The title of the King to his Lordships in Wales and the Marches rested on the same grounds as his title to the Realm of England,—namely, conquest and submission. The titles of his Barons to their Lordships Marchers were similarly founded. The sole distinction between a Crown Lordship and a Lordship Marcher was the condition of feudal tenure to which the latter was subject, a condition perfectly consistent with the independent sovereignty of the tenant within his tenement, as is evident from the example of many states of continental Europe during the feudal period.[1] All Lordships in Wales and the Marches held by, or in chief of, the Crown were, in respect of internal government, alike independent sovereignties.[2] The King had within his Lordships all royal prerogatives of dominion, jurisdiction, and revenue, not as King of England, but as Lord by conquest or submission. His Barons had within their Lordships Marchers the same prerogatives in their own right as Lords Marchers without any royal grant.[3]
King Edward I. himself finally overthrew the last native government in Wales in the eleventh year of his reign, after which no new Lordship Marcher was, or indeed could be, created.[4] In the following year he issued the famous Statutes of Wales, otherwise called, from the place of their enactment, the Statutes of Rhyddlan.
The instrument containing and authorising these statutes is well described by the Lords' Committee on the Dignity of a Peer, in their Report, as approved by the great lawyer Lord Redesdale.[5] It is not, nor does it purport to be, a parliamentary act, but a charter of the King to all his subjects of the land of Snowdon, and of other his lands in Wales, emanating throughout from his sole authority, and having his own seal affixed. The absolute power of legislation which he assumed is that generally allowed to be inherent in a sovereign on foreign conquest, and was neither more nor less than belonged to every Lord Marcher, as well as to himself.
The King commences his charter by declaring that Divine Providence had brought the land of Wales, previously subject to him by feudal law, entirely into his possession, and annexed and united it to the Crown of his kingdom. This was strictly true of the newly-conquered principality, and in some sense of the more
- ↑ Coke, 4 Inst. c. xlvii. p. 240, note.
- ↑ Yr. Bk. 19 H. VI. 12; Harg. L. T. 399; Coke, 4 Inst. c. xlii. p. 223.
- ↑ Coke, Entr. Quo Warr. 9, f. 549 b.
- ↑ Govt. of Wales, p. 107.
- ↑ First Report (1820), div. viii. vol. i. p. 191.
Welch, to hold of us and our heirs, save Kardigan with its dependencies, which we retain. Dated at Caen, 3 June, 2 John (A.D. 1200).—Rot. Chart. 66 b.
