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GLIMPSES OF LIFE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CARDIGANSHIRE In the seventeenth century, Cardiganshire was a predominantly rural and peasant county; animal husbandry and arable farming (and their ancillary occupations) provided the main sources of livelihood for the vast majority of the inhabitants who occupied the farms and smallholdings in the hills and lowland regions. The population was composed mainly of landlords, freeholders, tenant- farmers, farm-labourers, and rural craftsmen. But those sections of the population who occupied the coastal regions included many part-time fishermen, mariners (or seamen) and small-scale traders whose non-agricultural interests fostered a mentalite which created a socio-cultural divide vis-a-vis the agricultural hinterland. In the nineteenth century those differences were to be further compounded by the expansion of trade and commerce, and religious and denominational differences.2 Moreover, occupiers of land who were neither landlords, freeholders or copyholders were tenant-farmers whose tenure was defined by the nature of their leases which were often manipulated to the advantage or convenience of the landlord. The agricultural labourers formed a distinct social class, for they had no legal title to the land and consequently their only means of securing a livelihood was by selling their labour to those who required it in return for wages (and certain perquisites if they were fortunate!) Although the owners of land (and those who controlled access to it) dominated the economic, social, and political scene, numerically they formed but a small percentage of the total population. Yet their wealth and influence emanated from the labours of the nameless majority about whose life we know so little. The scatter of'country houses', with their interior furnishings (often described in romantic and elitist language), represented the landscape evidence of the inequalities that characterised Cardiganshire society in the seventeenth century, as indeed they did in later centuries perhaps