Welsh Journals

signs were there for all to read, and the downward curve from complete author- itarianism on the estates of rural Britain was on course. Land purchase which became common in Flintshire after the Statute of Rhuddlan, was further accelerated with the accession of the Tudors, and particularly after 1542.1 Yet many elements in the former picture remained, whether the estate was old or new. The big house was still set apart, surrounded by its park and gardens. Its owner was in many cases still the patron of the local living; many of the clergy in rural parishes were cadets of the squire's family. The squire still had local power and influence, but only as far as the law of the land allowed, since it applied equally to all. In a study of this theme related to Cheshire, there emerged a remarkable degree of continuity of site and occupation, and of other characteristics of the manors.2 Two areas were more liable to change than others. These were the north-east of the county where many of the ancient estates had been purchased by rising industrialists; and the Dee valley where a number had slipped back into the role of good farms and farmhouses, the element Hall or Court in the name the only self- evident indication of their former status. How typical was the Cheshire case? Might it be paralleled in Flintshire, of which the history had been so different? What claims could be made for continuity? Wars and invasions and the strictures of a greater proportion of upland must all have been influential. Yet so close have been Flintshire's links with Cheshire that, despite its troubled history, such a study promised interesting, not to say challenging, results. As a landscape feature, the landed estate wields a disproportionate influence in both local and national terms, and especially in local and national government. Land ownership has always been attractive and influential in social, political, and agricultural circles. Fertile land is a most desirable foundation of personal pros- perity, and should it be found to have underlying mineral wealth as is the case in many parts of Flintshire, still greater riches may accrue. Its value never flags and never will. Long and basically Celtic, Flintshire has roots deep in the past, from the evidences of Mousterian Man probably of Neanderthal type found in a cave at Pontnewydd above the Clwyd valley; the Mesolithic and successive prehistoric cultures traced at Rhuddlan; and the far more numerous Early Iron Age sites, which housed the Celtic forerunners of the Welsh speakers of today.3 But it is with the excavations of Early Iron Age sites that more firmly based inferences have been drawn with regard to local tribal groups. One of the most outstanding of such excavations of Early Iron Age hill-forts in Wales was that which exposed so 1 For an account of the rise of the freehold estate in Wales, see T. Jones Pierce, 'Landlords in Wales', chapter VI, in Joan Thirsk (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV (1967), 357-81. 2 Dorothy Sylvester, 'The Manor and the Cheshire Landscape', Trans. Lancs. and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, lxx, 1960, 1-15. 3 John Manley and Elizabeth Healey, 'Excavations at Hendre, Rhuddlan, the Mesolithic Finds' in Arch. Camb., CXXXI, 1982, 18-48.