Kings, Lords, Charters, and the Political Culture of Twelfth-Century Wales

Abstract

The development of Wales during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in terms of its political and social structures and legal and cultural institutions, has seen much attention over the last twenty years from scholars who have sought to explore the impact of the Normans in the British Isles and locate Wales's experience in an Insular context; the work of Robin Frame, Huw Pryce, John Gillingham, Robert Bartlett, and above all the late Sir Rees Davies has been enormously influential here. Nevertheless, Welsh political culture in the twelfth century has received less detailed attention than it might. The first problem is to define what we might mean by ‘political culture’ in the twelfth century. What was it? What were its features? Moreover, no historian would wish to sustain the argument that the political values, customs, and norms of society in, say, the Vale of Glamorgan were necessarily the same as those of Llŷn or Eifionydd in Gwynedd: we should be addressing the political cultures of Wales in the plural. The Europeanization of political culture in Wales The broad background to this paper is the transformation of Welsh society during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, what Sir Rees Davies identified as ‘far reaching and multi-faceted changes’. These changes fit into a much wider process of social, political, and cultural transformation in Europe's peripheral zones identified by Robert Bartlett in his important and influential Making of Europe .