"Urban Culture in Medieval Wales" is a collection of articles that examine 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 a largely rural economy. As the sites of political and cultural tension between English and Welsh, the towns were also responsible for the growth of national identity and a distinctive urban culture in Wales. The chapters in the book draw on the evidence of local records and literature in order to bring to light a neglected aspect of medieval Welsh history.
"Urban Culture in Medieval Wales" is a collection of articles that examine 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 a largely rural economy. As the sites of political and cultural tension between English and Welsh, the towns were also responsible for the growth of national identity and a distinctive urban culture in Wales. The chapters in the book draw on the evidence of local records and literature in order to bring to light a neglected aspect of medieval Welsh history.
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"Urban Culture in Medieval Wales" is a collection of articles that examine 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 a largely rural economy. As the sites of political and cultural tension between English and Welsh, the towns were also responsible for the growth of national identity and a distinctive urban culture in Wales. The chapters in the book draw on the evidence of local records and literature in order to bring to light a neglected aspect of medieval Welsh history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783165094 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 53 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Urban Culture in Medieval Wales
By Helen Fulton
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2012 The ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2503-2
CHAPTER 1
Who Were the Townsfolk of Medieval Wales?
Ralph A. Griffiths
Who were the townsfolk of medieval Wales? This is a straightforwardly reasonable question. It is also an important one in explaining the nature of urbanization in a country that is partly mountainous and part lowland, with an exceptionally long and indented coastline, and at a time when it was open to external influences from all quarters. The nature of identity, as a social phenomenon, is much more difficult to grasp because individuals and groups, including towns, have several identities: what identifies one individual, group or collectivity (including a town) need not be the characteristics or qualities that identify a neighbour or a town nearby, let alone consistently across a region or country. This is certainly so of medieval Wales.
Age, gender, occupation, status and origin are among the characteristics that help to identify the townsfolk of any place and period; in relation to medieval Wales, arguably the most fascinating and formative of these is origin. As with towns elsewhere in medieval Europe, my reasonable question – who were the townsfolk of medieval Wales? – would elicit different answers if directed to the tenth century, before the age of rapid population growth and migration; to the decades around 1300, when that age was drawing to a close; and to the end of the Middle Ages, after a century and more of demographic contraction and social turbulence. At the same time, urban historians justifiably bemoan the patchiness of the surviving archives of Welsh towns, all of which were subject either to the crown or to lordships that might pass from one noble family to the next – some Welsh, most English – and not always peacefully, often with unfortunate effects on the survival of their records. The documentary remains of individual townsfolk are even more scant: their wills, the title deeds to their property, and, fewer still, merchants' and craftsmen's bills and accounts, even in the later Middle Ages and in literate households. Haverfordwest's surviving substantial collection of town deeds is a rarity, and only one lay cartulary – of the Fort family of Llanstephan – is known; however, both illustrate the integrated nature of the environment of town and countryside in which people lived. The medieval centuries in Wales were an age of invasion and military conquest, migration and settlement, administrative particularity and social integration, features which gradually created a cosmopolitan urban society, albeit one whose universally small towns developed at different paces and whose communities might differ one from another in their origins, size and character. By 1300, there were almost a hundred of these small towns, serving through their shops, crafts, markets and fairs a predominantly rural country, as was the case in most parts of contemporary Europe. In Wales, the fundamental distinctions are, first, between those towns of the south and east geographically facing the English lowlands and the Severn estuary, and, smaller in number, those in the more rugged north and west facing the seas towards Ireland and Scotland; these geographical imperatives never lost their relevance to Wales's pre-industrial urban development. A second distinction is between those towns of the east and south that were established by relatively rapid conquest and attracted migrants from England, France and the Low Countries from about 1070 onwards (Cardiff, Pembroke and Oswestry spring to mind), and those of the north and west (such as Aberystwyth and Caernarfon) which were later and more deliberately organized, with further immigrants from England and from elsewhere in Wales, in the generation after 1275. It is worth noting too that a few settlements with town-like functions seem to have existed before the Anglo-Norman and English conquests, in the vicinity of distinguished churches and peopled with residents of more local origin (such as at Bangor and Llandeilo). And, finally, a small number of towns were fostered in the twelfth century and thereafter, especially near the west and north-west coasts, by Welsh princes for whom communication with Ireland was important; these were presumably populated with Welsh and probably some Irish folk, and might even be granted charters on the English model. Such a variety of origins and of urban chronology from the eleventh century to the fourteenth could hardly fail to make the communities of Welsh towns diverse and cosmopolitan.
