The Welsh Marches

At the Hay Festival, Misha Glenny and guests discuss the impact of the Norman invasion on the people and land of Wales and across the modern border with England in what became known as The Welsh Marches, march being a term for a militarized borderland. Hay was one of the first Marcher lordships. Even before 1066, William the Conqueror knew that he would have to subdue the Welsh if he were to control the English and he allowed more and more Norman warlords to establish virtually their own private kingdoms in these Marches. Later some of the Lords were to use these bases to invade Ireland rather than conquer the rest of Wales. Marcher Lords built numerous castles such as the one at Hay and many new towns would then grow up alongside these where there was one law for the English and another for the Welsh and, though the Acts of Union under the Tudors brought an end to much of the Marcher Lords' powers, the distinct identity of these Welsh Marches continued. With Rhun Emlyn Lecturer in the Department of History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University Helen Fulton Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol And Huw Pryce Emeritus Professor of Welsh History at Bangor University Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063-1415 (Oxford University Press, 2001) R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales 1282-1400 (Oxford University Press, 1978) John Fleming, The Welsh Marcher Lordships II: South-West (Logaston Press, 2023) Ben Giles, The Welsh Marches: 40 Town and Country Walks (Pocket Mountains, 2012) Philip Hume, The Welsh Marcher Lordships I: Central & North (Logaston Press, 2021) Max Lieberman, The March of Wales, 1067–1300: A Borderland of Medieval Britain (University of Wales Press, 2018) Max Lieberman, The Medieval March of Wales: The Creation and Perception of a Frontier, 1066-1283 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) D. Huw Owen, The Lordship of Denbigh 1282-1543 (University of Wales Press, 2024) Mike Parker, All the Wide Border: Wales, England and the Places Between (HarperNorth, 2024) Dewi Roberts, Both Sides of the Border: An Anthology of Writing on the Welsh Border Region (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch/Eagle Rock Press, 1998) Christopher Somerville, The Welsh Borders (Philips, 1991) David Stephenson, Patronage and Power in the Medieval Welsh March: One Family's Story (University of Wales Press, 2021) David Walker, Medieval Wales (Cambridge University Press, 2008) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. 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,

• 3:06Speaker 04

  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 Erin Emlin, lecturer in history and Welsh history at Aberystwyth University, Helen Fulton, professor of medieval literature at the University of Bristol, and Hugh Pryce, emeritus professor of Welsh history at Bangor University. Can I have a big, warm Hay welcome for my guests?

• 3:51Speaker 04

  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?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Well, I think the first thing to say is that the marches were an essential part of the story of the conquest and colonisation of Wales in the Middle Ages. 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...

• 4:44Speaker 00

  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 Nuffmarche, who had lands in Herefordshire, and he led troops down the Wye Valley. They would have been responsible for building the motte, 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 Brechanyog or Brecon, and at the

• 5:29Speaker 00

  same time, the powerful Welsh king of South West Wales, Hryse, Hryse Abteodor, is killed. And after that, the Normans also go further into West and South West 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.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  So how did these Marcher Lords, how did they manage to accrue so much power in their hands, particularly their independence from the English king?

• 6:01Speaker 00

  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 was a hybrid between, if you like, English and Welsh law, and that's recognised 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

• 6:43Speaker 00

  about 14 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 twelve fifty, who for some reason was offended by a letter sent to him by King Henry the Third and forced the royal messenger to eat the letter made of parchment and the wax seal, which sounds extremely indigestible.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Helen Fulton, let me come to you. So the lords had their lands here and their interests in this region, but they had interests all over the place. How would you characterize them?

• 7:58Speaker 05

  They were, they were great, 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 landowners. So they had estates in the March, but they also had estates elsewhere in England and increasingly in Ireland as well from the later twelfth 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 Breyers family in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. And that family of De Breyers is, a Norman family, also owned lands in England, France

• 8:43Speaker 05

  and Ireland. And later on in the fifteenth century, the town of Oswestry, which formed its own little centre for a Marcher lordship around Oswestry. That town and the lands around it were owned for a long time by the Fitzalan family, the Earls of Arundel, and they owned Oswestry from about the late twelfth. 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.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  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, Yolo Goch, and his poem to Edward III, written in what was perhaps a golden period for the Lords?

