Welsh Journals

DAMPNIFIED VILLAGERS: TAXATION IN WALES DURING THE FIRST CIVIL WAR1 GRUFFYDD AP STEPHEN, his wife and six children of St Harmon in west Radnorshire may have been unaware of the subtleties of military control in the principality during the First Civil War, but they may be representative of the real losers in the battle for central Wales in 1644-5. Gruffydd was a 'poor badger' (a small trader in grain) who, to support his family, depended on small-scale sales of oats carried by his two horses (one red and one black) to and from market, having 'noe meenes to maynteiyne them but by what he could gett by loading of ye said two horses from one m[ar]kett to another'. In 1644, during the apparent anarchy that followed the collapse of royalist control, the two horses and the twenty-one bushells of oats in his barn were 'commandeered' by soldiers under Captain Felwell. This represented the end of the family's economic independence and probably threw the family on to already overstretched charity.2 Whilst A. H. Dodd, Norman Tucker, Norman Dore and, more recently, Ronald Hutton have examined the military history of the civil wars in Wales, only S. A. Raymond and Professor Hutton have turned our attention to the financial aspects of the civil war. It is not difficult to see why. Raymond drew on the royalist Glamorgan commission of array's 'Book of Orders and Results'. This order book and the Worcestershire commissioners of array's papers form the most significant collection of such papers for Wales and England. Most of the rest of the material was destroyed at the end of the war or has been lost since. Whilst in Ireland most of the papers of the Catholic Confederation and its opponents' war efforts were destroyed in two 1 This article is based on the material used in The Civil Wars of Britain and Ireland, 1638-1651 (Oxford, 1996) and in a forthcoming work on personal ex- periences of the wars in Britain and Ireland. 2 Public Record Office (henceforth PRO), SP28/251.