Welsh Journals

JOURNAL OF THE CEREDIGION ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY CYFROL/VOLUME XI 1990 RHIFYN/NUMBER 2 THE MAKING OF MEDIEVAL CARDIGAN* More questions can be asked about the early history of Cardigan than are posed in an average day's diet of television quiz shows. But, unlike the latter, most of the questions about medieval Cardigan cannot be answered with certainty at least not in the present state of our knowledge. This is an extraordinary state of affairs, because Cardigan is the oldest recognisable town with a continuous history in Ceredigion, and it was the largest until Aberystwyth overhauled it after 1800. It was the county town of Cardiganshire during the Middle Ages and for long after, and from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century it was one of only three Welsh towns- Caernarfon and Carmarthen were the others-which served as the headquarters of the royal principality of Wales. Neither Cardigan and its inhabitants nor Wales's historians have done much to tackle the essential questions about medieval Cardigan. One must immediately say that there has been a small band of honourable exceptions. The towering figure of Sir John Edward Lloyd, professor of history at the University College of North Wales, Bangor- the lamplighter of all the centuries', as Saunders Lewis described him-gave some attention to the town in his all-too-brief Story of Ceredigion from 400 to 1277, published in 1937.1 Whereas Lloyd exploited mainly what the medieval Welsh and English chronicles had to say, Dr. 1. J. Sanders, of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in the 1950s ransacked many of the official royal archives to deepen our knowledge of Cardigan between 1277 and the sixteenth century, concentrating particularly on its *This is an amended text of a lecture to the Society, delivered at Cardigan on 22 October 1988. I am grateful to Kevin Mann, Terry James of the Dyfed Archaeological Trust, and especially to Canon James Cunnane for a number of items of information.