Welsh Marches

The Welsh Marches are a landscape along the border between England and Wales. The concept emerged in the Middle Ages, when the Kingdom of England spread to Wales and can be translated as Welsh brands.

Today is known - unofficially - with Welsh Marches, the counties along the border with Wales, especially on the English side. It involves Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire (in England) and Monmouthshire ( in Wales). The western half of Gloucestershire (England ) and Flintshire and Wrexham (Wales ) are sometimes added.

History

In European history marks the border regions (see Grenzmark ) between centers of power. In English history, the Welsh Marches refer to the borderland between England and Wales, the Scottish Marches to the border country between England and Scotland. The area was administered by the Marcher Lords, some of which the title of Earl of March ( Markgraf ) contributed, it gave both in England and in Scotland.

The Welsh Marches lie between the Welsh mountains and the river valleys of England. The Romans built forts in Chester ( castra ), Gloucester and Caerleon, a chain of market towns with garrisons defined the border country, like Offa's dyke built by King Offa of Mercia end of the 8th century frontier: in the Welsh Marches is the UK's largest concentration of moths.

After the Norman Conquest of England William the Conqueror began with the subjugation of the Welsh, a process that lasted a century and was not permanently promoted. Since that time the population of the Mark formed a frontier society in every sense, a stamp, which was the region pushed up to the Industrial Revolution.

The Anglo-Norman lords of the area differed in many respects from the usual English gentlemen: they were geographically compact, independent in the case law, and had special privileges. Royal Decrees were not in the Mark: The Marcher Lords ruled in their own right - sicut regale, like a king, turned Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester, solid ( Nelson 1966), while the holders of fiefs were the king directly accountable in England. The Marcher Lords were allowed to build castles, an otherwise jealously guarded privilege of the king, they could administer laws, wage wars, permit markets, as well as maintain their own offices with their own archives that have gone but completely lost. They had their own deputies or sheriffs, judges were in all cases except treason, but impressed itself no coins. Your only risk was - next to a rebellion against the king - their demise without legitimate heir to the reversion of the title to the crown.

Feudalism, which never completely prevailed in England, summed up in the Mark foot. The traditional view is that the Norman monarchy supported this, a more recent view is that this law in the 11th century was a common law, which was suppressed after the Norman invasion and has only survived in the marrow. People have been moved as if to leave the country, Knight got own country with feudal obligations to their Norman lord over. The cities were populated, they got market rights under the protection of a Norman castle. Farmers went in large numbers to Wales, King Henry I took them out of Brittany, Flanders, Normandy and England, in order to settle in South Wales.

The monarchy of the Plantagenet aimed at a centralized bureaucracy and legal violence, were eliminated with the local peculiarities - in the Welshman Mark these developments not prevailed. Protests of the border nobility have been preserved in the royal records and throw a revealing light on the nature and extent of their privileges.

At the local level, the local lord was significantly more dependent on the labor and able-bodied population than in the rest of England, so this was thus also able to obtain well defined by him freedoms.

The Marcher Lords were, however, increasingly, on the other hand, bound by the English kings on the one hand by granting land and lordships in England, where the control was strict dynastic alliances with large families. As Hugh le Despenser discovered it was easier to build up its own position, the more land you had in the brands: he exchanged estates in England against those in the Welshman Mark, and as the last male heir of the Braose family died, succeeded him, whose lands to get Swansea.

Edward I had conquered Wales in 1283 officially. Nevertheless, the Marcher Lords ruled for about 200 years later, in the time of Henry VIII, the two-thirds of Wales, not belonging to the Principality of Wales. Only from 1535 to 1542 this was abolished with the laws for the integration of Wales.

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