All over Europe the climate, particularly favourable since the middle of the eleventh century, began to deteriorate towards the end of the thirteenth. Population had been rising steadily and the limit of arable land available for new cultivation had been reached. Postan maintained that one of the causes of subsequent problems was the fact that more and more marginal land was ploughed up, leading to a loss of pasture and consequently a loss of manure to revitalize the land, and this thesis, although controversial, could well be applied to Wales. Some Welsh evidence does suggest extreme pressure on the land in the early fourteenth century. The deteriorating climate was bound to affect harvest yields, and consequently the food supply. Harvest failures became more frequent and between 1315 and 1317 the harvest failed in three successive years all over western Europe. Wales was affected as much as anywhere else and famine was followed in subsequent years by livestock epidemics and natural disasters such as the great storm of 6 December 1330, which saw much of the land of the borough of Newborough in Anglesey lost for ever to the encroaching sand.32
All this must have weakened the resistance of the population and its decline may have begun as a result of climatic change and famine. But in the middle of the fourteenth century came the greatest disaster to affect medieval Europe. The Black Death seems to have come into Wales from south-west England by way of the Severn estuary in the spring of 1349; around the same time it may also have arrived at the port of Carmarthen and spread from there through south-west Wales. Contemporary accounts show it moving through Gwent and then northwards along the border before swinging east through Flintshire and the lordships of Dyffryn Clwyd and Denbigh, coming eventually to Caernarfonshire and Anglesey.33 Surviving sources do not permit detailed analysis of its impact over the whole country. In some areas, for example Dyffryn Clwyd and Anglesey, the evidence is reasonably plentiful by Welsh standards, if not in comparison with the evidence available in England; in others, like Merioneth, there is no evidence at all. The 1349 outbreak was only the first and worst; the plague returned to south Wales in 1361-2 and 1369, affecting areas that had previously escaped virtually unscathed, and there were many subsequent local visitations.
The immediate consequence of the plague was a slump in population; the English chronicler Geoffrey le Baker suggested a mortality of one-third in Wales. This led in turn to a shortage of labour and to the lands of deceased tenants coming into the hands of the authorities, both in the principality and the march. The fall in population meant less demand for food, and this led in turn to arable land being let for grazing and the abandonment of many mills. There was also an immediate drop in revenue all over Wales, made worse by the fact that more bondmen than freemen seem to have died. The shortage of labour following the plague meant competition for the workers who survived. They were able to demand higher wages, which lords and employers were prepared to pay. But, as in England, the authorities stepped in to bring wages under control. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 seems to have been extended to Wales; later judicial records reveal many cases of craftsmen being fined for overcharging and workers for demanding excessive wages and there were other attempts to impose labour discipline.34 Individual marcher lordships made agreements with one another for the return of runaway bondmen.
Another effect of the labour shortage was a substantial increase in migration; after 1349 many more immigrants or avowry tenants moved into the principality and the march from elsewhere. There had always been migrant labour in Wales, especially at harvest time when itinerant gangs from the uplands travelled around the lowlands to undertake the harvest; in 1326-7 at Kingswood in the lordship of Pembroke a gang of 363 men completed the whole job in one day.35 But avowry, which involved incomers placing themselves under the protection of the lord or the prince, meant permanent migration. Society was in a state of flux and the authorities were desperate to dispose of the land that was in their hands. This was bringing in little or no income; the former tenants were dead and the best that could be hoped for, even from prime arable land, was to lease it at low rents for grazing. All this meant that land and work were available for the enterprising, while the authorities, anxious to find new tenants, would not ask too many questions, with the result that many bondmen were able to begin new lives.
Even before the plague some marcher lords had abandoned demesne farming and direct exploitation of the resources of lordship because they no longer paid. Most of the others followed their example in the second half of the fourteenth century; demesnes were rented out to tenants, creating what were in effect family farms where labour was provided by the tenant and his sons. Lords no longer had a direct stake in the land; no longer did the produce of the demesne go to feed them and their households or go to market, and lordship became a mechanism for collecting rent. This had been the position of the crown in the principality since 1282. After the conquest there was no longer a resident prince and therefore no direct exploitation; the Welsh of the principality no longer had any direct dealings with their lord. Mills, local offices and anything else that might yield revenue were farmed or leased out in return for cash, and the same thing was happening in the march. A further development was the rapid growth of a market in land. Land had always changed hands and the conveyance in tir prid, best described as a kind of unredeemed pledge, had evolved to facilitate the alienation of Welsh hereditary land. Conveyance in fee or by English law had been even more common, although there was some doubt about its legality. But after the plague the land market took off. One of the effects of the Black Death was the acceleration of the breakdown of the traditional Welsh pattern of tenure based on kindred and hereditary rights. The breakdown had already begun; partible succession over several generations had meant that many free tenants had shares that were no longer economic. The result was that these small tenants were selling out to richer and more enterprising neighbours; the corollary was the appearance of a class of landless labourers. These same enterprising free tenants were buying or taking up leases of those escheat lands that had come on to the market following the plague. This rapid expansion of the land market, which had begun before the pestilence, was one of the causes of the emergence of new landed estates that were being built up by some families of uchelwyt; one fourteenth-century example was the Mostyn estate in Flintshire, which was being accumulated by Tudur ab Ithel Fychan.36 We know little about the management of these estates, but large parts of them were probably let to tenants.
