County

The population of Pembrokeshire in 1670 has been estimated at around 32,000, making it the fifth largest of the Welsh counties by that measure. By size, however, it was small, its county leaders asserting in 1626 that it was at no point more than 18 miles wide. L. Owen, ‘The Population of Wales in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion, 1959, 113; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Pembrokeshire’. Culturally, it was marked by a linguistic divide established in the eleventh century when the region was subject to Anglo-Norman colonization.

Radnorshire was one of the smallest and most barren counties in seventeenth-century Wales. K. Parker, Radnorshire from Civil War to Restoration (Logaston, 2000), 1-2; R. Suggett, Houses and Hist. in the March of Wales: Radnorshire 1400-1800 (Aberystwyth, 2005), 3, 6-7, 9. It was described in the 1670s as ‘for soil, very hungry and ungrateful to the husbandman ... being so mountainous and rocky, especially in the west and north parts, which are fit only to feed cattle. And were it not for the many rivers which so plentifully water it ...

What struck contemporary commentators on Cardiganshire was evidently the sparse pasture of the county’s uplands, ‘horrible with the sight of bare stones’. In the eyes of those who measured prosperity by the extent and quality of farming practices, the landscape was rendered even less tolerable by the relative absence of animal husbandry. The Itinerary in Wales of John Leland ed. L.

Montgomeryshire was described in the 1670s as ‘very hilly and mountainous but interlaced with many fertile valleys both for corn and pasturage ... It hath for its eastern limits Shropshire, for its southern the counties of Radnor and Cardigan, for its western, Merionethshire, and for its northern, Denbighshire with parts of Merioneth and Shropshire’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 289.

Breconshire lay about half way in demographic size among the Welsh counties, with a population estimated to have been above 27,000 by 1670. L. Owen, ‘The Population of Wales’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), 113. Its topography was dominated by the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons, but in the eastern and western fringes of the county there was scope for the growing of wheat to complement the pasturage dictated by the upland conditions. Leland’s Itinerary in Wales ed. L. Toulmin Smith (1906), 104.

Adopting the style of the Old Testament jeremiad, John Jones I* asked a correspondent rhetorically ‘where is there more sin to encounter with, where more ignorance, where more hatred to the people of God, where the word saint more scorned, than in Merionethshire?’. ‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 185. The correct answer was of course nowhere, in his eyes, but most of his contemporaries would have been struck more by the county’s remoteness than by its spiritual desolation.

Seventeenth-century Flintshire consisted of a relatively narrow strip of land stretching along the north-Wales coast between Denbighshire and Cheshire, and a detached enclave to the south east, the Maelor Saesneg (English Maelor), that was surrounded by Denbighshire, Cheshire and Shropshire. The county was described in the 1670s as ‘not over-mountainous as the other parts of Wales, and interlaced with fertile valleys both for corn and pasturage, feeding good store of small cattle from which they make plenty of butter and cheese’. R.

By the seventeenth century, Carmarthenshire had through the incorporation of outlying lordships become the largest of the Welsh counties. In 1646 the gentry described the ‘mere commodities’ of their county as ‘butter, cheese, hay, oats etc.’, but insisted that ‘the subsistence of our county consists in stock of cattle not in corn or other commodities’. C108/189, petition of Carm.

Glamorgan’s topography made an impression on every visitor, its coastal plain of Y Fro (the vale of Glamorgan) in sharp contrast to the more northerly hills of Y Blaenau. The portway, the main road followed westwards from Cardiff, marked roughly the borderlands where hills and vale met, ‘the ‘border vale’ as conceptualized by modern historians. R. Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia ed. B. Ll. James (S. Wales Rec.Soc.

The island of Anglesey, rich in cultural significance though it was for the Welsh people, not least as the patrimonial home of the Tudor dynasty, was in the seventeenth century marked by its poverty. Indeed, Penmynydd, from whence the Tudors had sprung, was thought the most barren parish of all. In 1636 it was asserted by a resident that agricultural practice on Anglesey was backward, and no more than three men there could ‘lay out £300 at an instant’. Cal. Salusbury Corresp.