In Our Time - The Welsh Marches

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

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 UniversityHelen Fulton Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of BristolAnd Huw Pryce Emeritus Professor of Welsh History at Bangor UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading 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 ProductionSpanning 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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for the full list of programs and how to get free tickets. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. 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 Ivin Emlin, 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 hay welcome for my best? 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? 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, 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 Nuff Marchet, who had lands in Herefordshire, and he led troops down the Y 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 Brechenjog or Brecken and at the same time the powerful Welsh king of South West Wales Hries Abteodor 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. So how did these martial lords, how did they manage to accrue so much power in their hands, particularly their independence from the English king? 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. 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 rule of England and those in Wales, but 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 lordship. 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. 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 characterise them? 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 Brecken and Radner were owned for a long time by the very powerful Debraeus family in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. And that family of Debraeus is, a Norman family, also owned land. in England, France and Ireland.

And later on in the 15th century, the town of Oswistri, which formed its own little centre for a marcher lordship around Oswestery, that town and the lands around it were owned for a long time by the Fitz-Allen family, the Earls of Arendall. And they owned Oswistri from about the late 12th century right through to the 16th century in an almost unbroken line. And they were a very powerful family, of Arendal and of course they owned

Arindal 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. 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? 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, Calon a laudron a laelayu, the heart and breast of the lion. He says, Angel Da,

and Guelod Eyre, a good angel in the thick of battle. And the poet also calls him Erir Grinsor, 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 success. in those battles.

Reyn Emlen, let's go back to the beginning again. Who were the most powerful forces in Wales when the martial lords first started to invade? 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 Gwyneth and Poiss 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 be one powerful king, Griffitha Pllewellyn, 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 the Battle of Hastings, invaded Wales. That led to the collapse of Griffith and Ploughellin's kingdom. Incidentally, Harold Godmison also married Griffitha Plouwelyn's wife. Eildgith, so poor Eildgith 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. 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? Well, they'd had a hundred years or so of trying to conquer Wales. They'd managed to successfully at the beginning, but the Welsh had learned how to fight back. And after a while, whales seemed too hard a nut to crack, I suppose, to many of these martial lords. And they looked across at Ireland, and when the opportunity arose, there was an exiled king of Ireland, king of Lainstead. 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.

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? Well, you could certainly argue that,

I think that there's a century earlier in a way, it's 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 marcher law to 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 war they were the most suitable to conquer island and they should be sort of treated better by the king on account of that 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 welshrees and another law in the english rees what were these rees Well, we're talking about the organisation of, I think, the majority of marcher lordships. And what you tend to have was that the lower-lying land where you'd have the castle, the borough, sometimes a 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 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 manners. They pay 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 2,000 feet 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 they become a target of Owing Lindur later on, for example. And this persists, the urban concentration of English, then the rural concentration of Welsh and Welsh speakers. 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 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 taken over the veil 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 in fact Helen as I said 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 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 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. And the Marcher Lords respected Welsh culture and Welsh traditions or not? Well, the March of 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 were 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.

Harin, 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 duray, as it were? 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 century.

They hold power which elsewhere is exasied 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 the Lord.

one another which wouldn't be thinkable in their English territories. And it 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, such as sturgeons and porpoise and other things. So all these minor details which colour the image of the type of power that they had. And you see this encapsulated in 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 of 14th century of John Charlton, Lord of Poiss, 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 martial lord. So it could be king, but also certain laws. Lordships fell into royal hands.

And so the king had these rights as a martial lord in certain parts of Wales, rather than as 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.

The Signal Awards recognize the podcast that define culture, and being honored by the Signal Awards, sets your production team apart with recognition from the industry's top experts and access proof that your work is a standard bearer for podcasting worldwide. By entering, your work is heard by the Signal Awards Judging Academy, an invitation-only body of podcast professionals from a claimant, organizations which include the BBC. Grow your audience, celebrate your team and stand out.

