The Medieval Extents of Anglesey – Mapping the Domesday Book of North Wales

Our Public Map Platform project deals with the ways maps can reflect and shape our communities in the present and the future, but as a historian, I turned to the past. The two medieval ‘Extents’ of Anglesey are the closest things this part of Wales has to a ‘Domesday Book’ – and like the Domesday book, they came in the wake of a violent foreign conquest. But they can also tell us interesting things about a medieval society grappling with inequality, the pandemic of the Black Death, and standing on the brink of climate change.

The Extents of Anglesey are medieval administrative documents used for taxation. The original of the 1352 Extent is in Bangor University Archives, having been kept at the now-ruined manor house of Baron Hill for centuries. It was probably taken there from the North Wales Exchequer at Caernarfon, which was housed in the gatehouse on the town walls facing away from the sea.

In the medieval period, Wales was divided into a number of administrative units – the native Welsh kingdoms, the borderland lordships of the Marcher Lords, and, after the English conquest in the 1280s, the Principality of Wales (roughly the north-west and south-west of the country). The Principality covered the lands of the native Welsh princes conquered by the English king, which were ruled directly by the king of England or, usually, given to his son and heir. The Extents were commissioned by these rulers. The first Extent was made in 1284, commissioned by King Edward I of England, only a year after his conquest of Gwynedd and less than a year and a half after the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd at Cilmeri. The basic purpose was to outline how much tax was owed to the king from his newly-conquered lands – and because of this, the Extent is also useful in telling us how Gwynedd was governed under Llywelyn and the native princes.

The second Extent was commissioned in 1352 by Edward’s great-grandson, the English prince of Wales, Edward, also known as the Black Prince. In his time, the war between the English and the French meant that the Principality of Wales became a source of income and troops for the warmongering prince, and the death of so many people in the Black Death of the previous decade meant that the 1284 Extent was now hopelessly out of date.

By looking at the Extents, we can find out a lot about medieval society on Môn. They don’t tell us everything – only what people owed to the king or the prince. But this tells us a lot – who owned land, how much it was worth, who lived there, what the land was used for. The 1284 Extent has a lot of what we call renders in kind – people who owed the king a hundred eggs, or the milk of three cows, or a certain amount of barley. They could also owe the king work – for example, a few days’ work a year repairing one of the local mills. What we see changing between the 1284 Extent and the 1352 one is the conversion of these from food and work into cash payments. As the weight of the English administration of the Principality increased, with more money needed for war with France, the traditional ways of collecting taxes became more focused on cash.

The way I have been using this data is by focusing on one particular area – Aberffraw. This was the most important court of the Welsh princes of Gwynedd, though it became much less important after the conquest. By comparing the 1284 and 1352 Extents, we see a few changes – as noted, payments of crops and food became cash payments. Another change is that a lot of the garden plots in Aberffraw, which people held as the prince’s tenants, were vacant – this may be because the owners of these gardens, who are often named, had died in the Black Death. But we also see rents and taxes going up despite the fact that the population had declined – this increase in extractive taxation alongside social change, under an unfair English regime, led to the outbreak of twenty years of revolt against the English under Owain Glyndwr in 1400.

But mapping this stuff is also interesting for what it tells us about our current landscape. In mapping the area around Aberffraw as part of the modern Open Street Map, I came across a number of old mills – ruined watermills at Cellar Mill, Melin Gwna, and Melin y Traeth, and the windmill at Bryn Du, Melin y Bont. These are still features of the landscape, but they are all mentioned in the medieval Extents and were essential to the lives of local people in the Middle Ages. People had to take their corn to these mills, which were owned by the lord, and they often had to spend some of their time repairing and maintaining them. The profits from this formed a large part of the royal income.

We also see how the use of the landscape has changed – the barer, sandy land between Bodorgan and the sea is mostly lightly-used grazing land nowadays, but in the middle ages these were some of the most important lands around Aberffraw for those collecting money for the king or prince – these were bond settlements known as tir cyfrif, where tenants weren’t allowed to leave their lands and owed a lot more dues to their lord than free tenants elsewhere in Aberffraw. And from the 1284 Extent, we can see that this land supported sheep and hens, that it produced milk, butter, and cheese, and grew corn, barley, and wheat. This was no doubt easier before the climate changes of the late Middle Ages made this land much more sandy and dune-covered.

The map I’m making takes the information from these medieval Extents and places it – as accurately as possible – onto a multi-layered U-Map. Ideally, at the end of the project, this electronic map of our distant past can form another level on our public map of Anglesey. If we look to the past searching exclusively for lessons about the present and future, we can end up distorting our understanding of that past. But looking at it on its own terms – taking these documents and mapping them out as well as possible – can illuminate our own situation by exposing the long and deep history of the places we live, showing how they have developed. By looking at these medieval documents, we can see the ways in which this land and its people changed during the Middle Ages – but this can also give us insight into how they might change in our own lifetimes.