Welsh Journals

SETTLEMENT PATTERNS IN RURAL FLINTSHIRE (EXCLUDING MAELOR SAESNEG)* Flintshire is a march land and this is the key to many aspects of its life and culture and to its history from the time of the Romans. The shelving plateaus of Flintshire rise westward to the peaks of the Qwydian Range, drop gently east to the lowlands of Cheshire, and offer an environment intermediate between the wild mountain fastnesses of Gwynedd and the mild fertility of the Cheshire plain. The course of its history throughout the Christian era has served to emphasize its border character. Here in turn have come Roman, Anglian, Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman to intrude on and alter the once universal Celtic culture, and after centuries of warfare, the statutes of 1536 and 1542 set the final stamp on this marginal land by incorporating Englefield, Hope and Maelor Saesneg with the marcher lordships of Hawarden and Mold to form the most easterly of the north Welsh counties. It followed that in relation to the problems of rural settlement, this area was likely to offer a field of exceptional interest and after making studies of settlement patterns in Shropshire, Cheshire, Anglesey and parts of northern England,1 Flintshire was clearly the field of work of most immediate interest. When, with these Flint- shire researches already launched, your Society did me the honour to ask me to read a paper, I was only too glad of the opportunity to press on with the fascinating task of interpreting some of the avail- able material. Further, I am a Cheshire woman with a deep love of the Principality, who believes that a common Celtic ancestry and a common culture link the peoples on either side of the lowland Dee, and as Professor Tout said to this Society as far back as 1911 Cheshire and Flintshire records form a single inseparable series."2 As he further demonstrated, the political shape of Flint- shire is to some degree a historical accident and although Flint- shire apart from Maelor Saesneg has more geographical unity than Tout was perhaps prepared to recognize as a historian, it is evident at a glance that the present eastern boundary cuts across the natural division of the Dee plains and that there is no real division between the settlements and fields of south-west Cheshire and east Flint- shire. This article is based upon a paper read to the Society at a meeting in the Town Hall, Holywell; on November 29th, 1952. Chairman, Mr. J. Kerfoot Roberts. 1. Sylvester, Dorothy: 'Rural Settlement in Shropshire,' Shrops. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc., 1928; 'Rural Settlement in Domesday Shropshire,* Sociological Review, 1933; 'Domesday Cheshire' (unpublished paper prepared for British Association, 1939) Rural Settlement in Anglesey,' Anglesey Am. Soc., 1949; f Rural Settlement in Cheshire,' Tram. Hist. Soc. Lams and Cheshire, 1 9 The Northern Village—Evolution or Demy (in Studies in Architectural History, ed. W. A. Singleton, 1954). 2. Tout, T. F. Flintshire Its History and Its Records Flints, Hist. Soc., 191 1, p. 36.