoor. But, Rin, can you tell us about the general causes of tension? Because this is quite late on in the period we're discussing, isn't it? What causes the rebellion and what happens to it?
- [36:17]
Rhin Emlyn
Yes. So the Rebellion begins in 1400 in the Northeast of Wales, and I suppose I've already mentioned some of the opportunities, but clearly there were tensions under the surface as well, and many of them could be felt across the Marches. So clearly this discrimination against the Welsh was an important matter. Being Welsh at the time was in a way, an ethnic legal status, not just an identity, as we might think of it. So there were various restrictions, legal restrictions, officially at least, they weren't supposed to hold high office if you were Welsh, and also economic restrictions. So in many places, the Welsh were not supposed to be. Burgesses have this economic status in the towns. So, for example, in Brecon, officially, you had to be a whole Englishman to be a burgess. You had to have an English mother and an English father, if you had a Welsh parent at all.
- [37:12]
Melvyn Bragg
And the burgess gave you what sort of rights.
- [37:14]
Rhin Emlyn
So that gave you economic rights to within the town, to have the status in the town, to have the benefit of the trading in the town, of the tolls in the town. And basically the burgesses had an economic monopoly over the surrounding area.
- [37:29]
Melvyn Bragg
And the Welsh were excluded from that?
- [37:30]
Rhin Emlyn
Well, it depended from town to town. So some places they were allowed other places officially, like Brech, and they weren't, although we know of one or two Welshmen who sneaked in. And so it wasn't completely enforced all the time. So this discrimination was a real source of tension. You also had the fact that the Welsh also were in a way exploited economically. The March lords were exploiting their lordships, using them to sell farms or farming the land around. Also a series of arbitrary taxations. The lords could come into their lordships and demand various payments. So we know, for example, three years before the rebellion in 1397, Henry Bolingbroke had become Lord of Brecon and Hay, and he became Henry IV in two years. And as he came into his lordship for the first time, he demanded a payment, a gift from the people of Brecon and Hey, and they had to pay 2000 marks for the privilege of having him as their lord. So you could imagine some tensions that could arise from that. So all of this caused tensions, and I suppose people across Europe were exploited by the lords at the time. Wales was no different to elsewhere. But I suppose in Wales you have that ethnic dimension as well. They were living in the shadow of conquest. In a way, the Welsh had someone to blame for how they were treated, and the Marchal lords were those often who were blamed. And Helen has also mentioned prophecy, and I suppose prophecy was very important as well, talking about a brighter future that the Welsh could have if they followed a man who would appear and lead them to victory. The son of prophecy. And O England seemed to be that man, right?
- [39:20]
Melvyn Bragg
But eventually, of course, he was defeated. And that was the last great rebellion of the Welsh. Hugh, over this period of 400 years, from the 11th century, second half of the 11th century to the first half of the 15th century, how profound were the changes which the March area experienced?
- [39:45]
Hugh Price
They were very profound. I think they. Historian Gwynne Alf Williams once wrote that the Normans made the Welsh a European people. Now, I think that's exaggerated, but it does point to something important, that they certainly accelerate the introduction of things like, well, towns for the first time since the Romans reformed monasticism, obviously knights, castles, very influential. The round keeps say of Pembroke is sort of imitated both by the Marchers and the Welsh. So the topography, the landscape of Wales is transformed in many ways, not just in towns, but in the countryside. And then there are the cultural developments which we've heard about already. But they are, you know, they've been there for 200 years before the Edwardian conquest. And there's this sort of legacy of a, you know, as, as far, if you like, a gradual piecemeal conquest, which is bound to have had a big impact on Wales in the Middle Ages.
- [40:48]
Melvyn Bragg
Helene, we've heard about the emergence of the Marchal lords and the March lands. What about the end of the March lands? What happens in the Tudor period?