The study of the personal nomenclature of townsfolk is a treacherous field, but it does hint at certain social realities. William Doggerell, or William 'the Little Dog', was living in Cardiff by 1191, when the town was well established; but we do not know from what stock he came or where his forebears lived, or indeed whether he looked like a dog, behaved like a dog or sounded like a dog, yet his descriptive name suggests that he lived in an English-speaking environment. Picot was a chaplain living in Newport by 1147, soon after the town had begun to grow. He sounds French or AngloFrench; though no one can be certain of his origins, he may have been attached to the Anglo-Norman abbey at Gloucester which had been gifted to St Woolos Church in Newport, and was now ministering to townsfolk who were bilingual in English and French. Osbern, Thorkell and Leif were also prominent in early Cardiff, but did their Scandinavian names derive from Vikings or, indirectly, from Ireland or even from Normandy? The first recorded burgess of Brecon bore the English name of Harding, 'the son of a herdsman' – so he might either have been a local man described by incoming English, or an Englishman, for Harding was a common name in the Bristol area. Trade and the need for capital attracted a light scattering of Jews to towns like Cardigan and Chepstow, until their expulsion by Edward I overtook them in the last decade of the thirteenth century. Otherwise, all these, their companions and descendants, continued to live in eastern and southern towns and encouraged others to join them.
What of the Welsh folk among whom they lived? If, like many a conqueror, construction worker, castle builder and trader, the immigrants tended to be mostly younger males, they and their descendants are as likely to have married among the local populace as among their own kind, so that Welsh folk can be identified in these towns by the end of the twelfth century. Suburban development outside town walls at Carmarthen or across the bridges over the rivers beside which inland towns developed, as at Brecon and Monmouth, was a sign of expansion during the age of population growth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, presumably drawing in people from the countryside. The licensed traders who lived especially in southern towns but had no burgage or property there – the so-called chensers and burgesses 'of the wind and the street' – were surely peasants from the countryside, often hundreds of them frequenting an individual town. Before the end of the thirteenth century there were Welsh burgesses in Oswestry, including the brothers Cynwrig and Einion Foel ('the bald'), seemingly a family trait, though Cynwrig's son Richard may have had a head of hair because he preferred to be known as 'the clerk' and thereafter might have been mistaken for an Englishman by those who only knew his name.
Such social realities challenge the once commonly held belief that practically all the inhabitants of medieval Welsh towns were immigrants from far afield and that they and their lords preferred to keep it that way. This belief mainly derives from the polymath scholar Gerald of Wales. Writing in the 1190s, he claimed that the Welsh 'do not live in towns, villages or castles, but lead a solitary existence, deep in the woods'; 'they pay no attention to commerce, shipping or industry'. Gerald came from south-west Wales, not far from a clutch of coastal and lowland towns which by 1190 had Welsh-born residents alongside those of immigrant stock. He should have known better, not least because he himself by descent was part English and part Welsh; but then he had just returned from his famous journey with the archbishop of Canterbury to preach the crusade in Wales, a journey that took him to the far west and north where there were as yet few towns of the sort familiar to him in the south. Gerald, then, was myopic and partial in his view.
A century later, the comments of John Peckham, archbishop of Canterbury, have often been taken to confirm Gerald's view about the solitariness and lack of urbanity of Welsh people: Peckham took a jaundiced view of their manners and social behaviour and thought that town life could civilize them. But, then, he had spent most of his adult life as a scholar in bustling Paris before returning to Canterbury, and his recent return from a visitation of the Welsh Church, including the largest and furthest-flung dioceses of Bangor and St Davids (1284), doubtless confirmed his and Edward I's inclination to reform society by developing some towns alongside the new castles in north and west Wales comparable to those which both of them saw in the east and south – though few of these newish towns, it has to be said, developed on utterly pristine sites. Even at Caernarfon an urban settlement of Welsh folk seems to have been encouraged by the princes of Gwynedd well before King Edward began his great castle and issued a charter (1284) for the adjacent borough. Despite Edward I's ordinance that 'Welshmen were nominally forbidden to dwell or hold tenements within the liberties of the English boroughs', these northern towns had Welsh inhabitants as well as pioneer immigrants from England (and sometimes from elsewhere too) from the outset: how indeed could they survive without both? Before the end of the thirteenth century, William of Doncaster (in Yorkshire) was a merchant of Chester trading to Anglesey; he soon became a burgess of Beaumaris and by 1312 was even mayor of Flint. Among the earliest residents of Harlech were a Savoyard, Adam Beynard, whose descendants stayed, a number of English from Cheshire and the marchland, and also soon afterwards Henry of Brecon ('Breghkeynok') from south Wales; and when the town received its charter in 1325, the mayor was a Welshman, Hywel Goch.
