in the vale of Clwyd, where it would have been natural for Edward to have extended the shire system to the four cantreds.  Military exigences had, however, already erected most of these lands into new marcher lordships, and Edward was perforce content with the union of some fragments of Rhos to the shire of Carnarvon, and with joining together Englefield and some adjoining districts in the new county of Flint.  This arrangement secured the strongholds of Flint and Rhuddlan for the king.  But the district was too small to make it worth while to set up a separate organisation for it, and Flintshire was put under the justice and courts of Chester, so that it became a dependency of the neighbouring palatinate.[1]

    [1] For the shires of Walessee my paper on The Welsh Shires
    in Y Cymmrodor, ix. (1888), 201-26.

The lordships of the march were not directly influenced by this legislation.  They continued to hold their position as franchises until the reign of Henry VIII., and under Edward III. were declared by statute to be no part of the principality but directly subject to the English crown.  Yet the removal of the pressure of a native principality profoundly affected these districts.  The policy of definition made its mark even here.  The liberties of each marcher were defined and circumscribed, and, while scrupulously respected, were incapable of further extension.  The vague jurisdictions of the sheriffs of the border shires were cleared up, and if this process involved some limitation of the royal authority in districts like Clun and Oswestry, which virtually ceased to be parts of Shropshire, there was a compensating advantage in the increased clearness with which the border line was drawn and the royal authority consolidated.  Gradually the marcher lordships passed by lapse into the royal hands, and even from the beginning there were regions, such as Montgomery and Builth, which knew no lord but the king.  All this was, however, an indirect result of the Edwardian conquest.  Strictly speaking it was no conquest of all Wales but merely of the principality, the ancient dominions of Llewelyn, to which most of the crown lands in Wales were joined.

Ecclesiastical settlement followed the political reorganisation.  Peckham was as zealous as Edward in compelling the conquered to follow the law-abiding traditions of the king’s ancient inheritance.  He laboured strenuously for the rebuilding of churches, the preservation and extension of ecclesiastical property, the education of the clergy, and the extirpation of clerical matrimony and simony.  Despite his unsympathetic attitude, he did good work for the Welsh Church by his manful resistance to all attempts of Edward and his subordinates to encroach upon her liberties.  He quaintly thought it would promote the civilisation of Wales if the people were forced to “learn civility” by living in towns and sending their children to school in England.  His assiduous visitation of the Welsh dioceses in 1284 did something to kindle zeal, and win the Welsh clergy from the idleness wherein, he believed, lay the root of all their shortcomings.