The Tironensian Community at Titley: origins and development 

The monastic community at Titley in Herefordshire has not been well served by historians and sources are sparse. It was founded in the first half of the twelfth century and ceased to operate in the closing years of the fourteenth when its lands were sold and a long association of its lands with Winchester College began. The paper places the community in the context of the “new monasticism” and its mother house, the abbey of Tiron in northern France, and considers its foundation and patrons before reviewing its subsequent history.

Dr Kathleen Thompson

is an independent scholar who holds a senior honorary research fellowship in the History Department of the University of Sheffield. Since the early 1990s she has written on the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, including her 2002 study Power and lordship in medieval France and with David Crouch she edited a collection of essays for David Bates, Normandy and its neighbours, 900-1250. In 2014 she published The Monks of Tiron with Cambridge University Press, which sparked her interest in Titley, and has a translation of Hariulf’s History of St Riquier in the press with Manchester UP. She is the secretary of the Bristol Record Society and is the author of East of Bristol in the sixteenth century.

Naming Places in Medieval Wales

Texts from medieval Wales abound in stories that explain place names. In the second branch of the Mabinogi a cwmwd is named Tal Ebolion after the foals given to Matholwch to repay his insult, whilst Gerald of Wales explains that people associated the highest mountain in south Wales with king Arthur, referring to what is now Pen y Fan as Kaerarthur or cathedra Arthuri. This paper will attempt to put some order on these scattered references through investigating the strategies for explaining place names in both Latin and vernacular texts from medieval Wales together with the reasons for doing so.

Dr Rebecca Thomas

is a Lecturer in Medieval History at Cardiff University. She is an expert on early medieval Wales, and her book History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales, published by Boydell in 2022, won the Francis Jones Prize for Welsh History. In 2023, she received the Learned Society of Wales’s Dillwyn Medal. She also writes creatively, and has published two medieval historical novels for young adults: Dan Gysgod y Frenhines (2022) and Y Castell ar y Dŵr (2023).

‘Mapping the Medieval March of Wales’

This seminar introduces the ERC/UKRI research project which aims to produce a cultural history of the medieval March of Wales from 1282 to 1550. One of the major outputs of the project will be an interactive website which contains maps of the Marcher lordships with links to key people, places, manuscripts and texts from the region. The project will be presented by three speakers, Professor Helen Fulton, speaking about Marcher identity, Dr Rachael Harkes, describing the process of creating the digital maps, and Dr Matthew Lampitt, discussing some of the key texts and manuscripts from the March.

Professor Helen Fulton

is Chair of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol and Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Mapping the March: Medieval Wales and England, 1282–1550’ She has published widely on medieval Welsh and English literatures and is the co-editor of the Cambridge History of Welsh Literature (2019).

Dr Rachael Harkes

is currently Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol, working on ‘Mapping the March’. She previously held the post of Lecturer in Medieval History at Durham University. Rachael’s research interests focus on the development of socio-political networks and processes of decision-making in the Welsh Marches and neighbouring English border counties.

Dr Matt Lampitt

is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol, working on ‘Mapping the March’. Matt gained his PhD in 2019 from the Department of French at King’s College London, after which he held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, from 2019–2023. His monograph, Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2024.