The final entry deadline to submit is the 26th of June. Enter your podcast at signalaward.com for consideration. How did a boycott Jimmy become a billionaire from posting videos? On good, bad billionaire, we're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr. Beast, made his fortune. He's buried himself in a coffin for days. counted to 100,000 on camera and even recreated squid games

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What changes for the marcher lords once the rest of Wales is under the control of the English king? I think the biggest change is that they are now faced with the much more stable situation. I mean, in the 12th and 13th centuries there'd been quite a lot of towing and throwing. Welsh rulers had recaptured some of the areas like Kennedy. Dickion in West Wales, which had initially been taken by the March and so on, and a lot of warfare, as well as intermarriage and 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 Ed would reward

some of his friends and followers, with new marcher lordships carved out of the sort of east, part of the old principality of Guinness. So in north-east Wales. So you have the lordship of Rithin or Dufferin-Cloid, 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 march is in fact expanded and the fragmentation of Wales is in the sense increased. But now instead of there being what was called before the conquest, Pura Walia or Welsh Wales and Marchia Walié, the March of Wales.

Now you have the royal principality of Wales, if you like, the principality of North versus South Wales and then the March of Wales. So the configurations changed. And that's the territory that is given to the Prince of Wales as well. Yes. 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 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? I think after 1282, the march has 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 first built these enormous castles around the north of Wales like Flint and Conwy and Carnarvan. 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 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 times,

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. Of course, when you come to 1400, that's exactly what Owen Glendour did.

Yes, and Hamadin, what were Welsh people doing after Edward assumes power? How did they respond to this? What happens to Welshness in this period? Yeah, well, interesting. I mean, you've read it 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 Echelwir, the squirac in Wales, the leaders of Welsh society,

those of them who were willing to work with the regime, whether that's in the principality with the King of England, but in the marches where their marcher lords, there were positions that they could have to serve their marcher lords. and I suppose they were necessary for the March of Lords. There was necessary for March of Lords to have these people to connect the Lords to the communities of 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 and Oswestry in that area and they managed to successfully have power underneath the rule of the Fitzalan lords. One interesting example, a man called Huel Caffin, who was a cleric, who has 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 of the descendants of a man called Huel Apemirig. David Stevenson has written a book on this recently, tracking the history of the family from an obscure, Skiwa minor echelwyr, serving the Motimer dynasty, the De Boen dynasty of Marcher Lords,

serving the Crown, and ultimately some of them becoming minor martial lords themselves, or joining the Herefordshire gentry. So the Clanvo family of Hergars 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. Helen, you wanted to come in there. Yes, I wanted to pick Harreen, 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 a Welsh manuscript written in Glamorgan under the patronage of a Welsh gentry person, Hopkins Aptomas. So other manuscript anthologies like Penaeth 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 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. 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? 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, in Britain, because of the history of

conquest and doing and throwing. So, yeah, I wouldn't put a number on it. In the hundreds, I think. 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? 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 Rhys, I mentioned a bit earlier, who was killed in 1093 on his other side. So he's partly Welsh, he's related to the Welsh Princess Southwest Wales, but his father is Lord of Manabia in southern Pembrokeshire, quite a small marcher lordship, but 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 Fitz Stephen, according to Gerald, he writes a book about the conquest of Ireland, in which his relatives have the starring sort of role. but he has Robert gives 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 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 marches in Ireland would invoke St. David in battle. And indeed, Gerald had an uncle who was bishop of St. Davis, 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 hybridisation of the march, he's really significant. Flynn, we've already heard from Helen a mention of Owen Glendour. And for those of you who would like to find out more about him, There's an entire programme in our time devoted to Glendour. 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? 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, 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 town. So, for example, in Brecken, officially, you had to be a whole English man to be a Burgess. You had to have an English mother and an English father, if you had a Welsh parent at all. And the Burgess gave you what sort of rights? 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 Burgess has had an economic monopoly over the surrounding area. And the Welsh were excluded from that? Well, it depended from town to town. So some places they were allowed, other places officially, like Breck 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 Marche Lords were exploiting their lordships, using them to farm, we're 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 Bollingbrook, had become lord of breckon 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 Brecken 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 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. They were living in the shadow of conquest. in a way the Welsh had someone to blame for how they were treated and the martial lords were those often who were blamed. And Helen has also mentioned prophecy, and as was 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 Doer seem to be that man. 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? They were very profound, I think. The historian Gwynnalf 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 towns for the first time since the Romans reformed monasticism obviously knights castles very influential the round keeps of Pembroke