- [41:01]
Helen Fulton
The Marchal Lordship sort of officially ended with the act of Union that were passed by Henry VIII, one in 1536 and one in 1542. And the acts of Union were designed really by Thomas Cromwell. He was the one who wanted to try and regularize relations between England and Wales. We've already spoken about how some of the Marcher lordships were actually owned by the king. Quite often they devolved to the king. If a family died out or the king wasn't happy with someone, he would take their lands away. So a lot of the Marcher Lordships went in and out of royal possession. And by the Tudor period, many of the old Marcher Lordships were in the hands of the king already. So Henry VIII found himself in a slightly ambiguous position, that he was the monarch of the principality, but he was also a Marcher lord, exercising lordship rights over some of the quite a lot of the Marcher Lordships. So there were irregularities there. And of course, the Reformation happened at the same time the monasteries were dissolved. Between 1536 and 1538, all the monasteries were shut down and the contents apprehended by the king and his officers. So there were concerns about religious reform. How could this be implemented in Wales? If Wales were was still kind of partly governed by all these different people and still very fragmented, so the desire was to unify Wales once and for all. Earlier historians have referred to Wales and the March as if they were two separate places, which in jurisdictional terms they were. So Cromwell and Henry VIII wanted to unite the principality and the Marcher Lordships to become a single unit of Wales governed entirely by England, without all these fragmentary lordships kind of clogging up the works. So that was how they went about it through the Acts of Union. So it was quite a sudden, it was sort of gradually, and then suddenly the Acts of Union were implemented and the Marcher Lordships were turned into the new counties, the modern counties that ran down the eastern border. So Denby, Montgomery, Radnor, Brecon, Monmouthshire, they were the new counties that were established under the Acts of Union.
- [43:22]
Melvyn Bragg
And presumably this was all part of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell's centralization splurge that was going on in the 1530s, because it's not just Wales, it's also the north of England as well at this time.
- [43:36]
Helen Fulton
Absolutely, yes. They were determined to make Britain into a single nation, Wales and England into a single nation, and that was how they went about it, through legislation.
- [43:48]
Melvyn Bragg
Hirin, as a last question, where did this all leave the people of Wales? As we know, Welsh nationalism, both cultural and political, is sustained to this day. But it seems to me that with the Marcher lords there was quite a lot of acceptance amongst the Welsh for the reality on the ground, as it were, from the 11th century onwards. Do you think that they found ways of accommodating these structures?
- [44:17]
Rhin Emlyn
Yes, I suppose they had no chance to do anything but to accept the situation in the 11th and 12th century. I suppose by the 15th century, they accepted this was the situation they found themselves in. And really, when we see then the end of the marches in the 16th century, the people who had Been in the shadows, really ruling the roost. Under the Marches Lords now are the opportunity to openly to govern their areas, to become MPs, to become sheriffs, to become justices of the peace, to build large estates with the lands that now became available following the closure of the monasteries that Helen has mentioned. So over the whole period, really, people found a way to accommodate, found a way to work within this system and to make it work for them.
- [45:03]
Melvyn Bragg
And would you say that there are still traces today of that Marcher culture? Would that be going too far? Or do you move from this part of the world, for example, deeper into Wales in, say, Ceredigion or somewhere like that, and suddenly realize you're in a somewhat different place? Any of you?
- [45:24]
Hugh Price
Well, political scientists have come up with various models of three Wales, models of. And so on. I mean, how sort of British Wales and Welsh Wales and a sort of Welsh speaking Wales that was one which is quite dated now. But how far they're connected to the medieval history is another question. And this pattern is continuing to change. So, you know, I think the main legacy is really, as I was saying earlier, in the sort of physical landscape and, you know, the urbanization of Wales being perhaps the most marked effect of the Marches.
- [46:00]
Rhin Emlyn
You mentioned Ceredigion, and we can forget really that actually Ceredigion was one of the first areas to be conquered. And the original Norman lords there had their stated aim of turning Ceredigion, and I quote, into a second England, which they failed miserably in doing so. So they sometimes, you know, the land was taken back by Welsh kings quite quickly. So in some places we don't see much of a trace. But if you turn to places like the south of Pembrokeshire today, the part that was more heavily colonized by Flemish settlers in that contest, people from Flanders in the north of modern day Belgium, then you can see in terms of field patterns and place names and culture that there are remains really of that Marcher pattern.
