Writing the Welsh Borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England, by Lindy Brady

Abstract

Lindy Brady’s book is laudable for tackling a subject that has hitherto received very little attention. Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval Wales are all too often treated as if they were discrete entities divided by a precise frontier line, helpfully demarcated for us by King Offa in the eighth century. Recent work, particularly by T.M. Charles-Edwards, has helped to dispel such preconceptions by showing how delicately interconnected were the worlds of the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons during the early Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the spaces where those two worlds collided, and indeed co-existed, are still little understood. In this book, Brady addresses the deficit by examining these spaces through the lens of Anglo-Saxon literature. Brady’s central contention is that the geographical region that she calls the ‘Welsh borderlands’ was perceived by the English between the seventh and eleventh centuries as a distinctive space with its own special characteristics. More often than not, she finds the Welsh borderlands to be a locus of political harmony traversing ethnic boundaries, as encapsulated in microcosm by her opening case-study on the Dunsæte Agreement. This observation allows her to position herself against those who insist on reading the relationship between the English and the Welsh in post-colonial terms, treating the ultimate conquest of Wales in the thirteenth century as a foregone conclusion. She successfully combats such views by exploring the multiplicity of relationships that existed within and across the Welsh borderlands during her period of study.