The Economy of Medieval Wales, 1067-1536

Matthew Frank Stevens

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786834843
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786834867
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

This book surveys the economy of Wales from the first Norman intrusions of 1067 to the Act of Union of England and Wales in 1536. Key themes include the evolution of the agrarian economy; the foundation and growth of towns; the adoption of a money economy; English colonisation and economic exploitation; the collapse of Welsh social structures and rise of economic individualism; the disastrous effect of the Glynd?r rebellion; and, ultimately, the alignment of the Welsh economy to the English economy. Comprising four chapters, a narrative history is presented of the economic history of Wales, 1067–1536, and the final chapter tests the applicability in a Welsh context of the main theoretical frameworks that have been developed to explain long-term economic and social change in medieval Britain and Europe.

Chapter one

EARLY HISTORY, CONQUEST AND COLONISATION, 1067–1315

The organisation of native society to c.1100

WALES WAS, by the eleventh century, divided into a number of competing kingdoms. The most notable of these were Gwynedd in the north-west, Powys in east central Wales, Morgannwg (also called Glywysing) in the south-east and Deheubarth (that is, the kingdom of Dyfed plus other realms of the royal house of Dinefwr) in south-west Wales.¹ The rulers of these kingdoms, typically styled ‘princes’ in recognition of the modest extent of their realms, competed for control over a hierarchy of administrative-territorial units: the cantref, the commote and the maenor (plural maenorau).² These units existed from at least the conception of the body of Welsh law attributed to the mid-tenth-century prince of Deheubarth, Hywel Dda ap Cadell (d. 949/950), which, through the work of many hands, would evolve over many generations to become the regionally varied but universally recognised law of native Wales. The concept of lordship in native society primarily reflected a concern for the establishment and maintenance of hierarchies of dependence between and within descent groups of related free men who controlled the territorial units they occupied, and between those groups and the prince.³ Lordship as a mechanism for the direct control of land and collection renders and services, with the prince as the greatest lord, was developing from the twelfth century with the introduction of concepts of feudalism.⁴ By the thirteenth century close colleagues and social peers of the Welsh rulers were interjecting themselves, as lords with local territorial control, between their dependants and the princes.⁵

The geographical size of medieval territorial units and the number of their constituent subdivisions was highly variable. Typically, the more productive and more densely populated the unit was, the smaller was its geographical extent. For example, Anglesey, which was highly productive and densely populated by Welsh standards, was divided into three cantrefs, each comprising two commotes.⁶ By comparison, cantrefs spanning mountainous areas, such as Cantref Mawr (literally ‘the big cantref’) containing seven commotes and situated between the Black Mountains and historic Cardiganshire, were twice as large as those on Anglesey.⁷

Until about the year 1100, taxation was based on the maenor. A maenor was a flexible territorial unit comprising about a third or a quarter of a commote, and supplied either labour and food renders or a gwestfa tribute to the Welsh prince or lord.⁸ Local records of the administrative workings of commotes and maenorau do not exist, but maenorau are described in an idealised form in Welsh law books. These suggest that there were mainly arable maenorau of unfree peasants, notionally containing seven trefi, and mainly pastoral maenorau of free persons, notionally containing thirteen trefi; a tref equated loosely to an English vill or township, and could refer elastically to a nucleated village of clustered houses or an area of dispersed farmsteads.⁹ An unfree maenor was typically populated by persons living in houses clustered around arable fields of tir cyfrif, or ‘shareland’, distributed among and cultivated by unfree peasants who rendered to the prince or lord various labour services, such as carriage of goods and harvest work, and agricultural produce. A free maenor typically comprised dispersed settlements and, while not without arable lands, contained a greater focus on animal husbandry. A free maenor notionally provided a gwestfa, or tribute, from the resident free extended-family grouping(s) to the prince or lord, taking various forms. The gwestfa was recorded in thirteenth-century Cardiganshire, for example, as entertainment for the lord and his entourage – primarily food – four times annually.¹⁰ The gwestfa would have been subdivided among liable trefi of free families and was in later centuries commuted (see below) to a notional cash sum called the twnc pound.¹¹

