Welsh Marches

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Location of the Welsh Marches in Great Britain

The Welsh Marches are a landscape along the border between England and Wales . The term came up in the Middle Ages when the Kingdom of England expanded into Wales and can be translated as Welsh marks .

Today - unofficially - Welsh Marches is the name given to the counties along the border with Wales, especially on the English side. These are Cheshire , Shropshire , Herefordshire (in England) and Monmouthshire (in Wales). The western half of Gloucestershire (England) as well as Flintshire and Wrexham (Wales) are sometimes added.

history

In European history, brands are border regions between centers of power. In English history, the Welsh Marches refer to the borderland between England and Wales, the Scottish Marches to the borderland between England and Scotland . The Welsh Marches are located between the Welsh mountains and the river valleys of England. The Romans built forts at Chester ( castra ), Gloucester and Caerleon , a chain of market towns with garrisons defined the frontier, as did Offa's Dyke the border between England and Wales established by King Offa of Mercia in the late 8th century .

After the Norman conquest of England , William the Conqueror appointed three of his closest confidants to be Earls of Hereford , Shrewsbury and Chester . They were supposed to prevent raids by the Welsh into England and they themselves had the right to enlarge their territory by conquering Welsh territory . The Norman conquerors built numerous moths , simple castles made of earth and wood fortifications , to secure their conquered territories in the Welsh Marches , making the region the largest concentration of moths in Great Britain. Due to the limited resources of the Norman nobles, none of the barons could achieve supremacy in Wales, so that the conquest of Wales dragged on in several stages and over two centuries, until it was completed by the conquest of Wales by King Edward I in 1283. Through the centuries of wars, the population of the Welsh Marches formed a border society in every sense, a stamp that was left on the region until the Industrial Revolution .

The areas conquered by the Welsh principalities were also counted among the Welsh Marches, so that these areas, called Marchia Wallia , extended in the 13th century between Pembroke in South West Wales to near Chester. The conquered territories formed smaller or larger territories, the owners of which were called Marcher Lords . Their rulers in the area differed in many ways from the rest of the English rulers: they were geographically more compact, more independent in their jurisdiction, and had special privileges. The Marcher Lords thus formed their own social caste, and the marriage of the Norman barons with Welsh women resulted in a mixed Cambron-Norman culture. William the Conqueror and his successors, however, made sure that the Marcher Lords remained feudal vassals of the king. The feudalism that never fully took hold in England, summed up in the Welsh Marches foot. The traditional view is that the Norman monarchy supported this, a more recent view is that this right was general law in the 11th century that was suppressed after the Norman invasion and only survived in the march. People were settled as if the land had been abandoned, knights were given their own land with feudal duties to their Norman lord. The cities were also populated, they were given market rights under the protection of a Norman castle. Farmers went to Wales in large numbers, King Henry I brought them from Brittany , Flanders , Normandy and England to settle in South Wales. At the local level, the Marcher Lords were much more dependent on the able-bodied and able-bodied population than in the rest of England, so that they were also able to obtain carefully defined freedoms from them.

The Plantagenet monarchy aimed at a centralized bureaucracy and legal authority with which local peculiarities were eliminated - in the Welsh Marches these developments did not prevail. Protests of the border nobility have survived in the royal files and shed significant light on the nature and extent of their privileges. Increasingly, however, the baronies of the Welsh Marches came into the possession of English magnates , so towards the end of the 14th century the Duke of Norfolk Lord von Gower and Striguil , the Earl of Warwick Lord von Elfael, the Duke of Gloucester Lord von Caldicot , the Earl of Arundel Lord of Bromfield, Yale, Chirkland, Oswestry and Clun, the Duke of Lancaster Lord of Kidwelly and Monmouth . Due to his extensive possessions in the Welsh Marches - he was lord of 16 lordships - Roger Mortimer received the title of Earl of March in 1328 . Due to their possessions, which were also in England, these magnates were more closely obliged to the king.

The statute of Rhuddlan , with which King Edward I concluded the conquest of Wales in 1283, was limited to the conquered principality of Wales , which remained in the possession of the crown. The privileges of the Marcher Lords and the special status of the Welsh Marches were only finally abolished with the laws for the incorporation of Wales .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alheydis Plassmann: The Normans. Conquer, rule, integrate. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2008. ISBN 978-3-17-018945-4 , p. 295
  2. ^ Rees R. Davies: The Age of Conquest. Wales 1063-1415 . Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 1991, ISBN 0-19-820198-2 , p. 442

Web links

source

  • Lynn H. Nelson: The Normans in South Wales, 1070-1171 (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1966) [1]