‘The possession of land [to quote Professor Pollard] was the key to social dominance and political power’ in much of Europe in the fifteenth century. At the same time, in England and Wales – region by region, county by county, lordship by lordship – land, society and power were marked by differences as well as common features in administrative structures, management styles and political and social experiences, and, in an age of civil strife, certain peculiarities and disharmonies. In these contexts, the marcher lordships of Wales had a singular character and a distinctive part to play during the Wars of the Roses.

The rulers and inhabitants of these lordships in southern and eastern Wales, Gower among them, had recently experienced Owain Glyn Dŵr's revolt, either directly in many areas, or less directly in others as unsettling news arrived from neighbouring communities and lordships. There was physical destruction, and rural and urban folk alike were inclined (or induced) to adopt a variety of attitudes, for or against the rebels. In Gower some would have chosen the rebel side and others not, yet all – including the marcher lord himself – would surely have striven to emerge as peaceably and securely as possible after hostilities had generally ceased in the lordship by 1406. Such reactions were widespread in the decades that followed the revolt, whether in royal counties (such as Carmarthenshire) or the lordships of English nobles who were the marcher lords, among them the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, whose family had been lords of Gower since 1331 (apart from the years 1354–97). In this connection, it is still worth quoting the perceptive comment of G.M. Trevelyan in his classic (if in other respects dated) history of the English people: ‘The Wars of the Roses were to a large extent a quarrel among Marcher Lords. For the great Lords Marcher were closely related to the English throne, and had estates and political interests both in England and the Welsh March.’ Some of the implications and limitations of this observation for lords and their social elites are worth exploring in the lordship of Gower. At a seigneurial level, Gower became enmeshed in the wider political disputes about possession of the crown no earlier than the summer of 1460.

The marcher lordship of Gower in south Wales rarely rated a mention in the proceedings of the medieval English parliament. However, it achieved notoriety when the Commons and the Lords met in the winter of 1439–40: they were treated to a harrowing story with Gower at its centre. A petition was submitted to the Commons, either in the parliament's first session at Westminster between 12 November and 21 December 1439, or more likely in the second session held at Reading between 14 January and the third week of February 1440, on behalf of a young widow, Margaret Malefaunt. Her husband, Sir Thomas Malefaunt, had died in London on 8 May 1438, and the petition described how, in the course of her journey to London some weeks later from the Malefaunt estates in Pembrokeshire, she was abducted in Gower, and then taken to the neighbouring lordship of Glamorgan where she was raped and forced into marriage by her husband's former servant, Lewys Leyshon. The purpose of the petition was to secure the arrest and punishment of Leyshon: it accordingly related Margaret's view of the incident and proposed certain legal procedures by which he could be brought to justice.

Sir Thomas and Margaret Malefaunt were lord and lady of the manors of Upton and Pill in the lordship of Pembroke and of the manors of Wenvoe and St. George in the Vale of Glamorgan. In 1438 they were, therefore, mesne tenants of both Humphrey, duke of Gloucester and earl of Pembroke, and Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick and lord of Glamorgan. The incident in Gower, whose lord was John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, casts light on several aspects of society and the law in fifteenth-century England and Wales: on relationships – including judicial relationships – between three marcher lordships and between them and the crown, on the availability of justice (including for women), on relations between marcher lords and their prominent tenants, and on the interconnections of the English and Welsh gentry and their links with the royal household.

Doubtless in the light of advice available to Margaret from her relatives, friends and attorneys, the first part of her petition recounts what happened in Gower and Glamorgan in June 1438.

a framework

In 1300 Wales was almost as urbanised a country as England (Map 22.12). The current view, based largely, if tentatively, on the surviving records of a lay subsidy imposed on Wales by Edward I in 1292–3, is that Wales' population at that time was about 300,000 souls. It had about 100 towns and chartered boroughs, albeit they were on average smaller in size than those of England; only a minority is likely to have had more than 1,000 inhabitants each. The proportion of Wales' population that lived in these towns seems not to have been significantly smaller than town-dwelling proportions in England (estimated at 15 per cent) or Spain; fewer than one fifth of these town dwellers were of Welsh descent. Furthermore, in 1300 townsmen and country dwellers from Wales were regular visitors to the substantial, prosperous border towns of Chester, Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Ludlow, Leominster, Hereford, Tewkesbury, Gloucester and, by sea and ferry, to Bristol, whose own merchants customarily plied their trades in many a Welsh town.

Wales in 1300, then, was an urbanised society to a significant degree. This may seem surprising in view of the fact that Gerald of Wales (c. 1146–1223), who knew southern Wales especially well and had travelled widely through much of the country, implied that the Welsh population: do not live in towns, villages or castles, but lead a solitary existence, deep in the woods. It is not their habit to build great palaces, or vast and towering structures of stone and cement. Instead they content themselves with wattled huts on the edges of the forest, put up with little labour or expense, but strong enough to last a year or so.