A tripartite administrative apparatus tended to exist in each commote, consisting of a local llys, or hall, tir bwrdd, or a demesne farm belonging to the prince or lord, and a maerdref, or village occupied by unfree peasants charged with carrying out menial maintenance tasks in and about the court.¹² The llys was the meeting place of the court, in both the social and judicial sense of the term, a collection point of unfree renders and proobably of payments associated with the gwestfa and twnc tribute. This apparatus was notionally overseen, according to some law books, by a centrally appointed local official called a maer, or land maer biswail (literally dung-maer).¹³

In the century and a half after 1100 a number of other officers and their economic functions would be associated with the llys-maerdref complex. Of ancient origin and continued significance beyond English conquest (see below), are the rhaglaw, or ‘bailiff’, and rhinghel, or ‘beadle’. The rhaglaw was the chief official of the territorial ruler, later records suggesting he collected rents, issued summonses, arrested suspected felons and oversaw purveyance, the compulsory purchase of supplies.¹⁴ The rhingyll was, at least initially, an inferior officer to the rhaglaw who dealt with the unfree concerning various dues and renders, but who in later centuries became the more responsible official and chief arm of royal government.¹⁵ A number of other officials, with less overtly economic roles, can also be found in the Welsh law books.

Three key points are to be taken away from this outline of the administrative and social institutions that framed the Welsh agrarian economy before 1100. First, Wales was governed through structures that were scaled to their economic output, as shown by the varying size of commotes in relation to their fertility and population. Second, social structures were designed to maximise economic output, with denser unfree communities tied to the best lowland arable, and more dispersed free communities extending into upland areas that they exploited through pastoral animal husbandry. Third, the presence of officials provided by the prince or lord to oversee these social structures, enforcing the labour services of the unfree maenorau and collecting the gwestfa tribute of the free maenorau, indicates an effort to maintain and promote the agrarian system. Native Wales had a carefully managed, if not necessarily centrally planned, agrarian economy.

Urban life, in contrast, was not developed by native rulers until long after 1100. In Roman times, the native inhabitants of Wales could not but have been aware of commerce and towns. Roman forts across Wales, in particular at Caernarfon, Cardiff and, most importantly, Caerleon, were supported by trading settlements and remained or were renewed as foci of political control in the early Middle Ages. At Caerleon, a Roman garrison of 6,000 soldiers was supported by an extensive civilian community, and early Welsh rulers subsequently occupied and fortified the site until its eventual Norman takeover and commercial revival in the twelfth century.¹⁶ But unlike in England and northern Europe, where a degree of urban or proto-urban life survived the end of Roman rule, the fifth-century withdrawal of Roman troops from Wales heralded the all but total collapse of any clearly ‘urban’ commerce.¹⁷ The use of coinage as a means of exchange declined sharply, and ceased in most areas.¹⁸ At the turn of the eleventh century Welsh society was under the sway of a competitive ruling class of warrior freemen who governed their small kingdoms through the ideological prism of ‘heroic values and aggressive militarism’.¹⁹ Pillage, plunder and tribute taking were the norm, making permanent or large-scale trading settlements unsustainable targets. The agricultural surpluses of peasant production that, in England, might have gone to market, were largely collected and consumed or redistributed by Welsh rulers on progress throughout their dominions. Wendy Davies has argued that commercial exchange in Wales before 1070 was unusually small by European standards, focused on the import of small quantities of luxury goods such as silks or wine, and orientated towards the sea trade that circulated between Bristol, Ireland and Chester.²⁰ Some long-distance overland trade to England may well have existed but was ‘probably not great’ and focused on ‘necessities’, such as foodstuffs.²¹ From the eleventh century, native rulers moved slowly in the direction of the more systematic exploitation of their economic resources in response to, or in ‘dialogue’ with, their new Anglo-Norman neighbours.²² Most importantly, economic development in Wales was frequently prompted by violent interaction with Anglo-Norman leaders, until by the later thirteenth century the pace and extent of change was such that even native rulers were carried along.

