Welsh Journals

THE LAW OF THE MARCH 'AND if a dispute arises it shall be settled for tenements in England according to the law of England, for tenements in Wales according to the law of Wales, for tenements in the March according to the law of the March.' Thus declares clause 56 of Magna Carta; and thereby the law of the march is launched on its official career in the most august and authoritative of contexts. Unfortunately, Magna Carta is not a document renowned for its specific definition of terms, and in this instance we are given no clue either as to the extent of the march or as to the content of its law; but at least we are told that in the eyes of the political draftsmen of 1215 the law of the march was a recognizable system of law, distinct from the law of England on the one hand and the law of Wales on the other. Beyond this self-evident axiom of 1215 the official documents of the middle ages rarely take us. References to the law of the march, or more commonly to the laws and customs of the march, are, it is true, liberally scattered through the records of late medieval Wales. The treaty of Aber- conway of 1277, for example, solemnly upholds the definition of Magna Carta by ordaining that the laws of the march should operate in cases arising in the march, and the laws of Wales in those commencing in Wales.1 The distinction between these two laws was clearly regarded as an obvious datum of the political situation. And so equally was the distinction between the law of the march and the law of England, for in 1291 a defendant in the court of King's Bench could claim, on the unimpugnable basis of Magna Carta, that he ought to be tried by the custom of the marches rather than by the common law of England.2 In the reign of Edward II the separate identity of the law of the march became an issue of major importance, for it was behind it that the lords of the southern march lined up in their struggle against the territorial ambitions of the younger Despenser in Wales.3 Nor was the law of the march merely invoked as a quasi-constitutional device whenever the independence of the marches was threatened; it was equally likely to figure, almost casually, in the legal records of the time. John of Gaunt, for example, 1 Littere Wallie, ed. J. G. Edwards (1940), p. 120. Select Cases in the Court of King's Bench, II, ed. G. O. Sayles (Selden Society. 1938). 58 (Ralph de Tony of Elfael). s Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. N. Denholm-Young (1958), p. 108 (three references). The case has been recently discussed from a legalistic angle in J. M. W. Bean, The Decline of English Feudalism, 1215-1540 (1968). pp. 98-100.