highly trained and well-paid troops
kept the Welsh in check.

The civil government of the Edwardian conquests was provided for by the
statute of Wales, issued on Mid-Lent Sunday, 1284, at Rhuddlan,
Edward's usual headquarters. It declared that the land of Wales,
heretofore subject to the crown in feudal right, was entirely
transferred to the king's dominion. To the whole of the annexed
districts the English system of shire government was extended, though
such local customs as appealed to Edward's sense of justice were
suffered to be continued. Gwynedd and its appurtenances were divided
into the three shires of Anglesey, Carnarvon, and Merioneth, and were
collectively put under the justice of Snowdon, whose seat was to be at
Carnarvon, where courts of chancery and exchequer for north Wales were
set up. The shires of Cardigan and Carmarthen were re-organised so as
to include the southern districts which had been subject to Llewelyn,
or to the Welsh lords who had fallen with him. These were put under the
justice of west Wales, whose chancery and exchequer were established at
Carmarthen. It is significant that Edward prepared the way for making
these districts into shires by persuading his brother Edmund, to whom
they had been granted, to abandon his claims over them in return for
ample compensation elsewhere. Without this step the new shires would
only have been palatinates of the Glamorgan or Pembroke type, and the
creation of such franchises was directly contrary to Edward's policy.
It was different in the vale of Clwyd, where it would have been natural
for Edward to have extended the shire system to the four cantreds.
Military exigences had, however, already erected most of these lands
into new marcher lordships, and Edward was perforce content with the
union of some fragments of Rhos to the shire of Carnarvon, and with
joining together Englefield and some adjoining districts in the new
county of Flint. This arrangement secured the strongholds of Flint and
Rhuddlan for the king. But the district was too small to make it worth
while to set up a separate organisation for it, and Flintshire was put
under the justice and courts of Chester, so that it became a dependency
of the neighbouring palatinate.[1]

[1] For the shires of Walessee my paper on _The Welsh Shires_
in _Y Cymmrodor_, ix. (1888), 201-26.

The lordships of the march were not directly influenced by this
legislation. They continued to hold their pos