Over the rest of summer and the autumn, I’ll be doing a series on local government (a revisit to a topic covered on the old Oggy Bloggy Ogwr in 2013) – both in a devolved context and in the context of an independent Wales.
To kick things off, here’s how local government has developed and evolved in Wales.
You all know by now that pre-annexation Wales was made up of semi-independent principalities, with perhaps only one or two of them being dominant at any particular time.
While the principalities acted as administrative divisions in their own right, for this exercise I’m more interested in what was happening below that.
Some different names have been used, but it’s broadly accepted that medieval Wales was divided into the cantref/cantrefi (English: would translate as “a hundred settlements/a hundred“) which were in turn made up of anything between 2-7 cwmwd/cymydau (English: commote – I suppose the equivalent of a parish or what the French would call a commune).
The cantrefi were the higher tier of local government, while the cymydau made up the lower level. This is similar to the difference between the current counties/county borough and community councils, though the cymydau were further sub-divided into manorial estates (maenor/maenorau).
There’s little information on what each tier did for day-to-day governance, though each cantref had its own court to decide cases under Welsh law. The cymudau were more akin to parishes in England.
Some accounts suggest that the dividing line between the two tiers blurred to the point where the cymydau/commote became more important overall.
Following the Norman conquest, the system of cantrefi and cymydau largely remained intact in both the Principality and the Marcher lordships – the latter of which had a great deal of autonomy as Wales was yet to be annexed into England. The Marcher lords protected this autonomy as well as they could.
The Council of Wales and the Marches was later established as an administrative body for Wales and the border regions (a primitive form of devolution). Within Wales, however, local government was gradually reformed in line with England.
Although some English-style shire counties had already been established by this time, the Laws in Wales Acts created thirteen counties across the entirety of the country. The cantrefi, cymydau and Marcher lordships were all abolished.
“County business” under this system was generally overseen by a Justice of the Peace. As this suggests, the role of local government was more judicial in nature; a means of applying the law and making sure central government/the crown had a presence at a local level. The equivalent of a county council was the “quarter sessions”, which met four times a year in each county.
Quarter sessions not only had a role in the administration of justice – hearing criminal cases – but they had a growing civil role. This role included road maintenance, prisons, licensing, policing, the operation of lunatic asylums (the precursor to psychiatric hospitals) and enforcing poor laws (primarily through workhouses).
Smaller local units of local government (boroughs) held their own quarter sessions or had county/borough councils if granted the right to do so – such as through a charter.
