Helen Fulton
speaker
89 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 25 Jun
Helen Fulton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it's clear from the manuscript evidence that English speakers were almost as keen on preserving Welsh language culture as were Welsh speakers.
I think after 1282, the march has become less of a frontier, less of a military zone, and more of a settled, more urbanised zone.
And I suppose one of the main cultural changes was the rise of towns, because Edward I built these enormous castles around the north of Wales.
like Flint and Conwy and Caernarfon and of course it's ironic that the castles that tourists want to come and see in Wales were actually built by the English to keep the Welsh firmly in their place but they've become very much associated with the Welsh landscape now
But with the castles came towns and towns further down the eastern border and around the south coast began to grow and trade and commerce grew in the 14th century so that a lot of Welsh people were more aware of the advantages of urbanisation There was still a lot of discrimination against the Welsh, they weren't always allowed to trade in the towns
but they could go in to buy from the towns or they had their markets just outside the towns so there was a greater awareness of the kind of goods that could be bought in towns there was a long period of peace as Hugh said after 1282 I think the Welsh sort of realised the game was up really now that England managed the principality the March of Lords were managing the lordships there was very little space for the Welsh to really mount any serious rebellion
Though, of course, when you come to 1400, that's exactly what Owen Glyndwr did.
Yes, I wanted to pick up Rean's point about opportunities for cultural expression as well.
And the 14th century was really the time of the great manuscript anthologies written in Welsh but also in other languages as well.
Very characteristic of the March were these multilingual manuscript anthologies.
The most famous of them is probably the Red Book of Hergest, which some of the audience might have heard of.
And it's really an anthology of pretty much most of the canonical medieval Welsh literature that we still have surviving.
Poetry, prose, lore, chronicles, little bits of Latin in there as well, but basically a Welsh manuscript written in Glamorgan under the patronage of a Welsh gentry person, Hopkin ap Thomas.
So other manuscript anthologies like Peniarth 50 were written in Latin, English and Welsh.
So all these languages in one manuscript, including a lot of prophecy, which was clearly a very popular marcher genre because it's found in many marcher manuscripts.
And many of the manuscripts that we think of as belonging to England, especially those written in the West Midlands, actually belong to the March, because the March spilled over what is now the modern border.
The modern border wasn't there.
And so the March of Lordship spilled over what we think of as the border between Wales and England.
So many of the English manuscripts from the West Midlands actually arose out of and were directed to a Marcher audience.
The March of Lordship sort of officially ended with the Acts of Union that were passed by Henry VIII, one in 1536 and one in 1542.
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