Lost Villages in South-West Carmarthenshire

Abstract

Recent research has corrected the commonly held view that medieval open-field agriculture and enclosure on the English pattern was absent from Wales. Similarly this paper corrects the impression that the desertion of villages and hamlets was confined to England by tracing the evolution of the settlement pattern in the Commote of Laugharne in south-west Carmarthenshire. It demonstrates that the present-day pattern is not, as is commonly supposed, the original pattern, but has evolved over the last 600-700 years from a number of villages and hamlets, to a landscape of predominantly scattered farmsteads with only four nucleations. The reasons for the disappearance of the other nucleations are shown to be similar to those responsible for lost villages in England, namely the desire of landlords to benefit from the boom in wool prices towards the end of the fifteenth and early part of the sixteenth centuries, and the creation of parks. It is also shown how the tribal basis of Welsh society and the tenurial system contributed to or prevented the depopulations. IN HIS RESEARCHES into lost villages in England M. W. Beresford found that there was comparatively little depopulation in the northern and western counties of England, and, by inference, in Wales also. He records only one lost village in Carmarthenshire and that was submerged by the sea.1 A few depopulations consequent upon the Black Death in 1349 have been noted elsewhere.2 Apart from these isolated examples, information for the rest of Wales is almost non-existent. Yet the story of the commote, and later manor, of Laugharne in the southwestern corner of Carmarthenshire in the period I440-I590 is precisely one of the desertion of villages and hamlets (Fig. I). The earliest evidence extant for the settlement pattern of the commote of Laugharne is provided by an Inquisition of I307.3 This reveals that in the commote, a neighbourhood of approximately 208 km2, there were twenty-six villages and hamlets (Fig. 2). Laugharne, the largest village, contained 242 ha of demesne land, composed of bundles of quillets in arable which lay intermingled with those of the tenants of the manor, 404 ha of pasture, and 5 ha of meadow. At the other extreme there were hamlets such as Honeycorse where there was only one carucate of land appurtenant to the settlement. In some instances the numbers of tenants were recorded. At Cyffig there were forty-four tenants sharing 'two carucates and a half' of arable land, plus an additional 113 ha, and a further 186 ha of demesne. At Castle Ely there were twenty-eight tenants working 6 carucates of land, while at Belliter and Maesgwrda twenty-four tenants worked 5 carucates, whereas at Marros twenty-six tenants held I5 carucates. In 1968 only Laugharne, Llansadurnen, Llanddowror and Pendine survive as nucleations: the other settlements have disappeared but their names remain attached to single farms (Fig. 2). Elsewhere in Wales various authors have recognized the division of Welsh society in the Middle Ages into bond and free communities, and have demonstrated the distinctive settlements and evolutionary tendencies associated with each stratum of society.4 Although the distinction between bond and free communities in Laugharne commote frequently became confused through the grants of beneficent landlords and other circumstances, the tenurial status