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A marcher lord () was a noble appointed by the king of England to guard the border (known as the Welsh Marches) between England and Wales.
A marcher lord was the English equivalent of a margrave (in the Holy Roman Empire) or a marquis (in France) before the introduction of the title of "marquess" in Britain; no marcher lord ever bore the rank of marquess. In this context, the word march means a border region or frontier, and is cognate with the verb "to march", both ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *mereg-, "edge" or "boundary".
The greatest marcher lords included the earls of Chester, Gloucester, Hereford, Pembroke and Shrewsbury (see also English earls of March).
The term particularly applies to Anglo-Normans lords in Wales, who had complete jurisdiction over their subjects, without recourse to the king of England. The king had jurisdiction only in treason cases, though the lords each bore personal allegiance to the king as feudal subjects.
Marcher lords could build castles, a jealously guarded and easily revoked Royal privilege in England. Marcher lords administered laws, waged war, established , and maintained their own chanceries that kept their records (which have been completely lost). They had their own deputies, or . Sitting in their own courts they had jurisdiction over all cases at law save high treason. "They could establish forests and forest laws, declare and wage war, establish boroughs, and grant extensive charters of liberties. They could confiscate the estates of traitors and felons, and regrant these at will. They could establish and preside over their own petty parliaments and county courts. Finally, they could claim any and every feudal due, aid, grant, and relief",Nelson, ch. 8 although they did not mint coins.
Their one insecurity, if they did not take up arms against the king, was of dying without a legitimate heir, whereupon the title reverted to the Crown in escheat. Cyfraith Hywel was frequently used in the Marches in preference to English law, and there would sometimes be a dispute as to which code should be used to decide a particular case.
Feudal social structures, which were never fully established in England, took root in the Marches, which was not legally part of the realm of England. The traditional view has been that the Norman monarchy granted these outright. A revisionist view is that such rights were more common in the 11th century throughout the Conquest, but were largely suppressed in England, and survived in the Marches. Settlement was encouraged: knights were granted their own lands, which they held in feudal service to the Norman lords. Settlement was also encouraged in towns that were given market privileges, under the protection of a Norman keep. Peasants came to Wales in large numbers: Henry I encouraged Brittany, Flemings, Normans, and English settlers to move into the south of Wales.
The tendencies of innovations in the Plantagenet monarchy were towards a centralised bureaucracy and judiciary, with the gradual elimination of localisms. In the Marches of Wales these processes towards a "high medieval" authority were staunchly resisted. Protests of the border lords surviving in the Royal records throw some light upon the nature and extent of the privileges whose normal operation has left no record.
On the local side, the able-bodied population was more directly essential to the local Lord and was able to extract from him carefully defined and highly local liberties. A point of friction was in the Lords' funded churches where they appointed churchmen to Benefice held tightly under hierarchic control in the manner that had developed in Normandy, where a highly organised church structure was well in the hands of the duke. The Welsh church, on the Celtic plan, closely connected with clan loyalties, brooked little authoritarian influence.
The Marcher lords were progressively tied to the English kings by the grants of lands and lordships in England, where control was stricter, and where many marcher lords spent most of their time, and through the English kings' dynastic alliances with the great magnates. It was less easy to work in the opposite way, and establish a position among the hereditary marcher families, as Hugh Le Despenser discovered. He began by exchanging estates he held in England and by obtaining grants in the Welsh Marches from the king. He even obtained the Isle of Lundy. When the last male heir of the de Braose family died, Despenser was able to obtain the de Braose lands around Swansea. In 1321 the Marcher lords threatened to start a civil war and it was agreed that a parliament should be called to settle the matter.
Their daughter Gwenllian married Gilbert Talbot, progenitor of the earls of Shrewsbury. William de Braose was himself a descendant of Nesta verch Osborne of Wales through his mother Bertha of Hereford. Another member of the de Braose family, Isabella, daughter of Gwilym Ddu, or Black William, and Eva Marshal, married Prince Dafydd ap Llywelyn, whose mother Joan was an illegitimate daughter of King John of England. Queen Anne Boleyn descended directly from Gruffydd II ap Madog, Lord of Dinas Bran through his daughter, Angharad who married William Le Boteler of Wem, Shropshire.
Although the Laws in Wales Acts had not been modified – and the claim to have the same rights as a Marcher lordship could not therefore be legally possible – Leicester had such political power that he was able to make this a reality in practice.
Early in the 21st century, businessman Mark Roberts styled himself lord marcher of Trellech and purported to acquire the title of Lord Marcher of St. David's from the University of Wales, seeking to assert various associated economic rights including title in half the coastline of Pembrokeshire. Roberts contended that the Bishops of St David's were never themselves conquered and retained their ancient temporal possessions.
The last Welsh bishop had died in 1115 but the ensuing Normans bishops acquired the ancient jurisdictional rights by use and eventually by a distinct royal charter. Roberts claimed to be a corporation sole in succession to the bishops and to have the status of a rajah and effective state immunity. However, in May 2008, the High Court held that the Laws in Wales Act 1535 had abolished the franchise of Marcher Lord entirely and that Roberts had no such status. Crown Estates Commissioners -v- Roberts & another (2008)
List of Marcher lordships
Marcher lordships in the Welsh Marches and the successor shiresMax Lieberman, The March of Wales, 1067-1300: a borderland of medieval Britain, University of Wales Press, 2008,
See also
Bibliography
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