A ground-breaking study of the lawbooks which were created in the changing social and political climate of post-conquest Wales.

This is a major contribution to the study of medieval Wales by a group of outstanding British historians, writing in honour of one of Wales's most distinguished scholars and the biographer of Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The essays reflect exciting trends in the study of both Wales and the Middle Ages, including church building, chronicle writing, the comparative history of the law, valuable reassessments of town life and the implications of the Edwardian conquest of Wales.

A study of Wales's legal history from its beginnings to the present day, including an assessment of the importance of Roman and English influences to Wales's legal social identity. New edition.

An original study without rival. Comprehensive in its coverage of government and society. Appreciative reviews of the original edition and shown to be valuable to a range of scholars, writers and others.

Examines the role of Welsh soldiers in English armies, from the conquests under Edward I through to the Battle of Agincourt.

A frontier has been called "an area inviting entrance." For the Norman invaders of England the Welsh peninsula was such an area. Fertile forested lowlands invited agricultural occupation; a fierce but primitive and disunited native population was scarcely a formidable deterrent. In The Normans in South Wales, Lynn H. Nelson provides a comprehensive history of the century during which the Normans accomplished this occupation. Skillfully he combines facts and statistics gleaned from a variety of original sources—The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Domesday Book, Church records, charters of the kings and of the marcher lords, and more imaginative literary sources such as the chanson de geste and the frontier epic—to give a vivid picture of a century of strife. He describes the fluctuating conflict between Norman invaders in the lowlands and Welsh tribesmen in the highlands; the hard struggle of medieval frontiersmen to take from the new land a profit commensurate with their labors; the development of a Cambro-Norman society distinct and quite different from the Anglo-Norman culture which engendered it; and the attempt of the frontiersman to prevent the Anglo-Norman authorities from taking control of the lands he had won. The turbulent Welsh tribes provided an ever present harassment along the frontier, and Nelson begins his presentation with an account of the failure of the Saxons to control them. He examines the methods adopted by William the Conqueror to cope with the problem—the creation of the great marcher lordships and the subsequent problems in controlling these lordships—and the weakness of some Anglo-Norman kings and the strength of others. By 1171 the conquest of the Welsh frontier was complete; but as Nelson points out, this conquest was strangely limited. The frontier, which extended throughout the lowlands of Wales, stopped at the 600-foot contour line in the mountains. In his final chapter Nelson speculates upon the curious fact that large areas of seemingly inviting moorlands lying above this line remained closed to the Cambro-Norman, and his speculations lead him to some interesting inferences about the nature of the frontier's influence upon the civilization which moves in to occupy it.

The sixteen papers in this volume investigate the links between law and society during Late Antiquity (260-640 CE). On the one hand, they consider how social changes such as the barbarian settlement and the rise of the Christian church resulted in the creation of new sources of legal authority, such as local and 'vulgar' law, barbarian law codes, and canon law. On the other, they investigate the interrelationship between legal innovations and social change, for the very process of creating new law and new authority either resulted from or caused changes in the society in which it occurred. The studies in this volume discuss interactions between legal theory and practice, the Greek east and the Roman west, secular and ecclesiastical, Roman and barbarian, male and female, and Christian and non-Christian (including pagans, Jews, and Zoroastrians).