Native Wales learned from the Normans. Military lessons were rapidly put into practice and the princes of Gwynedd began to reward faithful servants with lands to be held by military service. Such grants often carried with them the delegation of the prince’s authority over the resident bondmen and the right to hold a court. Following conquest, however, first in the march and then in the principality, native society was decapitated; no longer were there native rulers or royal courts. Welsh society was henceforth dominated by the free proprietors or uchelwyr (gentry); some of these had been rewarded for their service to the princes with lands and privileges, but all of them exercised social and political leadership within their own communities and usually monopolized office at local level, as well as serving from time to time as sheriffs in the principality and as stewards and receivers in the march.11 They were the leaders and the effective rulers of the native Welsh community; the authorities negotiated with them over such matters as subsidies and taxation, and they drew attention to the community’s problems and grievances. Some were men of considerable wealth; although it was blood and descent that originally gave such men their status, economic power played an increasingly important part as the later middle ages progressed. Each uchelwr controlled a network of kinsmen, tenants and dependants and by the end of the fourteenth century each one had his plaid or retinue made up of such people. Brokerage and patronage were among their most important functions in their communities and they expected and received due respect. Not all their kinsmen were prosperous; many might well have been poorer than some unfree tenants, but they were intensely proud of and aware of their descent.
Land was the real basis of wealth. Free land, however, was vested in the lineage and not in the individual, who had no right to dispose of it. From about 1200 onwards the pattern of free tenure was an institution called the gwely or resting-place (the term was applied both to the lineage group and to its land). Individuals only enjoyed what amounted to a life interest and rights were shared equally among sons. The size of individual shares varied immensely, depending on the number of sons in each generation. In theory the existence of the gwely would have meant the prohibition of any property market, but some land did lie outside the kindred system and even before 1282 a legal device called the conveyance in tir prid, which made the alienation and the acquisition of hereditary land possible, had evolved.12
Below the free came the unfree, the bondmen or taeogion. The bondman was tied to the soil; he could not leave it, nor could he do anything else without the consent of his lord. Many late medieval deeds record the buying and selling of bondmen, but what was sold was authority over him and his issue and the right to his labour and services rather than the bondman himself and, like so many of his counterparts elsewhere, he would not be slow to protest about oppression or extortion. In 1305 the bond demesne community of Penrhosllugwy in Anglesey complained to the prince, Edward of Caernarfon, that they were being assessed for renders and services based on an unjust extent and, after prolonged agitation for more than twenty years, eventually won their case.13
There had been English settlement since the first coming of the Normans, but the Edwardian conquest brought in more immigrants. English settlers were introduced to the northern marcher lordships created by Edward I. In Denbigh Welsh tenants were moved to lands elsewhere, equal in acreage but not in fertility, an act which caused lasting resentment; the population of the town of Denbigh was almost entirely English but in Ruthin, on the other hand, Welsh and English burgesses lived side by side. The boroughs founded by Edward I around his new castles were intended as English colonies and secure supply bases. Names of early burgesses suggest that they came from many parts of England, some from as far afield as Lewes or Faversham; the generous terms of the foundation charters were intended to attract them. Their privileges often caused ill-feeling, but it is simplistic to think in terms of English towns and Welsh hinterland in a state of permanent mutual hostility. There was no lack of mutual suspicion; the two peoples often lived under different laws and customs, always a recipe for resentment and friction, but they had to live together and trade with each other. Prosperous burgesses and settlers very soon began to intermarry with Welsh gentry families and to join the ranks of the uchelwyr, even to the extent of becoming patrons of the poets or, in the early fifteenth century, of joining the revolt of Owain Glyn Dvr. Some of the most eminent gentry families, like the Salus-buries, Hanmers and Pulestons in the north-east or the Bulkeleys in Anglesey, came originally from England and the same pattern can be seen in the south.
The legal position of a woman was dictated by the status of her father if unmarried and by that of her husband if she were married. According to Welsh law she could not inherit land, nor could it be transmitted through her; in parts of Wales, particularly the north-east, this prohibition survived into the later middle ages, but the Statute of Wales of 1284 permitted women in the post-conquest principality to inherit land and to be assigned dower.14 Deeds, extents and judicial records reveal women there as sellers and purchasers and as tenants in their own right; most of these were unmarried women or widows, but there is at least one example from the fourteenth century of an heiress taking steps to protect her inheritance from her estranged husband.15 Marriages to heiresses also contributed to the rise of several landed estates; that of leuan Fychan ab leuan ab Adda of Pengwern to Angharad, the daughter and heiress of Hywel ap Tudur ab Ithel Fychan of Mostyn, in the early years of the fifteenth century is a case in point.16 Marriages such as this were generally arranged and many were within the same lineage group; the marriage of first cousins was entirely acceptable, although this was already being condemned by religious reformers in the twelfth century. Some families appear to have had clear marriage strategies and marriage was one of the factors that made the uchelwyr such a close-knit group; an awareness of the networks created by marriage is central to an understanding of the dynamics of late medieval society and of the nature of support for the Glyn Dvr revolt.17 It was not only marriage within the forbidden degrees that caused Welsh sexual morality to be regarded with suspicion by reform-minded churchmen like Gerald of Wales and Archbishop Pecham. Native law had always provided for the dissolution of a marriage; it was seen as a civil contract rather than a sacrament and, like any other contract, it could be terminated.18 Nor did the concept of legitimacy as such exist in Wales; acceptance and recognition by the father, rather than birth in wedlock, determined the right of a son to a share in the inheritance. The later middle ages did see an increasing tendency to conform to the demands of the church, but the old ways were far from dying out; in the fifteenth century William Griffith I of Penrhyn in Caernarfonshire was busily building up two estates, one for his first-born legitimate son and another for the eldest of his illegitimate offspring.19
There is no lack of evidence of women’s role in economic life. According to the Merioneth lay subsidy roll of 1292-3, some 10 per cent of those who contributed to the subsidy and who therefore had taxable goods valued at more than fifteen shillings were women. In a very different part of Wales, the marcher lordship of Monmouth, the figure was almost 11 per cent.20 In the same subsidy the matriarch Angharad ferch Adda and her sons in Llyn had forty-two oxen and forty-eight cows, along with large quantities of corn; this was substantial wealth.21 Angharad is unlikely to have worked her own land but other women undoubtedly did. As in England, many probably worked on the land alongside their menfolk, performing the same tasks. Some agricultural activities like weeding and winnowing were regarded as women’s work and the dairy was their territory. Spinning and carding were also exclusively female tasks, but weaving was done by both sexes. In the towns baking seems to have been a largely female function and women both brewed ale and sold it in taverns, as in Caernarfon in the second half of the fourteenth century.22 Surviving evidence suggests that much market trade was in their hands and the number of pleas of debt brought by women contained in court rolls is a further indicator of independent economic activity. From Anglesey in the 1320s come two cases of women amerced for usury; moneylending was always important in rural communities and the fact that some women were in a position to lend money is yet another indicator of independent means.23 Domestic service was a significant employer of women and some were involved in the building trade; early in the fourteenth century four women appear as hod and mortar carriers at Caernarfon castle. There were less respectable occupations as well, as witness the three prostitutes at Wrexham in 1336.24 At the other end of the scale, Agnes de Bevillard, widow of the previous constable, acted as constable of Harlech castle for nearly three years in the 1280s.25
World History
