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The Anglo-Norman lords had come to accept by the late twelfth century that the total subjugation of Wales was, at least for the time being, beyond their reach. So had England's government. Wales was to be a partially conquered country. The acknowledgement of this situation was reflected in the increasing use in official documents of a formal terminology to express the duality: on the one hand, the part of Wales that remained under native rule was referred to as ‘Wales’ or ‘Wales proper’, while the rest of the country was designated ‘the March of Wales’ and its rulers ‘the barons of the March’. A brief review of the March in the late twelfth century will serve to indicate the extent of Anglo-Norman penetration in Wales by that date and to emphasize the very variable quality of Anglo-Norman control.

By 1415, Wales had been conquered, finally and irreversibly. The story of that conquest dominated the history of the country for the 350 years covered by this book. What was surprising was that conquest had taken so long. Already by 1093 the odds against the survival of Wales's political independence seemed hopeless. But the Welsh showed remarkable resourcefulness and resilience. For almost two centuries they survived and even, periodically, flourished. They took full advantage of their own terrain, climate, and hardiness; they exploited the lack of stamina and frequent diversions of the Anglo-Norman invaders; they capitalized on the domestic preoccupations and periodic impotence of the English monarchy. Even the completion of the process of conquest did not bring political or governmental unity to Wales. Indeed, the country's natural particularism had been further entrenched by the piecemeal and protracted character of the Anglo-Norman conquest.

This book examines seignorial control of land in order to illuminate both the power of Anglo-Norman lordship and the functioning and development of law within society. The book examines the areas of co-operation or conflict between kings, lords, and vassals. It also explores the extent the honour was an independent social and political unit; how the relationships and land-holding within honours worked; the characteristics of a good lord; the constraints which existed upon the exercise of seignorial power and patronage; and the aspirations of vassals, especially with regard to land. Above all, the book asks how the aims and actions of lords and vassals were facilitated or constrained by power and ideas, and particularly by what might be referred to as legal norms. The book argues that some loose description of certain affairs as legal is still valid, both in terms of analytic utility and of the thought of the time. It concludes that power had certainly an effect on the normal conduct of affairs concerning land-holding and law, but the use of power to flout the workings of law and justice was condemned.

This chapter deals with connections between homage and land-holding. It reveals the homage relationship to be central to both the creation and the termination of tenurial bonds. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to distraint and the enforcement of services. Distraint, the removal from the vassal of chattels or land, is seen as the main process by which a lord could discipline his tenants, although many other informal pressures could be brought to bear. This chapter closes with a discussion of good and bad lordship, with particular attention to the warranty of land. Examination of these areas reveals the considerable security of tenure enjoyed by vassals in Anglo-Norman England.

The primary attention of this chapter is the royal administration of justice. It seeks to provide an interpretative account on the reforms of Henry II and their effect on land-holding and law. This chapter attempts to reconcile the evidence that the Anglo-Norman world was not one of autonomous lordships but of considerable royal involvement, and that the social effects of customs in Anglo-Norman England did not differ greatly from those of Common Law rules, with the continuing impression that Henry II's and subsequent reforms really did make a difference. After briefly sketching a chronology of the reforms, the chapter deals with the judicial aspects of his reforms, and then with their effect on land-holding. At the end of the chapter, it provides a reemphasis of the importance of developments before 1135, and the limits to the changes resulting from the reforms.

Between the 11th and the 13th centuries, the political map of Europe and the Mediterranean was transformed by a series of conquests which established, more or less securely, new ruling classes in countries as distant and diverse as Ireland and Palestine, Andalusia and Prussia. In these places a new military and landed elite of foreign origin — a colonial aristocracy — intruded into and was imposed upon the indigenous society. Moreover, beyond this comparability of situation is the fact that the alien aristocracies all shared certain traditions of Latin and Frankish origin. Thus, when one analyses the changes brought about by the partial Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland or the creation of the Mark of Brandenburg on formerly Slav terrain or the establishment of Outremer, the crusader colony in the Middle East, one is struck, simultaneously, by the contrasts between these different areas and by the common cultural and political baggage brought by the invaders.

From the late 11th century onwards — in other words from the period of ‘the awakening of Europe’ and ‘the making of the Middle Ages’ — Ireland and Wales may appropriately be regarded as two of the western frontier zones of medieval Europe. They stood at one of the peripheries of the area of feudal imperialism associated with the Norman conquest and colonisation, and indeed this seemed to slow down and even to frustrate its apparently remorseless advance. They were also frontier lands in cultural terms, where a new, confident, aggressive, north-western European, Latin- and French-dominated aristocratic and ecclesiastical culture came into contact, and often confrontation, with native cultures profoundly different in their economic configuration. The saga of the Anglo-Norman penetration of Ireland began in 1169, almost exactly a century later than that of Wales. After making rapid and impressive initial progress, it was already clearly faltering by the second half of the 13th century.