Normans and the March

The Normans did not conquer Wales in the way they conquered England. There was no single campaign and no Domesday settlement. Instead the king let his barons take what they could hold and keep it on terms that suited them, and what resulted was the March: a belt of private lordships along the border where royal writ did not run and each lord was, in practice, a small sovereign.

Most of modern Powys was in it.

The castles

Count the mottes. There are hundreds of earthwork castle sites in this county, more per square mile than almost anywhere in Britain, and they are the physical record of a frontier that moved back and forth for two centuries.

Roger de Montgomery pushed up the Severn from Shrewsbury in the 1070s and built at Hen Domen. Bernard de Neufmarché took Brycheiniog in the early 1090s in a campaign that killed Rhys ap Tewdwr, king of Deheubarth, in 1093, and built at Brecon. The Braose family held Radnor, Builth and Hay. The Mortimers took Maelienydd and eventually a great deal else.

Each of them raised timber castles at intervals of a few miles, because holding this country needed a network rather than a fortress.

The Welsh side

None of it was uncontested. The princes of Powys and of Gwynedd took castles back repeatedly and held some of them for long periods. Llywelyn ab Iorwerth dominated the middle decades of the thirteenth century and made the old site at Hen Domen untenable, which is why Henry III built the stone castle at Montgomery in 1223.

The high point came on 29 September 1267, when Henry III concluded the Treaty of Montgomery with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, recognising him as Prince of Wales and directing the homage of the other Welsh lords to him.

It lasted fifteen years. In December 1282 Llywelyn was killed near Builth and the war ended shortly afterwards. Edward I's settlement left the March intact but the independent principality gone.

The Cistercians

The white monks arrived in the twelfth century and settled where nobody else wanted to be. Abbeycwmhir in Radnorshire began in 1176 and its monks laid out a nave longer than any other in Wales, fourteen bays, which they never finished. Strata Marcella near Welshpool was founded in 1170 by the prince of Powys.

Cistercian houses in Wales were generally patronised by Welsh princes rather than by Marcher lords, which made them politically significant as well as economically so. They ran enormous sheep granges across the uplands, and the shape of upland grazing in mid Wales still partly reflects it.

Where to see it

Almost any village in the Vale of Montgomery or the middle Wye has a motte within a couple of miles. Painscastle has one of the largest earthwork castles in Wales. Tretower near Crickhowell has a fine circular keep.

Montgomery Castle for the stone phase, and the earthworks at Hen Domen a mile away for what it replaced.

Abbeycwmhir, where the outline of that unfinished nave is pegged out in the grass and gives a better sense of scale than most standing ruins.