- [46:45]
Melvyn Bragg
My thanks to Helen Fulton, Hugh Price and Rinne Emlyn, and to our audience here at the Hay Festival, who are about to give my guests another rousing round of applause. Next week, we're going back hundreds of millions of years to learn about the evolution of trees. Thank you for listening.
- [47:19]
Helen Fulton
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.
- [47:28]
Melvyn Bragg
Thank you all very much. And now we can go on to the podcast bit, which, when we're in the studio doing this bit, everyone, for reasons which are beyond me, tend to Relax and start talking much more freely and in discreet language. So before I ask you what you think that we missed out on this, what you mentioned at the end about the Flemish migration into Wales, what was all that about and when was that happening?
- [48:02]
Rhin Emlyn
So that happened in the beginning of the 12th century. So Henry I, King of England, he'd taken personal possession of that part of South Pembrokeshire, and I suppose he decided he needed a loyal population that relied upon him in that area. So he introduced the Flemish people there. People.
- [48:20]
Melvyn Bragg
Where were those Flemish people living at the time?
- [48:23]
Rhin Emlyn
Well, they'd moved, so I suppose we think of Normans as being a homogenous group, but with the Normans, multiple other people came, arrived in England as well. You had Normans, you had Bretons and yet Flemish as well. Some of them are settled in part of England first and then removed to that part of South Pembrokeshire. It's that part where we have the clearest evidence of wholesale change of population, where the native population are moved specifically and a new population are brought in.
- [48:52]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes, And I believe there's a sort of demarcation line that's almost recognisable to this day. Anyone else want to comment on what that is? The Landsca, I believe it's called.
- [49:05]
Hugh Price
Yes. And southern Pembrokeshire is known as Little England beyond Wales, and it's been for a long time. So, yeah, there's this sort of long, deeply seated English linguistic presence and the place names. And in Gower, in the Gower Peninsula, again, there was an English county there. Not English in Welsh street, but English and a Welsh county. And you then got the place names and so on. But Pembrokeshire is particularly interesting. And coming back to Gerald of Wales, he talks about, I think, one of his relatives anyway, who was still speaking Flemish in the early 13th century. So almost 100 years after the Flemings arrived, though Flemish did have to give way to English there over time.
- [49:46]
Melvyn Bragg
Okay, what are some things that we missed out that you'd like to talk about?
- [49:51]
Helen Fulton
I don't think I did enough justice to the. The richness of Macha culture, which really was incredibly diverse, partly because of the multilingualism there. English, French, Welsh were all spoken and used in writing as well, quite commonly. And so it was a very extraordinary kind of culture, much more so than the rest of Wales, which was more firmly Welsh speaking with English, well, Latin and then English and some Anglo, Norman used for legal and purposes of record keeping. But in the March of Wales, we get this tremendous industry in manuscripts and in translation. There was clearly an interest in French text, for example, French romances were translated into Welsh. So we have Welsh translations of the Grail legends, the Charlemagne legends, the Troy story. These were clearly of interest to Marcher audiences, especially Welsh speaking Welsh reading Marcher audiences who commissioned these translations of well known French texts into Welsh. So it was clearly a very multilingual, diverse kind of culture.
- [51:05]
Melvyn Bragg
And did you get any, did you get disputes between the Marcher lords, you know, jurisdiction, borders and so on and so forth?
- [51:14]
Hugh Price
Yeah, there was a famous dispute soon after the Edwardian conquest between the lords of Glamorgan and Brecon and raiding each other and saying they had the right to do this within their march of liberties. But Edward I steps in and they have to go before the royal court to sort this out. So, you know, that is certainly a good example of them fighting each other. I mean there could be conflicts within lordships as well, but in this case I think that those two very powerful, the born lords of Brecon and Gilbert de Clare in Glamorgan are, you know, big figures and they certainly attacking each other grim.
