This is the first study of the Anglo-Welsh border region in the period
before the Norman arrival in England, from the fifth to the twelfth
centuries. Its conclusions significantly alter our current picture of
Anglo/Welsh relations before the Norman Conquest by overturning the
longstanding critical belief that relations between these two peoples
during this period were predominately contentious. Writing the Welsh
borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates that the region which
would later become the March of Wales was not a military frontier in
Anglo-Saxon England, but a distinctively mixed Anglo-Welsh cultural zone
which was depicted as a singular place in contemporary Welsh and
Anglo-Saxon texts. This study reveals that the region of the Welsh
borderlands was much more culturally coherent, and the impact of the
Norman Conquest on it much greater, than has been previously realised.