Introduction

I have referred to the elite families as ‘great gentry’ in the context of Glamorgan, but this does not suggest their status relative to landowners from elsewhere in Britain. Wales was proverbial for poor but proud gentlemen who would have been dwarfed by even the yeomen of Kent or Norfolk. In Caernarvonshire or Merionethshire in the early eighteenth century, an annual income of only £800 was very rare, at a time when this would not have put most English squires in the first rank of their communities. A typically Welsh pattern was that of Radnorshire, where the saying went:

But as so often, we find that Glamorgan followed English rather than Welsh patterns. If we take the English criterion of ‘great gentry’ as those possessing annual incomes of about £1,000 in the 1670s (£2,000 about 1710) then about fifteen Glamorgan estates would qualify. This community was not dissimilar in wealth from Dr Roebuck's sample of Yorkshire baronets; and (it will be argued) at least equal to many European aristocrats.

This chapter examines the means by which the wealth of the gentry rose dramatically during the eighteenth century, and stresses both demographic factors and improved estate administration.