Filthy lucre

Keith Williams-Jones on the motives of the conquest of Wales. Amazingly, it was all about money. What. A. Shock.

“The conquest was certainly not a benevolent act of state. Edward I and his armies, like the Normans before them, conquered for their own profit. All potential assets were to be exploited to the full - even German miners were specially recruited to explore the possibilities of working the copper mines at Diserth. It is true that the issues of the archbishoprics of York and Dublin and those of the king’s lands in Ireland had to be diverted to help finance the construction of the castles, but that applied for the most part to extraordinary expenditure. It is also true that the principality’s accounts were heavily in arrears in the early years after 1282-3. But the aim of making the principality self-supporting was soon achieved: by 1300 it had ‘ceased to be a financial burden to the king’ and more than half the proceeds of the principality’s revenue found its way to the royal coffers.

Further, it was only to be expected that a strong, calculating monarch would, sooner or later, seize the opportunity his vast new power in Wales gave him of exacting some kind of payment from the Marcher lords in return for removing the threat which Llywelyn II had once posed for them. The subsidy of 1292-3 was one way of discharging the debt and proved fairly lucrative from the point of view of the crown - far more so, in sum and proportionately, than the ‘new’ subsidy demanded in 1543 immediately after the ‘Union’. If we are correct in assuming that Wales’s contribution to the subsidy of 1292-3 amounted to about £10,000, it follows that as much as one-twelfth of the total raised by the corresponding subsidy in England came from Wales. The amount Wales was expected to furnish in 1543, however, was only £4,291 out of a total of £74,070 - or about one-eighteenth of the whole. In one particular field, at least, Edward got a better bargain out of his conquest that Henry VIII did in forging the ‘Tudor Union’.”

Those who did get a nasty shock were the Marcher lords, who in 1292 were presented with a massive bill by the king as the price of getting rid of their chief enemy.