King Edward IV., about the seventeenth year of his reign, sent his son Edward Prince of Wales, with a guardian and council, to Ludlow Castle, to assume and exercise there the government of Wales and the Marches. Hence arose the authority of the President and Council of Wales and the Marches,[1] who soon became a recognised and permanent body. They sat by the Royal Commission, and proceeded in judicial matters as a Court of Equity. Their jurisdiction was extensive, and its limits not very clearly defined; and hence they became a powerful instrument in the hands of the Crown, which long successfully resisted their abolition.
The accession of the Tudor dynasty to the English throne was not only flattering to the pride and conciliatory to the spirit, but also conducive to the social and political advancement, of the Welch nation. Soon after that period, the legislation of the English Parliament for Wales, formerly restrictive and severe as for a conquered country, sought rather to reform the people and to assimilate the laws to those of England. Whenever it was possible, the statutes of the Realm of England were framed so as specially to include Wales.[2] Formerly, measures of restraint were chiefly directed against the Welchmen of the Marches by way of protection to the adjoining English counties; now they were also applied to protect the same Welchmen against the oppression of the Lords Marchers and their officers.[3] The "Act for recontinuing certain Liberties and Franchises heretofore taken from the Crown,"[4] so far as it affected Wales and the Marches, was preparatory and auxiliary to the Welch Act of Union, passed in the same session.
The "Act for Laws and Justice to be administered in Wales in like form as it is in this Realm,"[5] concerns not only Wales in its widest sense, but the March of England toward Wales also. Four distinct measures were deemed requisite for effecting its object, namely: 1, the union of Wales to the Realm of England; 2, the reduction of the Marches to shire-ground; 3, the extension of English laws to Wales; and 4, the extension of the English judicature to Wales. Of these, the two former were fully, the two latter only partially, carried out at this time.
As to the first, the Act, in uniting Wales to, did not confound it with, England. The common boundary lines of realms are not obliterated by political union; they are merely removed into the province of historical and antiquarian science. Their political existence, indeed, terminates; but, for that very reason, no occasion for
