Little England Beyond Wales: Re-defining the Myth

Abstract

The southern part of Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales is today popularly known as Little England Beyond Wales. This is a headline for a cultural history which gives us cricket in West Wales (Figure 1) and which explains how English as a language came to dominate this area on the north side of the Bristol Channel, following its conquest by Anglo-Normans in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. This history, however, has drawn the interpretation of placenames and landscape towards an assumption that this is a product of massive settlement by Norman lords and English peasants. This article provides a critique of that myth by discussing its nature, origin and development. While accepting the argument of linguistic change, it does question the assumptions of process, especially those related to physical change in the landscape. The work of the Carew Castle Archaeological Project provides a case study for analysing some of the details of landscape morphology and development in the critical period. It concludes that the landscape of South Pembrokeshire, as in North Pembrokeshire, is likely to be founded on a pre-Norman base of dispersed settlement and co-axial field systems, with some nucleation also beginning as a process towards the end of this period. However, nucleation was on a relatively small scale and continued throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Tudor era, when the myth of Little England was itself being created. Indeed it could be suggested that the manipulation of the landscape was a deliberate act of Anglicising by an aspirant gentry in the political circumstances of the Tudor policy of amalgamation which culminated in the Acts of Union and which is only now being undone in contemporary Wales.