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The Middle Ages
The four and a half centuries between the start of the Anglo-Norman conquest of south-east Wales in 1070 and the union of Wales with England in 1536 have left a legacy of buildings and archaeological sites that help us to visualize the lives of medieval people more clearly than is possible for earlier ages. As a result, historians have reconstructed a society – or rather a number of societies of fascinating complexity: rural folk and townsfolk, hill dwellers and valley and coastal communities, native and immigrant peoples, some rich and others very poor, some known to us by name but the majority now quite anonymous. At the end of the Middle Ages, Wales had a population of about 300,000, perhaps double what it had been in 1070 and yet still hardly the size of the city of Cardiff in 2008. As elsewhere in western Europe, the population had grown steadily for more than two centuries, but between 1310 and 1370 famine, disease and plague of a sort never experienced before cut it by at least a third, and it was not until the sixteenth century that it again reached the level of 1300.
These changes had profound effects on Welsh society: on agriculture and the use of the landscape, on the number and size of towns, and on the growth or decay of local communities. Meanwhile, developments in politics, war and ways of government in the British Isles had a lasting impact on Wales, creating a complex pattern of lordships and counties, administered from courts (or llysoedd), castles and houses whose remains still dot the landscape. Medieval society was, too, a universally Christian society that experienced periods of intense religious enthusiasm. This enthusiasm and spiritual devotion inspired much church and monastery building, sculpture and painting, many examples of which (like Tintern abbey and the font in Cenarth church) enrich our culture today. The small number of Jews who settled in Welsh towns in the wake of the Norman conquest all but disappeared after 1290, when King Edward I expelled the Jews from both England and Wales.
The Welsh experience had much in common with that of other countries in the British Isles and western Europe during the Middle Ages, yet it had a marked social and cultural distinctiveness. In many ways, medieval society was militaristic in tone and violent in action. The patchwork of Welsh kingdoms, some of which (in Powys and Gwynedd) resisted the Anglo-Norman conquest for two hundred years, encouraged their rulers’ rivalries and caused political instability. At the same time, population growth and social mobility produced other tensions and conflicts. Groups of English, Normans, Bretons and Flemings advanced into Wales in the wake of William the Conqueror’s invasion of south-east England in 1066; William himself travelled as far as St David’s in 1081. This migration continued for centuries and, of course, there have been few periods in Wales’s modern history that have not witnessed waves of immigrants. From 1070 to 1282, English and French lords and kings and their descendants struggled with the ruling Welsh lords for dominance in Wales. The organizational changes and influences which the migrants brought with them affected all aspects of Welsh society: they built castles in the landscape, stimulated town life, and gradually formed a parish system for the Church. The imprint of Wales’s medieval past is all around us.
The social impact of migration was lasting. Many incomers intermarried with native inhabitants and settled alongside them, and some of these families provided migrants onwards to Ireland after 1170. In the opposite direction went Welsh folk from the borderland with England (what had become the lordships of the Welsh March) to the English midlands and the West Country. In the lowlands and wider valleys of eastern Wales, and along the southern and northern coasts, these processes gave rise to communities that might be bi- or tri-lingual and developed a distinctive, cosmopolitan culture, for all the tensions that accompanied English and French colonization. A sense of Welsh identity persisted most strongly in Gwynedd, the last region to feel the full effect of these cultural influences.
Economic life was boosted by migration and closer relations with England, Ireland and the continent. The Itinerary of Wales, written by Gerald of Wales (died 1223), who was born of mixed Welsh and Norman parentage in Manorbier castle, provides a snapshot of the changes that were taking place. Roman roads were still used in the Middle Ages but were gradually supplemented by newer route-ways, and ferries crossed the main rivers and straits (including to Anglesey). The fertile lowlands of the east and south supported villages and English-style manors, with arable fields and pastoral spaces for animals. The fields were arranged according to a field system common in lowland England, with strips of land cultivated by individual tenants and their families; such ‘open fields’ may still be seen at The Vyle in Gower and in Pembrokeshire. In upland areas pastoral agriculture prevailed, and as time passed sheep runs became increasingly common, centred on farmsteads run by lay landholders and a score of new religious houses, as at Hen Ddinbych and Strata Florida abbey’s grange at Pennard, whose remains at Troed y Rhiw have been recorded by the Royal Commission.