The comments of observers are, of course, only as reliable as their experience and knowledge can make them, as the cases of Gerald of Wales and Archbishop Peckham indicate. The same might be said, fifty years on, of the monkish chronicler, Ranulf Higden, who wrote about 1340 from the vantage point of Chester. St Werburg's abbey and the town of Chester regularly encountered people from the Severn and Dee valleys, the north Wales coast and from across the mountains as far as Harlech; Ranulf observed how in his day they were beginning to adopt English lifestyles, living in towns and tilling their gardens and fields. By this stage, the size of the urban population of Wales was already past its peak and in the decades that followed would noticeably decline; yet that had the effect in some towns of attracting new immigrants, Welsh and English, to buy vacant properties and consolidate holdings. This was a process not without its tensions, which played a part in the revolt led by Owain Glyn Dwr at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, another Chester monk, writing this time about 1430, felt it apposite to repeat Ranulf 's observation and to add, tellingly, that these anglicized Welsh townsfolk sought to 'accumulate riches and they feared losses', in other words that resentments within town communities were tempered by individual opportunity and the processes of social integration – and all within two decades of the revolt's end.
Some Welsh towns admittedly withered almost to extinction in the century and a half after the Black Death. Others that prospered – and these were in all parts of a country of numerous lordships requiring administrative headquarters and the commercial paraphernalia that went with them – shed their earlier character as predominantly immigrant communities; yet in some places, such as the Edwardian boroughs of the north, those of immigrant origins or descent continued to express a rooted urban-rural dichotomy in the rhetoric of English and Welsh, especially at times of social tension. On a personal level, the use of Welsh and English aliases and Welsh surnames – even the adoption of Welsh patronymics by the descendants of immigrants – allowed individuals to find a versatile identity acceptable in what were hybrid and outgoing communities. By the end of the fourteenth century, John Owen of Kidwelly and his son were as much merchants of international standing as were Thomas Rede of Carmarthen and Bristol and his son, pursuing interests as broad as those of the Bolde family of Conwy and Lancashire. Whatever were the declared formal intentions of kings and lords, 'the English burgesses of the English borough towns' lived in a cosmopolitan environment well before this professed ideal of burgess-ship was formally abandoned by 1500.
In the fifteenth century, Welsh poets, who perambulated much of the country at large, often spoke admiringly of certain Welsh towns. Early in the century, Sion Cent, who is associated with the southern marchland, commended the busy-ness of Brecon, though its residents of hybrid descent put up stout resistance against Owain Glyn Dwr. Towards the end of the century, Gruffudd ap Dafydd ap Hywel, a Caernarfonshire poet, liked to visit Harlech, Edward I's castellated port-town on the north-western edge of Wales; he compared it with Calais, England's wool and cloth mart on the edge of north-west France, and he considered its bailiffs, who were mostly Welsh-born to judge by their names, to be 'not inferior to men of York' whom Gruffydd may have encountered.
His contemporary, Guto'r Glyn (died c.1493), from central Wales, looked eastwards – and equally admiringly – to Oswestry as the 'London of Owain's country', and the 'best town as far as Rome' where the women were sophisticated and Owain, in his latter years, could easily find the rich food and medicines he sought. Tudur Aled (died c.1525), from not too far away in Denbighshire, praised the officials, shopkeepers and trade of a town that was coming to rival Shrewsbury. And Ieuan ap Huw Cae Llwyd (fl.1455– 1505), originally from north-west Wales, spent most of his later life in the south and went so far as to dub Brecon 'the Constantinople of Wales'. The poets esteemed the urban and commercial qualities of these quite different towns, Brecon, Harlech and Oswestry – different in their histories and in their residents' origins and attitudes. If esteem turned to flattery as the poets grasped for extravagant comparitors – Calais, London, Rome, even Constantinople – it was the perceived cosmopolitan reputation of these small towns that the poets sought to convey.
The Franciscan friary at Carmarthen became the last resting place of a few of these poets, their bodies interred beside those of both country gentry and townsfolk of immigrant ancestry. In southern churches were placed tombs and effigies often carved from Somerset stone; while by the midfourteenth century, some town churches in the north were housing the tombs of leading Welsh families. When Lancaster herald visited south Wales in 1531, he observed the arms of well-to-do families of both Welsh and immigrant descent in the friaries of Carmarthen, Cardiff and Brecon and in Tenby's church; they may not always have been buried there but they were evidently regarded as committed patrons of these urban churches. Religious relics attracted pilgrims to town churches from far afield, like the famous eternal taper in St Mary's priory, Cardigan, a cell of Chertsey abbey in the Thames valley. And so the circumstances whereby colonization was overladen and replaced by social integration may be multiplied.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Urban Culture in Medieval Wales by Helen Fulton. Copyright © 2012 The Contributors. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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