• 9:54Speaker 05

  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 were supportive

• 10:39Speaker 05

  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, 'Calon a llawron a lleu', 'The heart and breast of the lion', he says, 'Angel da an gwylod yr'. A good angel in the thick of battle.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  And the poet also calls him Erygryn Thor, 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.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Hey, Nemlyn, let's go back to the beginning again. Who were the most powerful forces in Wales when the Marchal Lords first started to invade?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  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 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 their names now as the names of counties like Gwynneith and Poeth 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, you know, a kingdom depended on the personal power, the aggressive personality of the king himself.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Now, before the Normans arrived on the borders of Wales, there had been one powerful king, Griffith of Lloelwyn, who had managed to unite the whole of Wales under his control. But a few years before the Battle of Hastings, we had Harald Godwinson, of course, who was defeated at the Battle of Hastings, invaded Wales, thus led to the collapse of Griffith of Lloelwyn's kingdom. Incidentally, Harald Godwinson also married Griffith of Lloelwyn's wife, Ildgith, so poor Ildgith 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

• 13:22Speaker 00

  of kingdoms then, trying to vie for power against one another. So it was quite a turbulent time, and of course... Ten sixty-six complicated matters even further.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  So the Normans come in and fairly soon after they start establishing the Marchlands, they actually used these territories as a launchpad to invade Ireland. Why was that?

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Well, they'd had a hundred years or so of trying to conquer Wales. They'd managed successfully at the beginning, but the Welsh had learnt how to fight back. And after a while, Wales seemed too hard a nut 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.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  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 Marcher Lords, you could say that Wales was the first colony. What do you think of that?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Well, you could certainly argue that. I think that, you know, there's a century earlier in a way, sort of late eleventh rather than late 12th century. And, you know, I know from personal experience that Irish historians are very wedded to this idea that they're the first colony. I mean, I'm not sure it's that productive a sort of debate to have, really. What is, I think, interesting is that the Marcher Lords who go to Ireland have had experience of similar kind of warfare. And indeed, one of the great spokesmen, 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.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  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 Welsh Rees and another law in the English Rees. What were these Rees?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Well, we're talking about the organisation 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 a priory church, which were the sort of key 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 are, 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 organised more like English sort of manors.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  They pay, the tenants pay rents and perform services on an individual basis. But say, if you take the lordship of Hey, where there is actually a survey in thirteen forty, 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 villas up in the Black Mountains, some of them as high as two thousand feet up, you know, that they pay a communal payment of cattle every other year, of twenty-four 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.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  And, you know, they become a target of Onglindu later on, for example.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  So, and this persists, this, the urban concentration of English than the rural concentration of Welsh and Welsh speakers?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Well, to some extent, I mean, there was a rural element to the Englishries, inasmuch as that they're, like in a lot of other situations in Europe, you get peasant colonists coming in and clearing raw land and trying to grow crops over a sort of agrarian economy. And they come in and do that, or they're reclaiming land from the sea or whatever. Whereas, yeah, in the uplands, 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 fifteenth century, there seems to be a movement of Welsh-speaking, of Welsh people into the lowlands there.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  So the picture is very diverse, in fact.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  Helen, as I said, we're looking at a period of around 400 years. Was there a culture emerging in the March Lands which was distinct from either Welsh or English culture?

• 18:23Speaker 05

  Yes, I think there definitely was. It's most visible in the 14th and 15th centuries, I suppose, the 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.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  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 organised, was quite distinctive to the March.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  And the Marcher lords respected Welsh culture and Welsh traditions, or not?

• 19:42Speaker 05

  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.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Haryn, 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, long duration, as it were?

