Helen Fulton

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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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · The Welsh Marches · 25 Jun 2026 podcast

And the Acts of Union were designed really by Thomas Cromwell.

He was the one who wanted to try and regularise relations between England and Wales.

We've already spoken about how some of the March of Lordships were actually owned by the king.

Quite often they devolved to the king if a family died out or the king wasn't happy with someone, he would take their lands away.

So a lot of the March of Lordships went in and out of royal possession.

And by the Tudor period, many of the old marcher lordships were in the hands of the king already.

So Henry VIII found himself in a slightly ambiguous position, that he was the monarch of the principality, but he was also a marcher lord, exercising lordship rights over quite a lot of the marcher lordships.

So there were irregularities there.

And of course the Reformation happened at the same time.

The monasteries were dissolved between 1536 and 1538.

All the monasteries were shut down and the contents apprehended by the king and his officers.

So there were concerns about religious reform.

How could this be implemented in Wales if Wales was still kind of partly governed by all these different people and still very fragmented?

So the desire was to unify Wales once and for all.

Earlier historians have referred to Wales and the March as if they were two separate places which in jurisdictional terms they were So Cromwell and Henry VIII wanted to unite the Principality and the March of Lordships to become a single unit of Wales governed entirely by England without all these fragmentary lordships kind of clogging up the works

So that was how they went about it, through the Acts of Union.

So it was quite a sudden, it was sort of gradually and then suddenly the Acts of Union were implemented and the March of Lordships were turned into the new counties, the modern counties that ran down the eastern border.

So Denby, Montgomery, Radnor, Brecon, Monmouthshire, they were the new counties that were established under the Acts of Union.

Absolutely, yes, they were determined to make Britain into a single nation, Wales and England into a single nation, and that was how they went about it, through legislation.

I don't think I did enough justice to the richness of Marcher culture, which really was incredibly diverse, partly because of the multilingualism there.

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