Wales has often been seen as a single region of Britain, but it is itself a land of regions, its political geography being defined by internal natural frontiers. The regions range from the bleak upland pastures of much of mid-Wales or the grandeur of Snowdonia to the fertile lands of the Vale of Glamorgan or Anglesey. Some 60 per cent of the land surface is above the 200-metre contour line and the lie of the land has done much to mould Welsh society and economy. There were two agrarian worlds, the arable lowlands and the pastoral uplands; Sir Cyril Fox’s definition of the personality of Britain puts Wales firmly into the highland zone, but the country has both highland and lowland zones of its own and this has created a complex geographical and social environment.
The primary cause of economic change in Wales was the rise in population, the result of a period of favourable climate between about 1050 and 1300. The statistical bases for estimates of population range from the extremely tenuous to the nonexistent. Keith Williams-Jones proposed a very tentative figure of about 300,000 in 1300 when the medieval population was probably at its peak, and he went on to suggest that it was almost certainly greater at that time than it was in 1536.1 There is some evidence to suggest a substantial increase between 1100 and 1300; settlement expanded from fertile lands around the coast and in river valleys to inland areas where the soil had previously been less attractive and this meant the establishment of new communities. It is possible that this colonization was encouraged by offering more favourable conditions of tenure to unfree families to persuade them to move.2 More land was cleared for cultivation; Anglesey in particular seems to have been denuded of much of its indigenous forest by the twelfth century and some place-names reflect new settlement.3 The available evidence indicates growing pressure on a limited stock of arable land; by the end of the thirteenth century townships on marginal land in upland Merioneth had a high population density and the 1306 extent of the bishop of Bangor’s lands suggests the same thing.4 At Nanhwrfa in Anglesey fourteen heirs shared sixteen acres of arable, and this was only an extreme example.5
The basic structure of early medieval society was described in Welsh legal texts as ‘There are three kinds of person: a king, a breyr (a freeborn Welsh landed proprietor) and a bondman’.6 The fundamental division was that between free and unfree. In 1100 the unfree element formed the majority of the population in a world of itinerant kingship maintained by the food renders and labour services of the bondmen. The prevailing pattern of social organization over much of the country was the federal or multiple estate (W. maenor in south Wales, maenol in the north), made up of a number of vills or communities dependent on a court which could be that of a king or, on a smaller scale, of a breyr (in north Wales an uchelwr); relics of this pattern can still be seen in some of the extents drawn up in the fourteenth century and it is also evident in some of the Welsh entries in Domesday Book.7 In those parts of Wales where there was sufficient arable land, particularly in the south-east, earlier evidence suggests a pattern of large landed estates, probably worked by unfree labour.8
The coming of the Normans to Wales after 1066 had social and economic implications as well as political ones. The Norman invaders were adventurers, seeking to carve out lordships and lands for themselves, and it was these conquests which brought about the creation of the march, best defined as Welsh lordships in Wales ruled by Anglo-Norman lords. These new rulers had little impact on native Welsh society in the upland areas, known as the Welshry, where there was little or no change and where the Welsh population continued to provide food renders and perform labour services as it had always done. But the new rulers may have seen existing large estates as resembling the manors they already knew and these often came to be known as the Englishry where the custom of the manor rather than native law prevailed.9 Despite its name, the Englishry was not necessarily a region of English settlement; some settlers may have been brought in, but the greater part of the population usually continued to be Welsh and immigrants were often absorbed by the native community within a generation or two. There was only one instance of large-scale colonization; in 1108 Henry I permitted a substantial community of Flemings, driven from their homeland by the incursion of the sea, to settle in the southern part of what was later to be the county of Pembroke. This was a settlement of farmers and traders rather than a military conquest and it had significant cultural effects; the Welsh language disappeared from this region, never to return, and later documents show that even the field names became English.10
World History
