Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T15:11:25.417Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Wealth, status and ‘race’ in the Ruthin of Edward II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2005

MATTHEW STEVENS
Affiliation:
Department of History and Welsh History, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DY

Abstract

This article is a case study of the racially mixed, seigniorial borough of Ruthin (modern Denbighshire) in the early fourteenth century. It seeks to explore material inequalities and social aspects of the integration of English and Welsh burgesses in an urban setting. It concludes that whilst a disproportionate quantity of wealth did lie with the borough's English residents, Welsh burgesses enjoyed nearly comprehensive access to the community's wealth-generating and status-affirming activities. And, the behaviour of Ruthin's elites was more strongly dictated by their socioeconomic strata than racial background.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

‘Race’ has been used here only in response to the earlier historiographical context concerning the interaction of English and Welsh cultural practitioners in the Middle Ages, and for the convenience its succinctness affords by comparison to more politically correct alternatives. It here bears no correlation to any of the negative baggage which has been heaped upon the word in preceding decades.