Conquest to Glyndŵr

After 1282 the March carried on much as before. Edward I built at Builth between 1277 and 1282, one of his earliest Welsh castles, and the Marcher lords kept their liberties. What changed was that there was no longer a Welsh prince to play them against, or the crown against.

The economy of the March was a colonial one in a fairly literal sense. Boroughs were planted at castle gates and settled with English burgesses who held trading privileges Welshmen did not. Montgomery, Radnor, Builth, Knighton and Hay all worked this way. In the countryside the older Welsh patterns of tenure and inheritance carried on largely unchanged, and the two systems sat alongside each other with a good deal of friction.

The Black Death arrived in 1349 and hit hard. Rents collapsed, holdings were abandoned, and the balance between lord and tenant shifted permanently.

The revolt

In September 1400 Owain Glyndŵr was proclaimed Prince of Wales by a small group of supporters, following a land dispute with a neighbouring English lord that the courts and parliament both declined to take seriously.

Within four years he controlled most of Wales. Aberystwyth and Harlech fell. In 1404 he summoned a parliament at Machynlleth, four men from every commote, and was crowned in front of envoys from France, Scotland and Castile. In 1405 he agreed the Tripartite Indenture with Mortimer and Percy, which proposed dividing England and Wales between the three of them.

Powys took it badly in both directions. Hay was burned in 1401. Montgomery, Knighton, Presteigne, Welshpool and Radnor were all attacked at various points, and the towns that suffered most were the planted English boroughs, which was not a coincidence.

From 1406 it fell apart. The English recovered the castles, the French withdrew, and support drained. Glyndŵr disappeared around 1415 with no recorded death, burial or capture.

Afterwards

The penal laws passed against the Welsh after the revolt stayed on the statute book for over a century, though enforcement was patchy and evasion routine.

What is more visible on the ground is what happened next. Once the country settled, the fifteenth century saw a substantial amount of rebuilding: church roofs, rood screens, and the beginnings of the domestic architecture that replaced castles. Tretower Court, beside its own redundant castle, is the clearest example in the county of a family deciding that comfort now mattered more than defence.

Where to see it

Builth Castle earthworks, from which every scrap of Edward I's masonry has been removed.

The Parliament House at Machynlleth, and the town's long market street.

Tretower Court near Crickhowell, and the late medieval roofs and screens at Llananno, Partrishow and Llanwnnog, which are among the finest surviving woodwork in Wales.