Battle Royal by Hugh Bicheno

Author:Hugh Bicheno [Bicheno, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781859643
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2016-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

*1 When Calais was finally lost on 1 January 1558 it fell to a night attack that began with the capture of the sluice gates – by that time strongly fortified – while the garrison was drunkenly celebrating the New Year.

XVI

* * *

Here be Dragons

Wales might well have been marked ‘here be dragons’ on the Anglo-Norman mental map. Barring rims of settlement along the north and south coasts, it was a mountainous, wooded territory, thinly inhabited by miserably poor and deeply resentful peasants. It preserved its own legal system, with feudalism still the dominant form of land tenure, and of course its own language, thanks to which a separate Welsh identity survives to this day. It is only through translations of the oral history contained in bardic poems that English speakers can even glimpse what was going on in the hearts and minds of the conquered people.

The border marked on Map 12 was not legally defined until the mid-1500s, by the same series of acts that made Wales part of England, granting it representation in Parliament for the first time, but abolishing its legal system and banning the Welsh language from any official role or status. ‘The March’ occupied most of what we now call Wales. During the prolonged Norman conquest from 1067 to 1283 it was dotted with a profusion of motte and bailey timber castles. These were gradually replaced by a smaller but still large number of masonry castles and walled towns, with the heaviest concentration in the south.

Monmouth and Glamorgan corresponded approximately to the old kingdoms of Gwent and Morgannwg. The royal counties of Cardigan, Pembroke and Carmarthen had once been the kingdom of Deheubarth, while the borders of the Principality (Anglesey, Caernarvon and Merioneth), along with Denbigh and royal Flint, were those of Gwynedd, the last independent Welsh kingdom. Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire were English, but Welsh gentry predominated along the borders. Many adopted English surnames only during our period, under the pressure of penal laws enacted by Henry IV.

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