The Lawyer: Edward Morgan (I) of Goldgreave, Flintshire

To understand the Jacobean duel at the heart of our story, we must first reconstruct the protagonists’ backgrounds. This involves an exercise in family history which goes beyond the minutiae of genealogy to contextualise and explain the dynamics of the feud from which the duel arose. The Welsh dimension of the duel which focuses on Edward Morgan (I) of Goldgreave, the father of the duellist who also shared his name, is discussed in this section. It is a narrative of social advancement and the accumulation of wealth and influence. It is the story of an individual taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by the sixteenth century union of England and Wales, and a tale of personal ambition and the politics of marriage and kinship.

The Morgan family home at Goldgreave (also called ‘Gwylgre’, or ‘Golden Grove’) was situated in north-east Wales on Flintshire's northern border near the Dee Estuary. It lay in the parish of Llanasa in Prestatyn Hundred. Flintshire had been carved out of the lands of the defeated princes of Gwynedd by Edward I in 1284. It had close administrative and legal bonds with the county palatine of Chester and was placed under the control of Chester's justiciar. These ties continued after Henry VIII's reorganisation of Welsh justice and administration in the 1530s and 1540s, with Chester's Chief Justice presiding over Flintshire's great sessions court (the equivalent of the assizes found in English shires). The Morgans claimed ties with the old rulers of Gwynedd through their descent from Ednyfed Fychan, seneschal to Llywelyn the Great and progenitor of many of north Wales's leading families in the early modern period, including the Tudors themselves. They were not of the first order of families in Tudor Flintshire like the Hanmers, Mostyns and Salusburys, however, and did not feature on the county bench of justices in the decades after that body was established in 1541.