Programme: Summer Term 2024
Thursday 9th May, 7.30pm.
Dr Rebecca Thomas
Chair: Professor Marged Haycock
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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.
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).
Wednesday 22nd May, 7.30pm.
POSTPONED: Due to illness tonight’s talk will now take place at a later date, to be advised.
Dr Andy King
Chair: Professor Daniel Power
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‘Once Upon A Time In The Borders: Contrasts and Comparisons between the Welsh and Scottish Marches.’
The kingdom of England had two land borders, with Wales and with Scotland; over the course of the Middle Ages, both of these borders came to be designated as ‘Marches’. Differing conditions on both sides of the Welsh and Scottish borders ensured that their respective Marches developed in very different ways; in particular, the contrasting natures of the Welsh and Scottish polities, and the consequently differing course of Anglo-Welsh and Anglo-Scottish relations, resulted in widely divergent seigneurial and governmental institutions. What were the natures of these institutions? And what features – if any – did the Welsh and Scottish Marches nevertheless have in common?
Andy King
is a lecturer in mediaeval history at the University of Southampton, and a tutor at the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. Amongst other works, he edited Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica, and wrote Edward I: A New King Arthur? for the Penguin Monarchs series; he has also published on late-medieval Anglo-Scottish relations; armies and warfare; chivalry, treason and the laws of war; chronicles; and castles, as well as contributing a chapter to The Mortimers of Wigmore: Dynasty of Destiny. His co-edited volume Documenting Warfare: Records of the Hundred Years War Edited and Translated in Honour of Anne Curry will be published later this year.
Wednesday 5th June, 7.30pm.
Dr Dewi Alter
Chair: Professor Helen Fulton
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Remembering the Mortimers in early modern Wales.
This paper will investigate how the Mortimer family, particularly Roger Mortimer, 1st Baron Mortimer of Wigmore, and Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, were remembered in early modern Welsh history writing, especially ‘Cronica Walliae’ by Humphrey Llwyd (1559) and Historie of Cambria by David Powel (1584). Analysing how the Mortimers were remembered rather than investigating the validity of these accounts, the paper will investigate the portrayal of the Mortimers following the so-called Acts of Union which abolished much of the authority of the marcher lordships. In doing so the relationship between the Mortimers, the leading family of the medieval March will be analysed in light of the aspirations of the patrons of Welsh history, especially Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, and Sir Henry Sidney. This paper will show that remembering the Mortimers was a powerful tool for legitimacy that entangles Wales and England. This case study of the memory of the March will shed light on identities in early modern Wales and on historical culture more broadly.
Dewi Alter
is a lecturer in Welsh at Cardiff University and an O’Donovan fellow at the Dublin Institute investigating the afterlives of St David after the Reformation in Wales. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral fellow at Aberystwyth University where he adapted his PhD into a book, which is a forthcoming study of cultural memory in early modern Wales. He has published articles investigating memory in Wales including articles investigating the landscape and memory and historical writing in Drych y Prif Oesoedd, transnational memory in y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, he also has published an article on sleep in the poems of the Vicar Rhys Prichard, and the Vicar’s plague poetry. Recently he visited the Vatican’s Library, thanks to Saunders Lewis Trust, to investigate Catholic historical culture where he discovered two essays by Robert Owen defending the historicity of Cadwaladr’s journey to Rome at the end of the seventh century, a text he hopes to publish in a critical edition.