Welsh Journals

GENTLEMEN AND REBELS IN LATER MEDIAEVAL CARDIGANSHIRE LATER Mediaeval Cardiganshire sounds like a backwater. It is not my intention to prove otherwise-certainly not by releasing through it a torrent of great causes or great men. Rather will I regard it as a county as much in the main-stream of Welsh history in the later Middle Ages as any other part of the country, and with as valid a comment to make on Welsh society. I shall be concerned, firstly, with those gentlemen who, in time of peace or rebellion, were recognised as the leaders of society and the moulders of opinion in the county-whether their leadership was based on ancient lineage, social pre-eminence, economic power, or political authority. They form an amorphous group of infinite grad- ations, for, according to the late Professor Jones Pierce, Wales was a land where most peasants considered themselves to be gentlefolk'.1 I shall be concerned with the more outstanding of these gentlemen, those who were set apart by their dominant role in local government, their position as important landowners, or sometimes by the lineages proclaimed by their publicists and poets. This is my definition of a gentleman-a working, practical, almost instinctive definition. It is not an exact one involving a precise degree of wealth expressed in terms of £ s. d., because this is not calculable for mediaeval Wales! nor is it a definition arrived at by studying how men referred to them- selves in the later Middle Ages, for they used 'gentleman', 'esquire', armiger and uchelwr quite indiscriminately and with a blissful lack of precision. Secondly, I shall be concerned with those Cardigan- shire men who led revolt and rebellion against the Crown in the later Middle Ages, for it was the English king who, by 1283, had become lord of the entire county. These I have called rebels. Both the leading gentlemen of the county and its leading rebels were frequently one and the same in the later Middle Ages, for rebellion against English rule could only be successful if it attracted those who could compel or persuade their neighbours. And on the other side of the coin, there were always some among the socially influential who chose to side with royal authority and oppose rebellion, even if other members of their class were among the rebels. For these two reasons, it is worth investigating the relationship between the upper crust of society and the leaders of revolt. It is a theme central to an under- standing of the process of adaptation of Cardiganshire and its people to conquest and government by the long-hated enemy. On the eve of the final series of wars between Prince Llywelyn and King Edward I, in 1277, Cardiganshire society was dominated by the