English noble appointed to protect the border with Wales
A
marcher lord
(
Welsh
:
barwn y mers
) was a noble appointed by the
king of England
to guard the border (known as the
Welsh Marches
) between England and Wales.
A marcher lord was the English equivalent of a
margrave
(in the
Holy Roman Empire
) or a
marquis
(in France) before the introduction of the title of "marquess" in Britain; no marcher lord ever bore the rank of marquess. In this context, the word
march
means a border region or frontier, and is
cognate
with the verb "to march", both ultimately derived from
Proto-Indo-European
*mereg-
, "edge" or "boundary".
The greatest marcher lords included the earls of
Chester
,
Gloucester
,
Hereford
,
Pembroke
and
Shrewsbury
(see also
English earls of March
).
County palatine
[
edit
]
Some strong earldoms along the Welsh border were granted the privileged status of
county palatine
shortly after the
Norman Conquest
, but only that based on
Chester
survived for a long period.
The term particularly applies to
Anglo-Norman
lords in Wales, who had complete jurisdiction over their subjects, without recourse to the king of England. The king had jurisdiction only in
treason
cases, though the lords each bore personal allegiance to the king as feudal subjects.
Formation of the Welsh March
[
edit
]
The Welsh Marches contain Britain's densest concentration of
motte-and-bailey
castles
. After the
Norman Conquest
,
William the Conqueror
set out to
subdue
the
Welsh
, a process that took well over two centuries, and was never permanently effective. During those generations the Marches were a frontier society in every sense, and a stamp was set on the region that lasted into the time of the Industrial Revolution. Amid violence and dangers, a chronic lack of manpower afforded opportunities for the intrepid,
[
clarification needed
]
and the Marcher Lords encouraged immigration from all the
Norman-Angevin realms
, and encouraged trade from their "fair haven" ports like
Cardiff
. At the top of this culturally diverse, intensely
feudalised
and local society, the Marcher barons combined the authority of
feudal baron
and vassal of the King among their Normans, and of supplanting the traditional
tywysog
among their conquered Welsh.
[1]
Marcher powers
[
edit
]
The
Anglo-Norman
lordships in this area were distinct in several ways: they were geographically compact and jurisdictionally separate one from another, and they had special privileges which separated them from the usual English lordships. Royal writ did not work in the Marches: Marcher lords ruled their lands by their own law—
sicut regale
("like a king") as Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester, stated,
[1]
whereas in England fief-holders were directly accountable to the king. Marcher lords could build castles, a jealously guarded and easily revoked Royal privilege in England. Marcher lords administered laws, waged war, established
market towns
, and maintained their own
chanceries
that kept their records (which have been completely lost). They had their own deputies, or
sheriffs
. Sitting in their own courts they had jurisdiction over all cases at law save high treason. "They could establish forests and forest laws, declare and wage war, establish boroughs, and grant extensive charters of
liberties
. They could confiscate the estates of traitors and felons, and regrant these at will. They could establish and preside over their own petty parliaments and county courts. Finally, they could claim any and every feudal due, aid, grant, and relief",
[2]
although they did not mint coins. Their one insecurity, if they did not take up arms against the king, was of dying without a legitimate heir, whereupon the title reverted to the Crown in
escheat
.
Welsh law
was frequently used in the Marches in preference to English law, and there would sometimes be a dispute as to which code should be used to decide a particular case.
Feudal social structures, which were never fully established in England, took root in the Marches, which was not legally part of the realm of England. The traditional view has been that the Norman monarchy granted these outright. A revisionist view is that such rights were more common in the 11th century throughout the Conquest, but were largely suppressed in England, and survived in the Marches. Settlement was encouraged: knights were granted their own lands, which they held in feudal service to the Norman lords. Settlement was also encouraged in towns that were given market privileges, under the protection of a Norman
keep
. Peasants came to Wales in large numbers:
Henry I
encouraged
Bretons
,
Flemings
,
Normans
, and English settlers to move into the south of Wales.
The tendencies of innovations in the
Plantagenet
monarchy were towards a centralised bureaucracy and judiciary, with the gradual elimination of localisms. In the Marches of Wales these processes towards a "high medieval" authority were staunchly resisted. Protests of the border lords surviving in the Royal records throw some light upon the nature and extent of the privileges whose normal operation has left no record.
On the local side, the able-bodied population was more directly essential to the local Lord and was able to extract from him carefully defined and highly local liberties. A point of friction was in the Lords' funded churches where they appointed churchmen to
livings
held tightly under hierarchic control in the manner that had developed in
Normandy
, where a highly organised church structure was well in the hands of the duke. The Welsh church, on the Celtic plan, closely connected with clan loyalties, brooked little authoritarian influence.
The Marcher lords were progressively tied to the English kings by the grants of lands and lordships in England, where control was stricter, and where many marcher lords spent most of their time, and through the English kings' dynastic alliances with the great magnates. It was less easy to work in the opposite way, and establish a position among the hereditary marcher families, as
Hugh Le Despenser
discovered. He began by exchanging estates he held in England and by obtaining grants in the Welsh Marches from the king. He even obtained the Isle of
Lundy
. When the last male heir of the de Braose family died, Despenser was able to obtain the de Braose lands around Swansea. In 1321 the Marcher lords threatened to start a civil war and it was agreed that a parliament should be called to settle the matter.