In a sequence of events indicative of the long-term pattern of conflict and development to follow, in 1063, Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex and future king of England, defeated Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, ruler of much of Wales, and in the summer of 1065 built a fortified burh at Portskewett, in Gwent.²³ This was probably intended as a protected commercial centre for English merchants on the western shore of the Môr Hafren, or ‘Severn Sea’, known in English since the sixteenth century as the Bristol Channel. Within weeks, the fledgling initiative was sacked by the new king of Gwent, Caradog ap Gruffudd. But Caradog’s counteroffensive would only inspire a stronger invasion. Harold’s claims in Gwent were renewed by the new Norman Earl of Wessex, William fitz Osbern, when in 1067 he campaigned in Gwent and founded fortified settlements at Monmouth and Chepstow (then called ‘Striguil’).²⁴ In this way, the characteristic pattern of military-commercial engagement emerged: Anglo-Norman thrust and outpost foundation, Welsh riposte, and, finally, sustained Anglo-Norman counter-attack and occupation with associated settlement. However, towns, markets and coin-hungry local officials – the principal economic elements of this transformation – would have to be protected behind high walls for centuries.

This pattern of interaction between natives and incomers had a profound and transformative effect on Welsh society and the economy in rural Wales well beyond the areas that were coming under direct and durable Anglo-Norman control. Thomas Jones Pierce suggested that Norman power, even in places unadulterated by invasion, ‘appears to have exerted indirect pressures which brought about a veritable agrarian revolution in the years between 1100 and 1300’.²⁵ This took place in two phases. The first was a form of internal colonisation, from about 1100, in which free family groupings grew in size and complexity to occupy more fully upland trefi and maenorau. The second was a form of administrative streamlining, largely eliminating distinctions between unfree and free Welsh, that native rulers undertook upon recovering territories formerly subject to Anglo-Norman control.

The first phase of this ‘revolution’ involved enhancing the role of the extended family in exploiting only marginally croppable and upland territories. The gwely (plural, gwelyau), or four-generational agnatic kin group – that is, all men sharing the same great-grandfather – had been the unit of production from time immemorial when Norman lords first reached the Welsh borders. From Roman times, these gwelyau units occupied the best-drained soils on the Welsh coastal plains and valley floors, most often as unfree tir cyfrif tenants of correspondingly unfree trefi and maenorau. As the population grew in the absence of additional, fertile arable lands (see below), and as Welsh rulers sought to exploit their estates more fully, gwelyau expanded inland and family units adopted a system of transhumance in which time was divided between lowland arable and upland pastoral agriculture. These new secondary settlements tended to be of a free character, although they were sometimes created by the deliberate reorganisation of very small settlements of bondmen on marginal lands who formed semi-free gwelyau.²⁶ The new settlements gave rise to new, mostly free, trefi and maenorau. The areas occupied by these new extended-family units themselves came to be called gwelyau, giving the term both social and territorial meanings. The growth of free gwelyau social-territorial units in number and importance started along the north-eastern borderlands early in the twelfth century, gradually spreading west and south until they affected the whole of native Wales.²⁷ We know little of the exact drivers of this development, and any attempt to articulate this shift artificially imposes a degree of order on a confusedly devolved process. But the new semi-free and free gwelyau, as social-territorial units, have been viewed as both ‘the core of a more stable agrarian structure’ and a mechanism for the better exploitation of resources in response to the rising Anglo-Norman threat.²⁸

The second phase of this ‘revolution’ hinged on the de facto liberation of unfree tenants following intervals of Anglo-Norman control. Best explored is historic Cardiganshire, roughly corresponding to the Welsh kingdom of Deheubarth, most of which was subject to Anglo-Norman overlordship during the first half of the twelfth century.²⁹ In Cardiganshire, twelfth-century political disturbances resulted in the extinction or flight of much of the ancient bond population. After Welsh native control was re-established in the later twelfth century, the gwely, in its sense as a combined social and territorial unit, grew to underpin the economic organisation of the revived kingdom of Deheubarth. A more or less uniform and streamlined taxation of the land by a reimagined free gwestfa tribute, collected in services and goods against relatively regular territorial ‘gwestfa’ units, was intr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Early History, Conquest and Colonisation, 1067–1315
• Chapter 2: The Medieval Economy at its Apex, 1282–1348
• Chapter 3: Crises and Restructuring, 1315–1536
• Chapter 4: Modelling the Economy of Medieval Wales
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover