Shires and Civil War

The three counties that became Powys in 1974 were themselves invented, and not very long ago as these things go. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542 abolished the Marcher lordships and carved the ground into shires on the English model.

Montgomeryshire took its name from a town of a few hundred people. Radnorshire was assembled out of Rhwng Gwy a Hafren and given a county town, New Radnor, that never functioned as one. Brecknockshire inherited roughly the territory of the old kingdom of Brycheiniog.

With the shires came quarter sessions, sheriffs, JPs, and members of parliament, and a Welsh gentry class that learned quickly that advancement now ran through London and through English.

The dissolution

The monasteries went in the 1530s. Abbeycwmhir and Strata Marcella, both Cistercian and both Welsh-patronised, were dissolved and their fabric dispersed. The arcade in Llanidloes church came from Abbeycwmhir. Estates that had been monastic passed to laymen, and a good deal of the pattern of landownership in mid Wales dates from that transfer rather than from anything medieval.

The Bible

In 1588 William Morgan, vicar of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant in the Tanat valley, published his translation of the whole Bible into Welsh.

It is difficult to overstate what this did. It gave Welsh a standard literary form at exactly the moment when the language had lost its aristocratic patrons and had no official status whatever. Every parish church was required to hold a copy. For three centuries afterwards, Welsh prose was measured against Morgan's, and the survival of the language as a written medium runs directly through a rectory in a Montgomeryshire valley.

The wars

Powys was largely royalist, as most of Wales was, and the gentry raised troops accordingly.

The fighting that reached here was decisive when it came. In September 1644 the fields below Montgomery Castle saw one of the largest battles fought in Wales, and the royalists lost heavily. Powis Castle was taken by parliament in the same period. Montgomery Castle was slighted in 1649 so that it could never be held again, which is why there is so little of it.

The 1650s brought the Act for the Better Propagation of the Gospel in Wales and the first organised Puritan activity in the county, which planted something that would matter enormously a century later.

Where to see it

Powis Castle, the one great house in the county that came through the century occupied and still is.

Montgomery Castle, for the opposite outcome.

Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, where a plaque and very little else marks where the Bible was translated. The Shire Hall traditions at Presteigne and the quarter sessions records in Powys Archives at Llandrindod are where the administrative side of the century actually survives.