Marches could not accurately be described as a peaceful country, for according to Sir John Wynn in his history of the Gwydr family, "in those dayes in that wide worlde every man stood upon his guard and went not abroad but in sort and soe armed, as if he went to the field to encountre with his enemies." Hallam says that the Welsh frontier was constantly almost in a state of war, which a very little good sense and benevolence would have easily prevented, by admitting the Welsh people to partake in equal privileges with their fellow subjects. Instead of this, the mischief was aggravated by granting legal reprisals upon Welshmen.[1]
The internecine strife between the various Lordship Marchers, the privileges of the Marcher Lords, their oppression of the Welsh people, their tyrannical administration of justice in their Courts, and the hostility of the Welsh people to English official rule, were the chief causes of this deplorable state of affairs. A strong central government was required, and this became possible in the reign of Henry the Seventh, to whom the powers of the Marcher Lordships had passed through the death of Richard the Third. All the estates of the Earldom of March had become forfeited to the Crown, and in 1488, an Act relating to the Crown Lands provided that in future all grants in the Marches were to be made under the great seal of England.
With the accession of the Tudor dynasty the coercion period passed away. Henry the Seventh (Harry ap Tudor) was a Welshman. Sir Rhys ap Thomas, a Welshman, was largely instrumental in placing him on the throne. Henceforth, flattered by the knowledge that a King, proud of his Welsh ancestry, was ruler of Great Britain; treated with a sympathy they had never previously experienced; and judiciously managed by statesmanlike legislation based upon the concession of equal rights and full privileges, the people of the Principality and Dominion of Wales entered upon a more peaceful era.
- ↑ Hallam's "Middle Ages," vol. iii. p. 169.
