Welsh Journals

THE RURAL LANDSCAPE OF THE WELSH BORDERLAND: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY. By D. Sylvester. Macmillan, 1969. Pp. 548. £ 8. This is an important study. Miss Sylvester has taken those English and Welsh shires which form 'the border': Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, western Gloucestershire, Flint, Denbigh, Montgomery, Radnor and Brecon, with that curious historical anomaly, Monmouth- shire. She has examined the patterns of rural settlement which can be discerned in this area, and the factors of geography and history which have produced them. The first ten chapters are a survey for the whole area, while the remaining nine chapters are fundamental local studies on which the generalisations are based. A border area is not easy to define. Offa's Dyke provides an ancient, but in no sense satisfactory, line of demarcation. The border was a 'contact' area, and this 'contact' could extend widely on both sides of any artificial boundary. A fluctuating language frontier, which has left its mark most obviously in the place- names of the border, has created some curious features. In the sixteenth century, for example, the bishop of Hereford was required to provide a Welsh bible in churches in his diocese where Welsh was used, and in the following century Welsh was commonly heard in Hereford itself. Ecclesiastical boundaries and patterns of village settlement provide different indices of change along the border. 'The major riddle of Borderland settlement', as Miss Sylvester puts it, 'is the degree and character of the influence of Celt, English and Anglo-Norman and the extent to which the four hundred-odd years since the Union of England and Wales have applied a similar colour wash over the whole'. She defines three major phases the Mercian settlement of what were to become the English border shires, the years following the Norman Conquest, and the years following the Act of Union. If one single factor stands out, it is the impact of the Normans on the settlement pattern of Wales and the border. Motte and bailey castles scattered all across the border and the marches provided focal points for defence and settlement. Some of them, like Weobley or Clun, provided a centre for a considerable nucleated unit. Only the impact of industrialisation on south Wales can compare with that of the Norman invaders, but the full effects of industrial development lie outside Miss Sylvester's terms of reference. The least convincing section of this book is the attempt to unravel the ecclesiastical pattern of the border, which presents problems difficult alike to define and to resolve. There are few obvious slips, but it is surprising to find Augustine as archbishop of Canterbury from 597 to 668, with Theodore of Tarsus as his successor (p. 172). The second earl of Hereford forfeited his earldom in 1075, but he did not die in that year (p. 111). Geoffrey Barraclough's Early Charters of the Earldom of Chester and his paper on The Earldom and County Palatine of Chester do not appear in the bibliography, nor does T. C. Mendenhall's standard