Counties of the Welsh Marches (due in 2010)
Malcolm Wanklyn and Kevin DownCounties of the Welsh Marches is designed to provide readers with a detailed, stimulating and copiously illustrated account of the history of that part of the west of England which lies towards Wales. It comprises the lands between the upper Thames valley, the Central Midland conurbation and Wales, known in early Saxon times as the sub-kingdoms of the Hwicce, the Magonsaetan and the Wroecensaetan, and by AD 1000 as the counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire. The book will not include the most northerly of the border counties, Cheshire, as it has for centuries been bracketed with Lancashire and is thus clearly identified in popular consciousness with the North West of England.
The national significance of this part of the country, the vales of the Severn and the Wye and their surrounding hills, and its image in the national consciousness, undergoes subtle change as the centuries pass. An area of quiet prosperity in the early centuries of Roman Britain once Wales had been pacified, it became of major strategic significance once again from the eighth century onwards and remained so for as long as Wales was a separate principality or its conquistadors posed a military threat to the stability of the nation whilst failing to effectively police their own domains. The four counties, like the principality, were pacified by the committee of the king’s council permanently resident at Ludlow from the 1530s. Their military significance, however, revived with the Civil Wars a hundred years later. For the Royalist cause they were not only a source of men and munitions, but also a corridor between those parts of England and Wales held by the king’s supporters and the army headquarters of the field army at Oxford.
Although before 1640 a relatively impoverished area compared with those parts of England to the south and east, the wealth of the four counties increased markedly through trade in agricultural and industrial produce in the century after the Restoration, and in the First Industrial Revolution the industrialising parts of Gloucestershire. Shropshire and Worcestershire, building on a firm base established since 1660, appeared to be challenging the burgeoning hegemony of the manufacturing regions of the north and the central Midlands. However, the quarter century that followed the Napoleonic wars produced a complete change in image, as industry lost its competitive edge and shrunk back into a small number of isolated pockets, whilst the rest of the four counties was transformed into a treasured backwater where 'blue, remembered hills' enshrined traditional values. This reverie was disrupted by the Second World War, but signs of it are still apparent today in parts of the four counties where it has not been superseded by the spread of light industry, the industrialisation of agriculture, and the commercialisation of leisure. Its centre, as under the Tudors and the first two Stuart kings, is Ludlow, considered by some to be the slowest town in England.
About the authors
Malcolm Wanklyn is Professor in Regional History at the University of Wolverhampton, now semi-retired. Kevin Down formerly lecturer in medieval history and staff tutor in Herefordshire and Worcestershire for the University of Birmingham's Centre for Lifelong Learning.
This will be a marvellous addition to our county history series. If you register an interest in this title we will email you with fuller details nearer publication date.