Along what is a very extensive coastline and in the Severn and Dee estuaries, punctuated for most of the distance by a host of anchorages, fishing was common and some of the fish-traps that have been located are thought to be of medieval date. A more dramatic change occurred between 1070 and 1330 with the emergence of almost a hundred towns, the majority of them situated on or close to the coast or on navigable rivers. Some (like Carmarthen) developed from earlier communities, the more important of them (like Brecon) were given charters as boroughs by their lords or the English king, and all of them, from Chepstow to Caernarfon, Pembroke to Flint, were the focus of a money economy and of trading through markets and fairs. In the thirteenth century many of the towns set about protecting their interests and controlling their commerce by building stone walls (and a few, like Monmouth, stone bridges. Some of the larger islands around the coast were inhabited and modestly developed too – Lundy with its church, Cardigan Island with its animal pens, and Bardsey, the supposed resting-place of countless saints.
The stages by which these conquerors and colonizers advanced in Wales were marked, first, by the speedy erection of mottes of impacted earth with baileys and wooden buildings (as at Tomen y Mur), designed to overawe localities and act as springboards for further advances. A minority of these fortresses were still needed later as invasion turned into colonization and settlement, and they were converted into stone castles at places like Abergavenny and Builth. Even Welsh lords saw the need for strong castles (as at Dinas Bran). All in all, by 1300 Wales had more castles per square mile than almost any other comparable region of the British Isles, and examples of the most primitive of the earliest mottes are still being identified today by the Royal Commission’s aerial photography programme.
The new rulers revitalized religion in Wales as they did in England, along lines familiar in France and with a direct link to Rome. The traditional centres of St David’s, Bangor, Llandaff and, later, St Asaph became the focus of new dioceses, though under the oversight of the archbishop of Canterbury. Existing churches and monasteries (like Llanbadarn Fawr) were complemented by new religious houses, at first built close to the invaders’ castles and towns (as at Abergavenny and Brecon) and then in wilder country to meet the aspirations of the international Cistercian Order of monks at places like Valle Crucis and Strata Florida. Only a small number of friaries were founded in Wales to offer pastoral care to comparatively large centres of population like Cardiff and Haverfordwest. By the thirteenth century even small churches were being rebuilt in stone, often (as in Gower and at Hodgeston in Pembrokeshire) with defensive bell-towers of local or regional style sponsored by the communities themselves.
The years between 1260 and 1295 were a turning-point in Wales’s history. In Gwynedd, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd created a sophisticated state which expanded its power eastwards to the River Dee and southwards to Carmarthenshire and almost to Brecon. To complement his grandfather’s castles at Cricieth and Dolwyddelan, he built a massive new fortress at Dolforwyn, just a few miles from the king’s own castle of Montgomery. He encouraged the little towns of Pwllheli and Nefyn, and he patronized the Church, including Penmon priory in Anglesey. At Rhosyr, overlooking the Menai Strait in Anglesey, the site of one of his residences has recently been excavated.
In 1267 Llywelyn became the first Welsh ruler to be acknowledged as prince of Wales by an English king. This remarkable achievement provoked the new monarch, Edward I (1272-1307), to curb Llywelyn’s pretensions. In two sharp wars between 1277 and 1283, the principality of Gwynedd was conquered by English armies; and despite several uprisings soon afterwards it was incorporated into a new royal principality of six counties that covered most of north and west Wales. The rest of the country consisted of numerous marcher lordships, mostly ruled by English nobles. This political and governmental structure was the culmination of two centuries of military conquest and colonization in Wales, and it lasted for a further 250 years. It also hastened economic, religious and cultural changes that were already in train, yet without obliterating earlier features of Welsh society. Moreover, communication within the British Isles and with western Europe was strengthened, and the peoples of England and Wales grew closer while acknowledging ethnic and social differences.
