Friday, 16 September 2022

Morgan's run (2)



In 1279 the royal justices met at Oswestry to preside over competing claims to the land of Llandovery and commotes of Hirfryn and Perfedd. The rival parties were John Giffard and his wife Matilda on the one side, and Rhys Fychan, Rhys ap Maredudd and Morgan ap Maredudd on the other. Morgan is the subject of these posts, so to avoid migraines let us focus on him. 

 An enquiry held the previous year, 1278, had found that Morgan was ejected from all his lands by Earl Gilbert de Clare and Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. Yet the court hearing of 1279 shows that his last land of Hirfryn, seized by Llywelyn, had found its way into the hands of John Giffard. It is impossible to believe that Llywelyn would have re-granted land held by Welsh barony to an English lord, so therein lies a mystery. 

Morgan came to Oswestry and claimed two parts of his former land of Hirfryn. It seems he took bad advice, because he made the mistake of claiming against Giffard alone. Giffard countered that he had no claim to Hirfryn, except in right of his wife. For this blunder Morgan was amerced (fined) and told he could proceed again by summons if he wished. 

He returned with a new plea at the court of Montgomery on 1 July. This time he claimed to have inherited Hirfryn from his father, and that he ought to hold it by Welsh law and custom as opposed to English. Those were indeed the terms by which Lord Edward had granted the commote to Morgan's father a decade earlier. He was given a day at 'coram rege' (king's court) to plead his case. This came to nothing when the jurors failed to turn up. 

Morgan was also litigating against Gilbert de Clare over lands in Ystrad Tywi and Glamorgan, and one of Clare's tenants, Bartholomew de Mora, over land in Llanwern. The result was another disaster. At the first hearing the justices could not agree if the earl had been reasonably summoned. At the second, Clare's attorney argued that Morgan was claiming lands in Glamorgan, but the writ only mentioned the land of Edlogan. On that basis, variance of writ and pleading, the claim was void. 

In medieval law, a 'good writ' was all. If the spoken plea did not match the text, a case was thrown out or had to start over. Morgan and Clare were summoned to appear again a month later. They did so, but Morgan was unable to deny the faulty writ. Thus he got nothing. He did no better with the Llanwern claim. To defend this, Clare's bailiff came and argued that Morgan should make the claim in the earl's court, not the king's, because he was a tenant of the earl. Morgan countered that he claimed as a baron of the King. At a further hearing, it was shown that his writ only mentioned lands in Glamorgan, while he was pleading for lands in Llanwern. 

So, Morgan had made the same mistake twice. He made one further plea of land at Abergavenny, against his fellow Welshman Rhys Fychan, but failed to attend the court. Well, why bother.


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