MOWLIT and the Medieval March
The March of Wales occupied the lands on either side of what is now the border between Wales and England, together with territories running along the southern coastline of Wales as far as Pembroke. These were the territories of the Norman and English Marcher lords who occupied these areas of Wales following the Norman conquest of 1066.
We are now coming to the end of the second year of our five-year project, MOWLIT: ‘Mapping the March: Medieval Wales and England, 1282–1550’. We are collecting a large amount of data on specific entities: the people, places, events, manuscripts and texts circulating in the Welsh Marches. This data is helping us to investigate the multilingual culture of the March and the connections within and between the Welsh and English families living in the Marcher lordships. So far, we have collected more than 2000 data points and made nearly 3000 connections between entities.
Connecting people, places, manuscripts
One of the key places in the region of the March is the town of Ludlow, now in Shropshire, which was once the centre of the Marcher estates belonging to the powerful Mortimer family. Roger Mortimer, the first Earl of March (1287–1330), owned Wigmore Castle in Herefordshire, which was the home of the Mortimers. He also gained possession of Ludlow Castle through his wife Joan de Geneville, making him one of the most wealthy and influential of the Marcher lords. When he was executed in 1330, most of his lands were repossessed by the Crown, but his grandson, also called Roger, the second Earl of March (1328– 1360), restored the family’s estates, including their home at Wigmore.
During Roger’s lifetime, a scribe working in or near Ludlow produced more than 40 legal documents relating to properties in the region. More significantly, the same scribe wrote several multilingual manuscripts—in French, Latin and English—containing literary texts. The most famous of these is British Library Harley MS 2253, containing a set of beautiful lyric poems known as the ‘Harley Lyrics’. Though these are written in Middle English, the poems contain intriguing traces of French and Welsh, the two vernacular languages spoken throughout the region of the March. Matthew Lampitt, one of the postdoctoral researchers working on the MOWLIT project, has written an article about the Ludlow scribe and his literary connections in Ludlow, linking him with the Mortimers and other people, places and manuscripts.
Not far from Ludlow is the town of Oswestry, which is also now in Shropshire. In the Middle Ages, it was a multilingual centre of trade that was home to many Welsh and English people. A manuscript regarded as ‘Welsh’, but actually containing texts in Latin and English as well as Welsh, is National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 26, written around the middle of the fifteenth century. Oswestry was among the estates owned by the FitzAlan family, the earls of Arundel, and Peniarth 26 contains a number of annals relating to the town and its hinterland. However, it also contains astronomical texts, poetry, and political prophecies in the three languages, indicating the multilingual audience for such texts and the preoccupations of a border town.
These two manuscripts, Harley 2253 and Peniarth 26, have traditionally been studied separately, one as part of medieval English studies and the other as part of Welsh literary history. The MOWLIT project offers another way of looking at them as similar products of a distinctively multilingual and multicultural society living in a borderland region where national identities were often plural and fluid. The project Principal Investigator, Helen Fulton, has published an article on manuscript production in the medieval March that shows the role of the Welsh Marcher gentry in preserving Welsh literature and history.
The example of these two manuscripts hints at the richness of the connections we are trying to make between the people who commissioned and owned the many manuscripts in circulation, the places where they were written and read, and the audiences who received them.
Visualising the data
One of our big challenges is how to present and visualise this data so that it can be used by researchers and the general public. We have made a promotional video to publicise the project and draw attention to its ambition and scope.
Our team includes software engineers and postdoctoral researchers who have collaborated to identify the entities that the project aims to capture, and they have designed a database schema to incorporate these entities and their relationships. Initially, the project utilised a third-party service called Airtable (https://airtable.com/), which provided an intuitive tool for creating and testing the schema, along with an initial interface for data capture.
This tool has recently been replaced by a data management application developed by the software engineers. The new tool, hosted by the University of Bristol, offers a more advanced data entry experience based on the workflows utilised by the postdoctoral researchers. The new tool will continue to be enhanced and expanded as the postdoctoral researchers carry on their research and add further entities to the database.
