Writing the Welsh Borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England

Lindy Brady studies the Anglo-Welsh borderlands from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, before the region became the militarised March familiar from the post-Conquest period. Challenging the assumption that Anglo-Welsh relations were defined primarily by hostility, she argues that the borderlands formed a distinctive mixed cultural zone represented in both Anglo-Saxon and Welsh texts.

Through sources including Bede, saints’ lives, Old English riddles and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Brady traces how writers imagined the region and its inhabitants across several centuries. The study shows how literary representations of the borderlands changed around the Norman Conquest and uses those changes to reconsider identity, conflict and cultural exchange on the western edge of Anglo-Saxon England.