Money, money, money

The development of the medieval principality of Wales under the Llywelyns:

“We can thus see that the political and military achievements of the princes were facilitated, at the very least, by substantial developments in the machinery and personnel of governance. At an even more fundamental level economic growth was also crucial to political innovation: the foundation of trading centres, boroughs and ports was a phenomenon imported into Pura Wallia from the March and beyond, and was both stimulated by, and helped to produce, a major thirteenth-century development of commutation of revenues and rents formerly rendered in kind into ones paid in cash. There were numerous flourishing marketing centres in and near the eastern and southern March in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the importance of their trade with Wales can be judged by the quickness of the English governments to ban trade with Wales at times of Anglo-Welsh wars.” -

D Stephenson In light of the above, some difficult questions have to be asked. Why did so many Welshmen, of all ranks of society, reject Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1277? This was the important conflict: “It was in the war of 1282 that killed Llywelyn, but it was in the war of 1277 that he was crushed, reduced to a shadow of his former eminence”.

One reason may have been the efforts of the princes to introduce a cash economy: commutation of traditional services into money payments was viable for who produced a surplus to be sold in markets, but was a daunting prospect for the average peasant, who lived at bare subsistence level. As late as 1318, over forty years after Llywelyn’s death, the community of West Wales complained to Edward II that they ‘were never accustomed to have money in the Welshry’.