is sort of imitated both by the marches 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, if you like a gradual piecemeal conquest, which is bound to have had a big impact on Wales in the Middle Ages. Helen, we've heard about the emergence of the Marcher Lords and the Marchlands. What about the end of the March lands? What happens in the Tudor period? The March of Lordship 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. 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 march or quite a lot of the march of lordships so there were irregularities there and of course the 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 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 march of lordships to become a single unit of Wales, government. 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, Radner, Brecon, Monmouthshire, they were the new counties that were established under the Acts of Union. under the Acts of Union. And presumably this was all part of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell's centralisation 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. 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. Herina, 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?

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 marcher 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 a land. and now became available following the closure of the monasties 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. 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, Keredigian, somewhere like that and suddenly realize you're in a somewhat different place. Any of you? Well, political scientists have come up with various models of three whales models and so on. I mean, how sort of British Wales and a Welsh Wales and a sort of frog and Rai or well-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 marches. You mentioned Caradigion, and we can forget, really, actually, Caradigion was on the first areas to be conquered. And the original Norman lords there had their stated aim of turning Caradigion 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 police names and culture that they are, remains really of that marcher pattern. My thanks to Helen Fulton, Hugh Price and Rinemlin, 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. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. 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, what you mentioned at the end about the Flemish migration into Wales, what was all about and when was that happening so that happened in the beginning of the 12th century so henry the first king of england he'd taken personal possession of that part of south pembrookshire and i suppose he decided he needed a loyal population that relied upon him in that area so he introduced

the flemish people there where were those flemish people living at the time well they'd moved so i suppose we think of normans as being a homogenous group but we're with the Normans, multiple other people came, well, ride in England as well. You had Normans, you had Bretons, and you had Flemish as well. Some of them are settling part of England first, and then we moved to that part of South Pembrokeshire. And 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. 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 Lansker, I believe it's called. Yes, and southern Pembrokeshire is known as Little England beyond Wales and has been for a long time. So, yeah, there's this sort of long, deeply seated English linguistic presence and the place names.

In the Gower Peninsula, again, there was an English county there, not in Englishy in Welsh, but English and a Welsh country, 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. Okay, what are some things that we missed out that you'd like to talk about? I don't think I did enough justice to the richness of March of 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 records. 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. And did you get disputes between the March of Lords, you know, jurisdiction, borders and so on and so forth? Yeah, there was a famous dispute soon after the Edwardian conquest between the Lords of Glamorgan and Brecken

and raiding each other and saying they had the right to do this, within their March of liberties, but sort of of Edward 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 those two very powerful, the born lords of Brecken and Gilbert de Clare in Glamorgan are, you know, big figures. And they

certainly attacking each other. It's not just the March of Lords as well, it's the communities of the different Lordships. And in a sense you have a lot of these conflict, these fields between the different martial lodships. One of the things, as we haven't really reflected as much on, is the lawless nature, or at least the lowless characterisation 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, you know, Gleesbury 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 an example in the 14th century of whole communities attacking the neighbouring lordship. I can't remember the exact date in the 14th century where the lordship of hay decide to go en masse and attack the lordship of Clifford, which is just over the modern Wales-English border, they burn 200 houses.

I don't know what the people of Clifford are done to the people of Hay. but obviously something had happened and they decided to exact their 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 the dangerous place to live, I think. 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. Was there ever any sense that this might emerge as a sort of proto-state formation?

I don't think so. 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. It gives 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, but laws 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 Wales, to come back to him,

says of his uncle, Robert Fitz-Steven, that he was offered his friend, freedom after being captured by the Lord Fries in the 1160s if he went to fight against the King of England on Fries's side and according to Gerald Robert refused because that would bring disgrace upon him because he was you know committing treason against his lord and that's how he went off to Ireland according to Gerald and Finn 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, why is there those

divisions in Wales that seem to be so persistent in the lead-up to the March of Lords period? I mean, there was a clear sense of Welshness. It's not but 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 a certain point certain Welsh kings did manage unite most of Wales under them

mentioned Griffitha Pluelen 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 first. 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. In our time with Misha Gleney is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production. Political language can seem archaic.

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