Welsh Journals

HENRY, EARL OF PEMBROKE'S SURVEY OF THE MANOR OF MYNYDDISLWYN IN 1570 IN 1570 Henry, second Earl of Pembroke, inherited the massive estate his father William Herbert had built up. The customary estate survey was more than usually necessary. Henry's exuberant father younger son of a Herefordshire backwoodsman, brother-in-law of Henry VIII, Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales had played the property market as a hobby, buying, selling and exchanging land with the Crown and private owners until even he lost track of what was his. He was even prepared to act as an estate agent for favoured clients, buying and exchanging land on their behalf from the Crown. His main Welsh purchases were Marcher lordships and manors, but he also dabbled in monastic estates and insignificant scraps of chantry land. In 1560 he bought two of Llantarnam Abbey's remaining Monmouthshire granges, Wentsland and Bryngwyn and Mynyddislwyn or Aber-carn. He sold Wentsland and Bryngwyn the following year to William Morgan, who had bought most of Llantarnam's other estates and lived on the site of the abbey. Morgan would almost certainly have wanted Mynyddislwyn as well, but it fitted too neatly with Herbert's other estates in the area. The grange had been carved out of a tract of upland which was to become the lordship of Machen: this now belonged to Herbert, and the purchase of Mynyddislwyn enabled him to reunite the two portions of the lordship. Thus it was that the manor or grange of Mynyddislwyn was surveyed in detail in the 1570 survey of the second earl's estates. It is the most detailed survey of any of Llantarnam's properties, and one of the most useful for any Cistercian estate in south Wales. The whole survey deserves to be better known. It has escaped the attention of a number of historians because, although it is in the National Library of Wales, it is not where one would expect to find it. The Glamorgan part of the survey is where it should be, in the Bute MSS,2 and was edited by Sarah Halewood for her Local History MA thesis at Cardiff in 1990. However, the Monmouthshire part of the survey, which includes the lordships of Newport, Usk, Caerleon and Trelech as well as the former monastic property, survives only in a working copy made for the purposes of a later survey in 1583 and further annotated later in the century. This copy was subsequently bound into a compilation which also includes a copy of the 1476 charter of Newport and some other material. This volume is sometimes called the Brown Book of Usk, a name given to it by the historian John Hobson Matthews, who owned it for a time and had it rebound