Widows, Native Law and the Long Shadow of England in Thirteenth-Century Wales

Abstract

Abstract This article examines complex core–periphery relationships in the medieval British Isles and, for the first time, explores the role of elite women in facilitating and shaping those relationships. It takes the advent of English-style dower in native Wales before Wales’s conquest by Edward I of England (1282) as a case-study, and explores the interrelationship between ‘law’ and ‘custom’ in the native legal culture, in order to shed new light on Wales’s relationship with England in the final eighty or so years of Welsh independence. It contends not only that Wales, like other ‘peripheral’ regions of the British Isles, was complicit (however unwittingly) in its own subjection to the English ‘core’, but also that the elite women for whom the dower provisions were made were integral to the very processes of cultural exchange that led to the development of ‘Welsh dower’. While modelled on English common law provisions, Welsh dower—a hybrid phenomenon—was also consistent with Welsh legal norms. By variously turning to the law courts, and employing extra-curial and extra-legal methods of negotiation and redress, the women helped to shape and promote these changes, and to embed them in native Welsh before its final conquest by England. It also makes clear not only that the experiences of Wales in these matters differed from those of other of England’s insular neighbours, such as Ireland, but also that the right of these women to suitable provision was always upheld, no matter how mixed or contested the legal environment.