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This collection of twelve essays describes aspects of town life in medieval Wales, from the way people lived and worked to how they spent their leisure time. Drawing on evidence from historical records, archaeology and literature, twelve leading scholars outline the diversity of town life and urban identity in medieval Wales. While urban histories of Wales have charted the economic growth of towns in post-Norman Wales, much less has been written about the nature of urban culture in Wales. This book fills in some of the gaps about how people lived in towns and the kinds of cultural experience which helped to construct a Welsh urban identity.
This collection of articles examines towns and urban life as part of the cultural fabric of late-medieval Wales. Though medieval Welsh towns were small relative to those in England and Europe, they had a significant impact on what was at the time a largely rural economy. As the sites of political and cultural tension between English and Wels, these towns were also responsible for the growth of national identity and a distinctive urban culture in Wales. This book draws on the evidence of local records and literature in order to shed light on a neglected aspect of medieval Welsh History.
Situates Celtic languages and literatures in relation to European movements, in the tradition of Helen Fulton's groundbreaking research. Professor Helen Fulton's influential scholarship has pioneered our understanding of the links between Welsh and European medieval literature. The essays collected here pay tribute to and reflect that scholarship, by positioning Celtic languages and literatures in relation to broader European movements and conventions. They include studies of texts from medieval Wales, Ireland, and the Welsh March, alongside discussions of continental multicultural literary engagements, understood as a closely related and analogous field of enquiry. Contributors present new investigations of Welsh poetry, from the pre-Conquest poetry of the princes to late-medieval and early Tudor urban subject matters; Welsh Arthuriana and Irish epic; the literature of the Welsh March - including the writings of the Gawain-poet; and the multilingual contexts of medieval and post-medieval Europe, from the Dutch speakers of polyglot medieval Calais to the Romantic poet Shelley's probable ownership of a Welsh Bible.
The conquest of Wales by the medieval English throne produced a fiercely contested territory, both militarily and culturally. Wales was left fissured by frontiers of language, jurisdiction and loyalty - a reluctant meeting place of literary traditions and political cultures. But the profound consequences of this first colonial adventure on the development of medieval English culture have been disregarded. In setting English figurations of Wales against the contrasted representations of the Welsh language tradition, this volume seeks to reverse this neglect, insisting on the crucial importance of the English experience in Wales for any understanding of the literary cultures of medieval England and medieval Britain.
After outlining conventional accounts of Wales in the High Middle Ages, this book moves to more radical approaches to its subject. Rather than discussing the emergence of the March of Wales from the usual perspective of the ‘intrusive’ marcher lords, for instance, it is considered from a Welsh standpoint explaining the lure of the March to Welsh princes and its contribution to the fall of the native principality of Wales. Analysis of the achievements of the princes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries focuses on the paradoxical process by which increasingly sophisticated political structures and a changing political culture supported an autonomous native principality, but also facilitated eventual assimilation of much of Wales into an English ‘empire’. The Edwardian conquest is examined and it is argued that, alongside the resultant hardship and oppression suffered by many, the rising class of Welsh administrators and community leaders who were essential to the governance of Wales enjoyed an age of opportunity. This is a book that introduces the reader to the celebrated and the less well-known men and women who shaped medieval Wales.
This book provides a detailed analysis of women’s involvement in litigation and other legal actions within their local communities in late-medieval England. It draws upon the rich records of three English towns – Nottingham, Chester and Winchester – and their courts to bring to life the experiences of hundreds of women within the systems of local justice. Through comparison of the records of three towns, and of women’s roles in different types of legal action, the book reveals the complex ways in which individual women’s legal status could vary according to their marital status, different types of plea and the town that they lived in. At this lowest level of medieval law, women’s status was malleable, making each woman’s experience of justice unique.
Irish inhabitants of the 'four obedient shires' - a term commonly used to describe the region at the heart of the English colony in the later Middle Ages - were significantly anglicised, taking on English names, dress, and even legal status. However, the processes of cultural exchange went both ways. This study examines the nature of interactions between English and Irish neighbours in the four shires, taking into account the complex tensions between assimilation and the preservation of distinct ethnic identities and exploring how the common colonial rhetoric of the Irish as an 'enemy' coexisted with the daily reality of alliance, intermarriage, and accommodation. Placing Ireland in a broad context, Sparky Booker addresses the strategies the colonial community used to deal with the difficulties posed by extensive assimilation, and the lasting changes this made to understandings of what it meant to be 'English' or 'Irish' in the face of such challenges.
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 Glyndŵr 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.
This ground-breaking volume brings together contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines (including literary studies, history, geography and archaeology) to investigate questions of space, place and identity in the medieval city.
A thriving port, a frontier base for the lords of Gower and a multi-cultural urban community, the south Wales town of Swansea was an important centre in the Middle Ages, at a nexus of multiple identities, cultural practices and configurations of power. As the principal town of the Marcher lordship of Gower and seat of the Marcher lord's rule, Swansea was a site of contested authority, colonial control and complex interactions – and collisions – between different cultures, languages and traditions. Swansea also features in the miracle collection prepared for the canonisation of Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford (d. 1282), as the setting for the intriguing case of the hanging and strange revival of the Welsh rebel, William Cragh. Taking medieval Swansea and Wales as its starting point, this volume brings into focus questions of place, power, identity and belief, bringing together inter-disciplinary perspectives which span History, Literary Studies and Geography / Archaeology, and engaging with current debates in the fields of medieval frontier studies, urban history, manuscript studies and hagiography. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History.