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is an interesting situation which they found themselves in. Obviously, the King of England 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 in 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

• 21:11Speaker 00

  that's raising taxes, establishing boroughs, they have the right to royal fish, so such as sturgeons and porpoise and other things. So, all these, you know, these minor details which colour the image of the type of power that they had. And you see this encapsulated in a number of different examples. I mean, Hughes already referred to one of the best examples of Walter Clifford, you know, who sort of sent, had the messenger eat the seal. Another example of 14th century, of John Charlton, Lord of Poys, whose mantra seemed to have been, you know, "I am pope, I am king, I am bishop and abbot in my land." So, in

• 21:50Speaker 00

  the sense that the king has no right to exercise justice in his lordship. I suppose what complicates matters as well, though, is that the king could also be a martial lord. So, he could be king, but also certain lordships fell into royal hands. And so, the king had these rights as a martial lord in certain parts of Wales, rather than a

• 22:12Speaker 04

  King in a sense. 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?

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  Hello, Misha Glenny here. Before you listen to this episode, I wanted to share some exciting news. You can now watch this episode and all future episodes of In Our Time in full video. Just search for In Our Time on YouTube or watch episodes 28 days early by subscribing to the streaming service BBC Select in the US and Canada.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  So 1282 Hugh is obviously a very important date, 1282 to 1284, because Edward the First subdues the rest of Wales outside of the Marchers. What changes for the Marcher Lords once the rest of Wales is under the control of the English king?

• 25:27Speaker 00

  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 Caledonian and West Wales, which had initially been taken by the Marchers and so on, and a lot of warfare as well as intermarriage and, you know, all sorts of connections. But anyway, it's been stabilised 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

• 26:12Speaker 00

  the old principality of Gwynn, so in north east Wales. So you have the lordship of Rhythyn or Dufferin Cloyde, lordship of Denby, 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 Marchers in fact expanded and the augmentation of Wales is in a sense increased. But now, instead of there being what was called before the conquest, Pura Wallia, or Welsh Wales, and Marchia Wallia, 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.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  And that's the territory that is given to the Prince of Wales as well.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  This is when 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?

• 27:39Speaker 05

  I think after 1282, the marches become less of a frontier, less of a military zone, and more of a settled, more urbanised 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 Carnarvon. 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,

• 28:21Speaker 05

  and trade and commerce grew in the 14th century. So that a lot of Welsh people were more aware of the advantages of urbanisation. 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 peace, as Hugh said. After 1282, I think the Welsh sort of realised 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.

• 29:06Speaker 05

  Though, of course, when you come to 1400, that's exactly what O. N. Glyndyre did.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Yes, and, Adrian, what were Welsh people doing after Edward assumes power? How did they respond to this? What happens to Welshness in this period?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, interesting. I mean, you've already referred to the fact that this is, you know, a 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 a lot of discrimination and prejudice against the Welsh in the marches. But for those of high status, what we call the Echelwyr, the squierach in Wales, the leaders of Welsh society. Those of them who were willing to work with the regime, whether that's, you know, in the principality with the King of England, but in the marches with their Marcher Lords. There were positions that they could have to serve their Marcher Lords. And I suppose they were necessary for the Marcher Lords. There was necessary for Marcher Lords to have these people

• 30:10Speaker 00

  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 Oswystry, in that area. And they managed to successfully have power underneath the rule of the Fytalyn Lords. One interesting example, a man called Horwel Cuffin, who was a cleric, who 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 landlord. As well. Another family closer to this area is the dynasty of the descendants of a

• 30:53Speaker 00

  man called Hwyl ap Meirig. David Stephenson has written a book on this recently, tracking the history of the family from an obscure minor Echelwyr, serving the Motma dynasty, the Bowen dynasty of Marcher Lords, serving the Crown, and ultimately some of them becoming minor Marcher Lords themselves, or joining the Herefordshire Gentry. So the Clanwo family of Herges Court, 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.

• 31:28Speaker 04

  Helen, you wanted to come in there.

• 31:30Speaker 05

  Yes, I wanted to pick up Rhian'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 Hergest, 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

• 32:09Speaker 05

  a Welsh manuscript written in Glamorgan, under the patronage of a Welsh gentry person, Hopkin ap Thomas. So other manuscript anthologies, like Pennyarth 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 belonged 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

• 32:50Speaker 05

  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.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  Hugh, in fact, all of you have mentioned the castles, but Hugh, can you tell me roughly how many castles there were? Any of you?

• 33:13Speaker 00

  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 toing and froing, so yeah, I couldn't put a number on it. In the hundreds, I think.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  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?

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Well, I think Gerald is really interesting. He's of a sort of mixed parentage, so his grandmother was Nest, a daughter of this King Hreece 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 Manabir in southern Pembrokeshire, quite a small Marcher lordship, but there's his relatives and him both 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, he, according to Gerald, he writes a book about

• 34:22Speaker 00

  the conquest of Ireland, in which his relatives have the starring sort of role. But 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, the Britons and thus the Welsh, and our skill in arms from the Gauls, the French, as 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 marches 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

• 35:07Speaker 00

  and indeed Archbishop of St David's, but that's another story. But I think as a voice for the sort of the hybrid ...of the march, he's really significant.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  Echyn, we've already heard from Helen a mention of Owen Glendur, and for those of you who would like to find out more about him, there's an entire programme in our time devoted to Glendur. But, Echyn, 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?

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the rebellion begins in 1400 in the north-east 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, anyway, 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.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  So, for example, in Brecon, officially, you had to be a holy, 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.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  And a burgess gave you what sort of rights?

• 36:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  And the Welsh were excluded from that?

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Well, it depended from town to town. So some places they were allowed, other places officially, like Brecon, 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 Marcher Lords were exploiting their lordships, using them to fill farms, were farming the land around. Also, a series of arbitrary taxations. The lords could come into their lordships and demand various payments.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  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 Hay, and they had to pay 2,000 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, you know, people across Europe were exploited by the lords at the time. Wales was no different to elsewhere. But I suppose in Wales, you had that ethnic dimension as well.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  They were living in the shadow of conquest. In a way, the Welsh had someone to blame for how they were treated, and the Marcher 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 Owinglenir seemed to be that man.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  Right, 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?

• 39:12Speaker 00

  They were very profound, I think. The historian Gwyneth 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 keep 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

• 39:55Speaker 00

  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, you know, if you like, a gradual piecemeal conquest, which is bound to have had a big impact on Wales in the Middle Ages.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Helen, we've heard about the emergence of the Marcher Lords and the Marchlands. What about the end of the Marchlands? What happens in the Tudor period?

• 40:26Speaker 05

  The Marcher lordships sort of officially ended with the Acts 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 regularise relations between England and Wales. And 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

• 41:08Speaker 05

  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 Lord ...rights over some of the March, or quite a lot of the Marcher lordships. So there were irregularities there. And of course, the, um, the Reformation happened at the same time. The monasteries were dissolved, dissolved between fifteen thirty six and fifteen thirty eight. All the monasteries were shut down and the contents apprehended by the king and his officers. So, um, there were concerns about religious reform. How could this be implemented in Wales if Wales was still kind of partly governed by

• 41:52Speaker 05

  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 the Eighth 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

• 42:36Speaker 05

  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.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  And presumably this was all part of Henry the Eighth and Thomas Cromwell's centralisation splurge that was going on in the, the fifteen thirties, because it's not just Wales, it's also the north of England as well at this time.

• 43:02Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yes, they were determined to make, um, Britain into a single nation, Wales and England into a single nation. And that was how they went about it, through legislation.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Erin, as a last question, where did this all leave the people of Wales? As we know, uh, 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, for the reality on the ground, as it were, from the eleventh century onwards. Do you think that they found ways of accommodating this, this, these structures?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Yes, I suppose they had no chance to do anything but to accept the situation 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 Marchers in the 16th century, the people who had been in the shadows really, ruling the roost under the Marcher lords, now have the opportunity to openly govern their areas, to become MPs, to become sheriffs, to become justices of the peace, to build larger states 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,

• 44:25Speaker 00

  found a way to work within this system, and to make it work for them.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  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, Caledonian or somewhere like that, and suddenly realise you're in a somewhat different place? Any of you?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Well, political scientists have come up with various models, of three Wales models and so on. I mean, how, sort of, British Wales and a Welsh Wales and a sort of Froga Morais, 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 urbanisation of Wales being perhaps the most marked effect of the Marchers. You mentioned Caledigion, and we can forget really, that actually Caledigion

• 45:30Speaker 00

  was one of the first areas to be conquered. And the original Norman lords there had their stated aim of turning Caledigion, 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, you know, if you turn to places like the south of Pembrokeshire today, the part that was more heavily colonised by Flemish settlers in that context, 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.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  My thanks to Helen Fulton, Hugh Price and Rin Emlyn, and to our audience here at the Hay Festival, who are about to give my guests another rousing round of applause.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Next week, we're going back hundreds of millions of years to learn about the evolution of trees. Thank you for listening.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  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 indiscreetly. So before I ask you what you think that we missed out on this. Rin, what you mentioned at the end about the Flemish migration into Wales. What was all that about? And when was that happening?

• 47:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  Where were those Flemish people living at the time?

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Well, they'd moved, so I suppose we think of Normans as being a homogenous group. But with the Normans, multiple other people came. Well, right in England as well. You had Normans, you had Bretons, and you had Flemish as well. Some of them had settled in part of England first and then were moved 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.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  Yes, 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 Lanscaer, I believe it's called.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  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 the Gower Peninsula, again, there was an English county there, not English and Welsh, but English and 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 were 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.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  Okay, what are some things that we missed out that you'd like to talk about?

• 49:18Speaker 05

  I don't think I did enough justice to the richness of Marcha 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 texts,

• 50:02Speaker 05

  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 Marcha audiences, especially Welsh-speaking, Welsh-reading Marcha audiences, who commissioned these translations of well-known French texts into Welsh. So it was clearly a very multilingual, diverse kind of culture.

• 50:31Speaker 04

  And did you get any, did you get disputes between the martial lords, you know, jurisdiction, borders and so on and so forth?

• 50:40Speaker 00

  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 martial liberties, but sort of edge of the first 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 bone lords of Brecon and Gilbert de Clare in Glamorgan are, you know, big figures and they certainly attacking each other.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  And it's not just the martial lords as well, it's the communities, all of the different lordships. And in a sense, you have a lot of these conflicts, these feuds between the different martial 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 martial lordships. One of the reasons why they were ended in the end is because, you know, you could flee justice by just going over the border into the next lordship. And considering somewhere like Hay, you know, Glisbury was another lordship, Clifford, the other side of, you know, the modern English border is another lordship again. So, quite easy to escape justice. And, you know, there's example in the 14th century of whole communities attacking

• 52:05Speaker 00

  the neighboring lordship. I can't remember the exact date in the 14th century where the lordship of Hay decided to go on mass 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.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  The revenge on 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? Yeah, so that was a dangerous place to live, I think.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  But they did have sort of days of the march, I think, where they would meet at particular places to try and sort out, you know, and make peace. So there were mechanisms and I suspect boundaries were known, but of course they weren't always respected.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Was there ever any sense that this might emerge as a sort of proto-state formation?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  I don't think so. The one thing I would have added, just as a more sort of observation, a comparison, is with Scotland. There, the kings of Scotland, of course, settled Norman knights and so on. They 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 go back to him, says of his uncle, Robert Fitzstephen, that he was offered his freedom

• 53:53Speaker 00

  after being captured by the Lord Ries in the 1160s, if he went to fight against the King of England on Ries's side. And according to Gerald, Robert refused because that would bring disgrace upon him because he was, you know, committing treason against his lords. And that's how he went off to Ireland, according to Gerald.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  And Finn, you mentioned at the beginning, which interested me, that 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 seemed to be so persistent in the lead up to the March of the Lords period.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  I mean, there was a clear sense of Welshness. It's not that the Welsh thought they were, although they had, they, 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. I mentioned Griffith ap Llewelyn, 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 the First. And so Wales was following, in some ways in parallel with Scotland at a later date, but too late to face Edward the First.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  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.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  In Our Time with Misha Glenny is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Political language can seem archaic.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  It's like the light from one of those stars that actually died.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Sometimes bamboozling. It's a theme park with a five foot log flume from one thought to another. And very often beyond words. I don't know how to describe the language I use. I'm Amanda Yinucci, I'm all reset and turbocharged to stress, test to destruction, used and abused buzzwords and phrases from the world of politics. I come with a dazzling array of guest presenters and I'll be exploring the verbal tricks of the political trade, the intentions behind them and the effect they have on all of us. The new series of Strong Message here with me, Amanda Yinucci, from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

• 56:23Speaker 04

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