Wales subdued: the legacy of the Conquest
Wales was left with its language, but daily business increasingly took place in English. Taxes were collected in coin for the first time, and the burden of tax fell hardest on the poor.
The cost of all this fighting and colonisation cost England over £240,000, including £40,000 spent on the castles. It left the crown dependent upon massive loans from the Ricardi bankers, and parliamentary grants of taxation.
One unforeseen consequence of the Welsh and later Scots wars was to fundamentally change the place and role of the English parliament. The fighting and castles had to be paid for and only by regular grants of taxation could the king raise the necessary funds.
This meant regularly calling a parliament and extending its membership, and therefore those who paid tax, to the commoners, as well as the nobles and clergy. In time, the Welsh would also be summoned to the English parliament.
'This necessity probably did more than anything else in the Middle Ages to forge a sense of unity and identity in the native Welsh.'
The greatest visible legacy of the conquest remains the castles designed by Master James of St George from Savoy, using the latest European ideas.
Beaumaris in Anglesey, the last one to be built, is the best designed while Caernarfon remains the most impressive structure, inspired as it is by the walls of Constantinople. Harlech, standing proudly upon the cliff edge that used to form the coastline, seems to best represent the symbolism of subjection that Edward I intended.
Together, this ring of stone reflected both the nature of subjugation and the realisation that castle strongholds are the only way to control a dissident rural population. Many of the northern Welsh towns that we know today grew up beside the castles, which are many-walled for protection, and all placed along the coast to allow trade and re-supply in times of war.
English settlers, enticed by free land grants and the jurisdiction of their own laws, arrived by the thousand. They destroyed native churches, rebuilt others, and gradually brought Wales into the orbit of Canterbury. Thus they denied the Welsh their claim to appeal directly to the Pope.
Edward's conquest had now become nothing short of a deliberate attempt to stamp out Welsh national identity, and to make the Welsh his subjects, just as the English were. As Professor Davies has written: 'Such a conquest entailed the eradication of the memory of the conquered peoples'.
Wales's most treasured national artefacts were taken to London, including the royal insignia and Y Groes Naid, said to be a fragment of the true cross on which Christ was crucified. To Edward, the principality just became another 'land' for him to own, ruled from Westminster just like the rest of his kingdom.
Although his attempt at forced union would eventually fail in Scotland, Edward I's attempted colonial domination of Wales, 'had given way to an ideology of unity, uniformity and conquest.'
Ironically, it probably did more than anything else in the Middle Ages to forge a sense of unity and identity in the native Welsh. They may have lost their political independence, but the Welsh gained a written statement of a national consciousness that survives to this day.
Published: 2001-05-01
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