page_title: England–Wales border
section_title: March of Wales
hierarchical_section_title: England–Wales border / History / March of Wales
caption_attribution_description: A view of Chepstow Castle and Bridge from Tutshill.
context_page_description: The England–Wales border, sometimes referred to as the Wales–England border or the Anglo-Welsh border, is the border between England and Wales, two constituent countries of the United Kingdom. It runs for 160 miles from the Dee estuary, in the north, to the Severn estuary in the south. It has followed broadly the same line since the 8th century, and in part that of Offa's Dyke; the modern boundary was fixed in 1536, when the former marcher lordships which occupied the border area were abolished and new county boundaries were created.
  The administrative boundary of Wales was confirmed in the Local Government Act 1972. Whether Monmouthshire was part of Wales, or an English county treated for most purposes as though it were Welsh, was also settled by the 1972 Act, which included it in Wales.
context_section_description: Immediately after the Norman conquest of England, King William installed one of his most trusted confidants, William FitzOsbern, as Earl of Hereford. By 1071 he had started the building of Chepstow Castle, the first castle in Britain built of stone, near the mouth of the Wye. It served as a base from which the Normans continued to expand westward into south Wales, establishing a castle at Caerleon and extinguishing the Welsh kingdom of Gwent. William also installed Roger de Montgomerie at Shrewsbury, and Hugh d'Avranches at Chester, creating a new expansionist earldom in each case. In the Domesday Book of 1086, Norman lands are recorded west of the Wye at Chepstow and Caldicot in the Gwent Levels (Welsh: Gwent Is-coed); over the whole of north east Wales as far west as the River Clwyd, an area known to the Welsh as the Perfeddwlad; and west of Offa's Dyke, especially in Powys where a new castle was named, after its lord, Montgomery.
  Domesday Book no doubt records the extent of English penetration into Wales. This suggests that Offa's Dyke still approximately represented the boundary between England and Wales. However, during the anarchy of Stephen various Welsh princes were able to occupy lands beyond it, including Whittington, Shropshire (see Whittington Castle) and Maelor Saesneg, hitherto in England. These lands were brought under English lordship by Henry II of England, but became Marcher lordships, and so part of Wales. This involved a loss of direct rule by the English crown.
  Over the next four centuries, Norman lords established mostly small lordships, at times numbering over 150, between the Dee and Severn and further west. The precise dates and means of formation of the lordships varied, as did their size. Hundreds of small castles, mostly of the motte and bailey type, were built in the border area in the 12th and 13th centuries, predominantly by Norman lords as assertions of power as well as defences against Welsh raiders and rebels. Many new towns were established across the area, some such as Chepstow, Monmouth, Ludlow and Newtown becoming successful trading centres, and these tended to be a focus of English settlement. However, the Welsh continued to attack English soil and supported rebellions against the Normans.
  The Marches, or Marchia Wallia, were to a greater or lesser extent independent of both the English monarchy and the Principality of Wales, which remained based in Gwynedd in the north west of the country. By the early 12th century, they covered the areas which would later become Monmouthshire and much of Flintshire, Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire, Brecknockshire, Glamorgan, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. Some of the lordships, such as Oswestry, Whittington, Clun, and Wigmore had been part of England at the time of Domesday, while others such as the Lordship of Powys were Welsh principalities that passed by marriage into the hands of Norman barons. In ecclesiastical terms, the ancient dioceses of Bangor and St. Asaph in the north, and St. David's and Llandaff in the south, collectively defined an area which included both the Principality and the March, and coincided closely with later definitions of Wales.
  The Principality of Wales (Welsh: Tywysogaeth Cymru) covered the lands ruled by the Prince of Wales directly, and was formally founded in 1216, and later recognised by the 1218 Treaty of Worcester between Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, Prince of Gwynedd, and King John of England. Encompassing two-thirds of modern Wales, the principality operated as an effectively independent entity from the reign of Llywelyn until 1283 (though it underwent a period of contraction during the early part of the reign of Dafydd ap Llywelyn in the 1240s, and again for several years from the beginning of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd's rule in 1246). Its independence was characterised by a separate legal jurisprudence based on the well established laws of Cyfraith Hywel, and by the increasingly sophisticated court of the Aberffraw dynasty.
  The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 followed the conquest of the Principality by Edward I of England
caption: The River Wye, 1816 road bridge and castle at Chepstow. The river forms the boundary between Monmouthshire, Wales (left) and Gloucestershire, England (right)
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