This did not, however, guarantee a more peaceful Wales. Edward I was responsible for the greatest castle-building programme ever attempted in the British Isles. Its aim was to ensure English control of Gwynedd and the surrounding country: it began in 1277 with castles like Aberystwyth and ended with Beaumaris, which was completed after the king’s death. In 1986, four of Edward’s most imposing fortresses Harlech, Caernarfon, Conwy and Beaumaris were designated by UNESCO as Wales’s first World Heritage Site. Some of the castles, and others that were built or rebuilt in marcher lordships like Denbigh and Newport, became seats of government supported by boroughs that were intended to exploit the wealth of the countryside. Other castles were mainly garrison centres and in more peaceful times they fell into disrepair. The archbishop of Canterbury had visited Wales in 1284 to enforce discipline in Church and society, to restore damaged monasteries and churches (like Bangor cathedral) and to promote reconciliation between the Welsh and immigrant populations.For a time the policies worked.
Yet social integration was not a smooth process. In the fourteenth century life’s uncertainties were increased by worsening weather across England and Wales in the 1310s that caused cattle murrain and famine, by economic dislocation and hardship, and by a series of devastating plagues. ‘The great mortality’ or ‘the great pestilence’ (later known as the Black Death) quickly spread from the Severnside ports in 1349 through the southern lowlands, the Severn valley and the borderland – and it reappeared in later decades. Manors, villages and towns were more seriously affected than scattered upland farms. The disasters disrupted the lives of individuals and families, urban and rural communities, lords as well as clergy; towns like Radnor shrank and several villages (like Runston) began to wither to be rediscovered by aerial archaeologists in our own day.
Such experiences increased the possibility of unrest in a volatile society where rulers and ruled faced greater hardships and uncertainties and where, especially in northern Wales, the memory of conquest was greenest. The most spectacular outburst was the revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (1400-10). Aside from Owain’s own grievances as a prominent Welsh landowner in north-east Wales, his revolt was so serious and lasted so long because it tapped into broader resentments in Church and state and the economy which prompted Owain and his supporters to attack the Anglicized towns of the north-east (like Ruthin and Welshpool), to descend into southern Wales to attack Brecon, Cardiff, Kidwelly and Carmarthen with devastating effect, and to besiege Grosmont and Coity castles. His forces won as many battles as they lost, though the sites of these encounters (even at Pilleth in 1405) can rarely be pin-pointed precisely. Owen had ambitious plans for an independent state, but the revolt never struck a universal chord among the peoples of Wales and ultimately it was unsuccessful.
Where the armies marched, the revolt was destructive: the fabric of towns and rural houses and mills suffered, especially in central and southern Wales, and the experience interrupted the evolution of a peaceful society. Yet from the 1430s there are signs of recovery, with population levels more stable, commercial life reviving in places like Haverfordwest and Oswestry, and the cloth and cattle trades with English towns across the border and in the Severn valley flourishing. Progress was made in refurbishing town buildings and, as the Royal Commission’s survey of Radnorshire has shown, reconstructing rural halls.
Some of those who weathered the turbulence of the fourteenth century and the great revolt grasped the opportunities presented by any volatile society, buying vacant properties or moving elsewhere, and realigning their loyalties. Enterprising peasants laid the foundations for family estates or started sheep farms, or prospered by providing craft and retail services in the larger towns. Welsh labourers found seasonal work on English estates, just as construction workers and craftsmen had been enlisted on either side of the border when castles and town walls were being built; after their work was done, some of these workers and craftsmen had put down roots in and around towns like Harlech and Beaumaris. The Welsh-born ancestors of Sir William ap Thomas were so successful that their family became one of the most powerful in fifteenth-century Wales, building a magnificent castle at Raglan and entering the peerage. The Bulkeley family was English in origin, but they too seized their chances, this time in the commercial world of Beaumaris and the Anglesey countryside.