Patronage and Power in the Medieval Welsh March: One Family’s Story, by David Stephenson

Abstract

This monograph by David Stephenson is, according to its subtitle, ‘one family’s story’, and it focuses on Hywel ap Meurig and his descendants, who became an important family of administrators—among other things—from their base in Herefordshire and adjacent regions. However, simply calling this work a family history would be to underplay its importance in scholarship on medieval Wales. Taking into account this one family over a period of two centuries—from the 1250s up to 1422—Stephenson discusses major events in both Welsh and English history, including a superb account of the March of Wales and its central place in medieval history. The author is, of course, well-known for his work on medieval Wales and the March, with an emphasis in his recent publications on bringing the study of the March of Wales to the fore. This present work is specific and is not intended to be a general introduction to the March, but the explanation of what the March was in the Preface would easily work as a first stop for examining Marcher history. Here, Stephenson states that in studies of the March ‘the Welsh population is often pictured as being of little account, the principal focus being on the Marcher lords themselves’, but this book demonstrates brilliantly the critical importance of a slightly lower level in society, described by him as ‘the gentry’. The Welsh gentry in the March is rightly described by Stephenson as an ‘elusive group’ compared to their English counterparts and is an under-studied subject, but this work proves the value of looking at one family as a case-study. It may be that families such as this one, Hywel ap Meurig and his descendants, have been neglected as they do not fit into the category of ‘heroic Welshmen’: instead, they were quite the opposite, and focused their energies on looking eastward to England, and by the third generation the men had stopped using the traditional patronymic form and had adopted more Anglicised naming patterns. However, as Stephenson shows, the family was able to advance their administrative careers because of their Welsh origins, rather than despite them, and as Marcher men they were able ‘to move easily from milieux which were predominantly Welsh to association with officials who were overwhelmingly English’, and it was their background that meant that they could transition freely from the March into both England and Wales.