The decline in population meant that much land, especially in upland areas, went out of cultivation for good and was converted to pasture. In the lordships of the middle march this meant that some followed the example of the Cistercians and went over to sheep-farming; where magnates led, lesser men (and women) followed, and by the end of the century increasing numbers of sheep are found in inventories. With the spread of sheep-farming came another change, from the export of raw wool to the manufacture of cloth. This can be seen from the growth in the number of fulling mills, first in the south-east and then in the marcher lordships of the north-east, where only the lords could afford the capital outlay involved. Ruthin became the main centre of cloth manufacture in medieval Wales.
Villeinage was in decline in Wales even before the conquest. In the march, as in Gwynedd, there had been a substantial amount of commutation in the thirteenth century; in lordships in northern Gwent in 1256-7 most of the work at the harvest and at other busy times was done by hired labour, with very large numbers sometimes employed.37 Labour services in Wales had tended to be much lighter than they were in England, and with the abandonment of direct exploitation of the demesne in the fourteenth century services in the march became superfluous, as they had long been in native Wales. Bond status only remained because it was a source of profit for both prince and marcher lord. The restrictions that affected the bondman remained, but he could now be released from them if he paid for the necessary licence; he could also purchase his freedom. The only burden left was financial. This decline was bound to affect the bond communities that had contributed so much to the income of both prince and lord, but bond status was now completely irrelevant and the authorities were fighting a losing battle when they attempted to recover lost income. Free tenants were moving into vacant bond lands and ignoring the obligations attached to them. Some bondmen, too, went up in the world; one from Anglesey in 1481-2 had goods worth ?26 18s. 4d. and had married his daughters to freemen.38 The income once drawn from unfree townships had now to be replaced by subsidies negotiated with the leaders of the native community.
The sources available and the absence of the manor from much of Wales mean that it is not easy to assess the extent of recovery after the plague; the Bridbury thesis of the pestilence being ‘more purgative than toxic’, for instance, cannot easily be tested.39 There seems to have been some temporary recovery, but the loss of revenue in many parts of the country was permanent. Rural depopulation was to continue through the fifteenth century with whole townships being let for grazing; many communities, both free and bond, disappeared for ever, often being replaced by a single consolidated farm bearing the same name and an isolated church. The towns of Wales seem generally to have been going through a difficult time in the halfcentury following the plague. The northern castle boroughs like Conwy and Beaumaris certainly had problems, while at Pembroke in the 1390s 25.5 burgages were unoccupied; on the other hand Wrexham, the largest town in north Wales, seems to have been flourishing.40 Some towns had never been very successful, while others never recovered after the plague. The blame for economic problems in late medieval Wales has usually been laid at the door either of the Glyn Dtvr revolt or the plague; the latter probably bears more responsibility than the former, but the whole fourteenth century was a period of crisis, often verging on the apocalyptic. The plague only exacerbated problems that had begun to appear at the beginning of the century. But the fourteenth century also sees the beginning of the transition to a new social and economic pattern in Wales, the expanding landed estate on the one hand, and wage labour, based in part on a class of landless labourers, on the other.
How did people react to these changes? Between the middle of the fourteenth century and the middle of the fifteenth most European countries saw at least one popular revolt. This was an age of protest, often driven by the crises of the century. Wales’s revolt, that of Owain Glyn Dvr in the first decade of the fifteenth century, cannot be described as the same kind of popular protest as the Jacquerie in France or the Peasants’ Revolt in England, but there was social protest in medieval Wales. The revolts in 1287 and 1294-5 that followed the conquests were neither popular nor national; the former was a protest by a disappointed Welsh nobleman, and the latter may have been a warning to Edward I by the leaders of the native community that his financial demands were excessive. A revolt in Glamorgan in 1315 may have included some elements of popular protest; it was precipitated by the oppressive rule of the custodian of the lordship following the death of the earl of Gloucester at Bannockburn, and the beginning of a series of harvest failures may also have been a contributory factor.
Surviving records point to extortion and oppression on the part of local officials - who were usually Welsh. In Flintshire there were widespread complaints about the activities of officials at all levels from the sheriff down during the middle years of the fourteenth century, and they reveal a culture of extortion managed by some of the local Welsh leaders.41 In 1345 the Black Prince’s attorney in north Wales was assassinated by a band of Welshmen led by the head of the senior branch of the Ednyfed Fychan lineage.42 This was a time of rising tension and resentment at the top of native society, even before the plague, and the problems that were already there may have contributed to this climate of restlessness, especially, perhaps, the scarcity of available land at a time when the evidence of deeds suggests that a market in land was already developing. There was certainly a good deal of buying and selling of land, much of it illegally; in 1358 the community of the cantref of Englefield in Flintshire paid a fine of ?800 for retrospective recognition of all its members’ illegal acquisitions of land since the conquest.43
The plague was followed by a definite decline in standards of public order; much of the evidence comes from Flintshire, but had judicial records from other parts of Wales survived the picture might have been similar. The deputy justiciar of south Wales was murdered in 1385 by a local uchelwr on the road between
Carmarthen and Cardigan, and as early as 1338 the Hospitallers of Slebech were paying annual retainers to two local Welsh squires to defend the successors of the knights who had once protected pilgrims in the Holy Land.44 The cause of law and order was not helped by the presence in Wales of substantial numbers of former soldiers, many with years of experience in the wars in France, who found it difficult to settle down to civilian life and who were often recruited to the retinues of leading uchelwyr. All this was allied in the late fourteenth century to a general disillusion on the part of the leaders of the native community who had accepted and had cooperated with the new order after 1282. This was the background against which some were planning the return of the last heir of the royal house of Gwynedd, Owain ap Thomas ap Rhodri.
World History
