Programme: Autumn Term 2023
Wednesday 18th October, 7.00pm.
Dr Simon Egan
Chair: Professor Gruffydd Aled Williams
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‘“You and your noble kinsmen in Ireland shall come to our aid”: Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Irish Sea World, c.1400-c.1415’
The rebellion of Owain Glyn Dŵr (d.c.1415) was perhaps the single greatest test faced by Henry IV (d.1413). The rising not only presented a major military challenge, it drew in a host of the king’s enemies. Disaffected English nobles such as the Percies of Northumberland and Sir Edmund Mortimer of Wigmore were directly engaged in the conflict, others such as the Valois and Stewarts were more peripherally involved in the struggle. Unsurprisingly, the rebellion has been the subject of considerable historical interest. For instance, scholars have underlined the significance of Glyn Dŵr’s connections with the Mortimers and highlighted the importance of Cambro-French military links in this period. Equally, though on a much smaller scale than that of France, historians have noted Glyn Dŵr’s negotiations with Scotland’s ruling Stewart dynasty. Less attention, by comparison, has been devoted to exploring Glyn Dŵr’s links with Ireland. In November 1401, the Welsh rebel famously penned letters to a number of unnamed Irish lords. These letters appear to have been intercepted en route to Ireland and the attempt to enlist Irish aid has been dismissed by one notable historian as an ‘unmitigated disaster’. This paper seeks to explore this Irish dimension in more detail. It challenges the notion that Glyn Dŵr’s overtures to the Irish were wholly unrealistic and argues that his efforts to recruit military support from Ireland need to be viewed in a wider context that encompasses the world of the Irish Sea, Anglo-Irish relations, and Ireland’s evolving relationship with Scotland.
Simon Egan
graduated with a PhD in History from University College Cork in 2016 and has previously worked at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College Dublin. He is currently the Lecturer in Medieval Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. Simon’s research interests focus mainly on the evolving relationship between Ireland and Scotland in the later middle ages but he is also interested in exploring how events in this wider Gaelic world shaped the course of ‘British’ history across the period, c.1100-c.1600.
Wednesday 8th November, 7.30pm.
John Marshall
Chair: Dr Alastair Ayton
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The Marshal family and Wales, 1189-1245: core or periphery?
At the death of William Marshal the younger in 1231, the annalist of Waverley abbey remarked that ‘Wales rejoiced, fearing his wars and menace when alive’. Yet, it has often been the case that studies of the Marshal family have been focused on their activities in England, their lands in Ireland and Wales tending to be viewed as peripheral to the family. This paper argues the opposite: that the Welsh March was in fact the focus of Marshal ambitions in the first half of the thirteenth century. To do this, this paper explores the tumultuous politics of the period, demonstrating how such conditions were used by the Marshal family to extract patronage grants in the March and how concerns regarding Wales often underpinned the actions of the Marshals elsewhere.
John Marshall
is a final year PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, and is a current RHS Centenary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London, from 2023-4. His research analyses transnational lordship and politics in thirteenth-century Britain and Ireland. John’s thesis focuses on the Marshal earls of Pembroke and lords of Leinster, in particular how their influence on the ‘peripheries’ of the Plantagenet empire brought them influence and patronage at the core. His thesis will also provide the first edition of the partition of the Marshal estates in 1247 after the male line of the family died out. John has published on aspects of his research in Irish Historical Studies (2023) and History: the Journal of the Historical Association (2023).
Wednesday 22nd November, Either 7.00 or 7.30pm.
Dr Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan
Chair: Dr Sara Elin Roberts
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The cross-border lives of medieval Arthurian texts
During the second half of the Middle Ages a number of Old French Arthurian texts were adapted or translated into Welsh or mined for titbits of content. Some light can be thrown on the ownership and circulation of manuscripts of such texts by means of ‘sightings’ in a variety of sources. The evidence locating manuscripts and their transmission moves between ecclesiastical and secular domains and across literary genres as well as crossing geo-political and linguistic borders.
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan
has an MA and DPhil from Oxford and a maîtrise from Poitiers and was formerly Head of Manuscripts and Visual Images at the National Library of Wales. She has published widely on French and Welsh Arthurian literature, manuscripts and textual transmission and is currently working with colleagues from the universities of Brest, Rouen and Ulster on a research project on adaptations of French grail romances into Celtic and Scandinavian languages. She is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, has held Honorary Research Fellowships at Cardiff and Bangor and was recently appointed to an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Wales Trinity St Davids.