MORNING SERIAL
FROM 1055 until 1063, he ruled all Wales. These eight years represent the only time Wales can really claim to have been one independent nation. But it was achieved by brutality and fear and this was perhaps why it was someone Welsh who killed him in 1063 and sent his head to the English king. After his death, Wales fractured again and the Welsh returned to being a people spread across four kingdoms rather than a political entity. Moreover, the whole idea of Wales as a nation or kingdom remained invisible. This was because, despite the way their sense of difference to England probably gave them some feeling of unity, the Welsh seemed to continue to think of themselves as Britons with a cultural inheritance and identity based, not upon the western peninsula where they lived, but on the whole island.
The first stages of the conquest of Wales and the Welsh
IN 1093, Rhys ap Tewdwr, the King of Deheubarth, was killed. The murder of a Welsh leader was not unusual in what was often a bloody and brutal world but this time the act was blamed on the Normans, the aristocratic group from France who had seized control of the English crown in 1066 and of England itself in the years that followed.
The Battle of Hastings precipitated not just the invasion of England but of parts of Wales too.
Norman lords grabbed land across the whole of south Wales and in pockets of the north. This was not an organised or a crown-sponsored conquest but rather the actions of individual barons with a significant technological edge. To protect their conquests, they built castles, with one at Chepstow being started as early as 1067.
These structures began as simple wooden fortifications on high earthen mounds or natural peaks, designed to be held by small numbers. But they gradually turned into large stone structures which stamped Norman authority on the landscape and reminded the natives of who was in charge and just how powerful they were.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com