Home Forums Medieval Where to find Uchelwr? Reply To: Where to find Uchelwr?

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Avatar photoGuy Farrish
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I refer to my suggestion above – start sculpting, start talking to a sculptor or talk to a figure company.

And you then will have a figure of illustration No.48 of Heath’s book (but not a precise and exact copy of what Uchelwyr looked like – as frankly, no-on knows to that degree of precision).

The descriptions of Welsh and Irish and Scots in various campaigns and hosts that tend to be remembered are those that focus on the poor foot soldiers because of their difference. The ones who blended in and the higher class warriors don’t get mentioned – not because Irish, Welsh and Scottish upper class warriors weren’t there, but because they were so like their Anglo/Norman counterparts they didn’t merit a mention in the chroniclers eye or because their descriptions slide past as unexceptional to historians and writers looking for the unusual to surprise their audiences.

With regard to retention of their ‘Celtic’ nature, this is an enticing romantic aim, helped not least by people like Gerald and his division of the country into ‘native Wales’ and ‘Marchia Wallia’. Yes there was English settlement in walled towns allied to castle invasion and taxation patterns, particularly in lowland Wales reflect southern English models, but the initial division between the two cultural developments rapidly melded and the Wales of the mid 14th century is very different from that of pre conquest Wales, right across Wales and not just in the walled towns which had broken their bounds mixed with the Welsh hinterland and produced a very different economic and cultural model from both its parent roots.

So Welsh nobility (probably mostly Anglo-Welsh after the conquest of Edward I, but considerably so even prior to that calamity) would have increasingly mirrored their western European counterparts in dress and aspiration. Barelegged Dark Age warriors would have been as confusing to most Welsh medieval hosts as to their English and French chroniclers.