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KINSHIP AND FORCED MARRIAGE IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WALES CASES of disputed marriages in early modern Wales have certain peculiar characteristics dictated by the nature of Welsh society and the economy. In the first place, most of the contestants were linked together by infinitely complex ties of kinship, so that most disputed marriages involved internal feuds either between different branches of a single extended family or between members of an almost endless cousinhood by which everyone was somehow linked to everybody else. The complexities of cousinhood-further confused by marriages between first or second cousins, or step-nieces and uncles by marriage, as well as multiple remarriages-were such that even the natives were vague about them. Thus, the bride in an alleged marriage referred vaguely to the groom as 'something akin' to his manager, 'as I believe'. This confusion was not helped by the fact that all these people's surnames were drawn from a very limited number of patronymics. Secondly, the protagonists were all desperately poor, and their motives, with one or two exceptions, in consequence appear more undisguisedly and single-mindedly mercenary than they do at first glance among English litigants of the same class in the eighteenth century. Thirdly, Welsh litigants were always resistant to intervention by English courts, many of them protecting themselves as far as possible from appeals to London by a smoke- screen of perjury, even more barefaced than that usually thrown up by English cases of marital litigation. The events described in this story took place in the hamlet of Llandyfodwg, in the hills overlooking the vale of Glamorgan to the south-west. It possessed a church, served at the end of the seventeenth century by a drunken and timid vicar, but there was no gentleman or lord of the manor to manage its affairs. Many participants lived close by at the village of Coychurch, which was on the main road leading to the market town of Bridgend, two or three miles away. So far as can be gathered, it was a society of impoverished small peasants, each owning or leasing a few acres of land. Despite this almost universal poverty, being really poor was regarded as a despicable condition. One man was described as 'no very reputable person as to his wealth, but sells apples up and down in markets and fairs'; another as 'a very mean person of no fortune in the world'. That it was a bilingual society is shown by the fact that one of the residents, Rice ap Evan, described his occupation as 'translator', and that at the marriage at issue the service was