- [51:58]
Rhin Emlyn
It's not just the march of lords as well, it's the communities of the different lordships and in a sense you have all of these conflict, these flow fields between the different Marcher lordships. And one of the things as we haven't really reflected as much on is the lawless nature or at least the lawless characterization of the Marcher Lordships. One of the reasons why they were ended in the end is because you could flee justice by just going over the border into the next lordship and considering somewhere like hey, Gleesbury was another lordship Clifford, the other side of the modern English borders, another lordship again, so quite easy to escape justice. And you know, there's example in the 14th century of whole communities attacking the neighbor neighbouring lordship. I can't remember the exact date in the 14th century where the Lordship of Hay decided to go en masse and attack the lordship of Clifford, which is just over the modern Wales English border. They burned 200 houses. I don't know what the people of Clifford had done to the people of Hay, but obviously something had happened and they decided to exactly the revenge on
- [53:00]
Melvyn Bragg
the people of Clifford and presumably the demarcation. The borderlines were not always very distinct. What if you were a peasant wandering around on the edge of one lordship to another?
- [53:13]
Rhin Emlyn
Yeah, that was a dangerous place to live, I think.
- [53:17]
Hugh Price
But they did have sort of days of the march, I think where they would meet at particular places to try and sort out and make peace. So there were mechanisms and I suspect boundaries were known, but of course they weren't always respected.
- [53:32]
Melvyn Bragg
Was there ever any sense that this might emerge as a sort of proto state formation?
- [53:41]
Hugh Price
I don't think so. The one thing I would have added, just as more as a sort of observation, a comparison, is with Scotland. There the kings of Scotland, of course, settle Norman knights and so on, and give them large tracts of land in return for military service. And of course they're absorbed into the kingdom of Scotland. But the March of Wales is interesting because it's neither absorbed into the kingdom of England until the Acts of Union, and instead it's tried. The lords are trying to sort of escape the jurisdiction of the counties along the borders with England. But nor do the Welsh princes recruit Normans. I mean, they ally with them sometimes, you know, but there's a great difference. And Gerald of Wales, to come back to him, says of his uncle, Robert Fitzstephen, that he was offered his freedom after being captured by the Lord rhys in the 1160s if he went to fight against the King of England on Rhys's side. And according to General, Robert refused because that would bring disgrace upon him because he was, you know, committing treason against his lord. And that's how they. Why went off to Ireland.
- [54:44]
Melvyn Bragg
According to Jo and Hryn, you mentioned at the beginning, which interested me, the sort of relative chaos within Wales was that. I mean, in a sense, although Scotland had its own divisions and its own problems, it had a sort of clearer sense of itself, I might argue. Is that why is there, though, those divisions in Wales that seem to be so persistent in the lead up to the March of Lords period?
- [55:15]
Rhin Emlyn
I mean, there was a clear sense of Welshness. It's not that the Welsh thought they were, you know, although they had their, you know, they often fought against one another as well. I mean, there was a practice of unity as well. So at certain points, certain Welsh kings did manage to unite most of Wales under them. Mentioned Gruffyd Ab Suelin. There were others before then as well. And I suppose if you go to the 12th century, 13th century, there was an emerging sense of Welsh political unity, but it was cut short by Edward I. And so Wales was following in some ways in parallel with Scotland at a later date, but too late to face Edward I.
- [55:53]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. And I think that's the end of the podcast. No tea from Simon this week, unfortunately, because we're in a very sadly. But thank you all for your contributions
- [56:07]
Helen Fulton
in our time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC studios production.
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Melvyn Bragg
It's like the light from one of
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Helen Fulton
those stars that actually died.
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Amanda Iannucci
Sometimes bamboozling.
- [56:21]
Helen Fulton
It's a theme park with a five foot log flume.
- [56:23]
Hugh Price
From one sort to another and very often beyond words.
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Hugh Price
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