Intermarriage with the Welsh
[
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]
While fierce hostility between the Marcher lords and the Welsh was a fact of life, nevertheless, much intermarriage occurred between the Norman-descended barons and princely Welsh families, (often as a means of cementing a local agreement or alliance). The
Mortimers
,
de Braoses
,
de Lacys
,
Grey de Ruthyns
,
Talbots
, and the
Le Strange
families eventually acquired much Welsh blood through politically advantageous marriages with the Welsh nobility.
Roger Mortimer, 1st Baron Mortimer
(1231?1282) was a son of
Gwladys Ddu
, daughter of
Llewelyn the Great
of
Gwynedd
.
Matilda de Braose
, a granddaughter of
William de Braose, 4th Lord of Bramber
, married a Welsh prince. He was Rhys Mechyll, Prince of
Deheubarth
. Their daughter Gwenllian married Gilbert Talbot, progenitor of the earls of
Shrewsbury
. William de Braose was himself a descendant of Nesta verch Osborne of Wales through his mother
Bertha of Hereford
. Another member of the de Braose family, Isabella, daughter of
Gwilym Ddu
or
Black William
and
Eva Marshal
married Prince
Dafydd ap Llywelyn
, whose mother
Joan
was an illegitimate daughter of King
John of England
.
[
citation needed
]
Queen
Anne Boleyn
descended directly from
Gruffydd II ap Madog, Lord of Dinas Bran
through his daughter, Angharad who married William Le Boteler of
Wem
, Shropshire.
End of Marcher powers
[
edit
]
By the 16th century, many lordships had passed into the hands of the crown, which governed its lordships through the traditional institutions. The crown was also directly responsible for the government of the
Principality of Wales
, which had its own institutions and was (like England) divided into counties. The jurisdiction of the remaining marcher lords was thus an anomaly. This was abolished by the
Laws in Wales Acts 1535?1542
(also known as the Acts of Union), which organised the Marches of Wales into counties, adding some lordships to adjoining English counties. It also gave statutory recognition to the
Council of Wales and the Marches
(based at
Ludlow
), responsible for oversight of the area.
Later claims
[
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]
In 1563,
Elizabeth I
granted the former Marcher
Lordship of Denbigh
to her favourite
Robert Dudley
, later the earl of Leicester.
[3]
The grant claimed that Denbigh was given to him,
- "in as large and ample a manner...as was used when it was a lordship marcher with as large wardes as council learned could devise."
[3]
Although the Laws in Wales Acts had not been modified ? and the claim to have the same rights as a Marcher lordship could not therefore be legally possible ? Leicester had such political power that he was able to make this a reality in practice.
[3]
Early in the 21st century, businessman
Mark Roberts
styled himself lord marcher of
Trellick
and purported to acquire the title of
Lord Marcher of St. David's
from the
University of Wales
, seeking to assert various associated economic rights including title in half the coastline of
Pembrokeshire
. Roberts contended that the
Bishops of St David's
were never themselves conquered and retained their ancient temporal possessions. The last Welsh bishop had died in 1115 but the ensuing
Norman
bishops acquired the ancient jurisdictional rights by use and eventually by a distinct
royal charter
. Roberts claimed to be a
corporation sole
in succession to the bishops and to have the status of a
rajah
and effective
state immunity
. However, in May 2008, the
High Court
held that the
Laws in Wales Act 1535
had abolished the
jurisdictional
franchise
of Marcher Lord entirely and that Roberts had no such status.
[4]
[5]
List of Marcher lordships
[
edit
]
Marcher lordships in the
Welsh Marches
and the successor shires
[6]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
Nelson
- ^
Nelson
, ch. 8
- ^
a
b
c
Adams, Simon (2002).
Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics
. p. 295.
ISBN
978-0719053252
. Retrieved
7 July
2012
.
- ^
Frank Hinks (4 September 2008).
"To the manor bought"
.
Legal Week
. Archived from
the original
on 18 November 2008
. Retrieved
5 September
2008
.
- ^
Crown Estates Commissioners -v- Roberts & another (2008)
- ^
Max Lieberman,
The March of Wales, 1067-1300: a borderland of medieval Britain
, University of Wales Press, 2008,
ISBN
978-0-7083-2115-7
- ^
P. Brown, P. King, and P. Remfry, 'Whittington Castle: The marcher fortress of the Fitz Warin family',
Shropshire Archaeology and History
LXXIX (2004), 106?127.
Bibliography
[
edit
]
- Davies, Robert Rees, Sir,
Lordship and society in the March of Wales, 1282?1400
(Oxford University Press, 1978.
- Davies, Robert Rees, Sir,
The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063?1415
(Oxford University Press, 2000)
- Nelson, Lynn H. (1966).
The Normans in South Wales, 1070?1171
. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.
- Reeves, A. C.,
The Marcher Lords
(Dyfed: Christopher Davies), 1983.