The researchers and software engineers are collaborating with a user experience (UX) consultant and a graphic designer. The UX consultant conducted internal workshops with the team, clarifying the types of data the project aimed to capture and exploring various user journeys through our proposed web-based tool; for example, how external users, such as academics, might utilise the digital tool for their research. This included creating interactive digital mock-ups, enabling us to examine how the data might be interrogated and presented.
The graphic designer collaborated with the MOWLIT team and the UX consultant to develop a brand for the project and the digital tool, using designs based on the mock-ups. Assumptions regarding the data, UX mock-ups and designs were tested with academics, comprising both doctoral students and staff, during a UX workshop held at the end of 2024. The workshop provided valuable feedback, and we are currently refining the mock-ups and designs. These mock-ups and designs will serve as blueprints and templates for the software engineers creating public-facing digital tools.
The end result will be an interactive website that will allow researchers and other users to discover the rich cultural history and geography of the medieval March, along with the diverse people—nobles, gentry, monks, abbots, burgesses, scribes, poets—who lived and worked there.
References
Fulton, H. (2015) ‘The Geography of Welsh Literary Production in Late-Medieval Glamorgan’, Journal of Medieval History, 41(3) pp. 325–340.
Fulton, H. (2019) ‘The Red Book and the White: Gentry libraries in medieval Wales’, in Byrne, A. and Flood, V. (eds) Crossing borders in the Insular Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 23–45.
Lampitt, M. (2024) ‘Introducing the Harley Scribe’, Mortimer Matters, 56 [Online]. Available at: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/introducing-the-harley-scribe.
Rees, W. (1933) Historical map of South Wales and the border in the fourteenth century. Cardiff: Western Mail and Echo Ltd.
PROJECT NAME
Mapping the March: Medieval Wales and England, c. 1282–1550
PROJECT SUMMARY
The project aims to create the first cultural history of the medieval March of Wales, the borderlands between Wales and England. The main aims are to catalogue the manuscripts produced and circulated in the medieval March from 1282 to 1550, to create an original series of digital maps of the Marcher lordships, and to explore cultural identities in a British border region.
PROJECT PARTNERS
Project lead: Helen Fulton, University of Bristol
Postdoctoral researchers: Rachael Harkes and Matt Lampitt
Research administrator: Abi Freeman
Research IT Bristol: Mike Jones
Digital maps: Scott Lloyd and Jon Dollery, RCAHMW
Project partner: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales
PROJECT LEAD PROFILE
Professor Helen Fulton holds the Chair in Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. She has previously held a number of research awards, including a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of medieval Wales and its relations with England, and she has published widely in this field. She is the co-editor of the Cambridge History of Welsh Literature.
PROJECT CONTACTS
Professor Helen Fulton
School of Humanities, University of Bristol, 11 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TB, UK.
Email: mapping-the-march@bristol.ac.uk
Web: https://blog.mowlit.ac.uk
X: @MappingtheMarch
Bluesky: @mappingthemarch.bsky.social
YouTube: @MappingtheMarch
FUNDING
The project was selected for funding by the European Research Council (ERC) and funded by the UKRI Horizon Guarantee programme, under grant agreement No. ERC 101054383/UKRI EP/X027880/1.
Figure legends
Figure 1: View from Bryn Alyn to Moel Famau, near Mold.
Figure 2: The town of Ludlow. Licensed from Shutterstock.
Figure 3: Map of medieval Wales, © Chris Diamond.
Figure 4: Section from William Rees’s map of N-E Wales showing Wigmore and Ludlow.
Figure 5: NLW MS Peniarth 26, p. 39, prophecy in Middle English.
Figure 6: Entering names into Airtable.
Figure 7: Digital workflows.
Figure 8: MOWLIT logo.