³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

The Welsh climate deteriorated after 1300. Wet summers, disease among domestic animals and soil exhaustion caused agricultural problems. By 1320, the population was in decline and would not return to the level of 1300 for another 250 years.

Then in 1349, appalling disaster struck. The Black Death - the plague carried by rat fleas - killed perhaps a third of the population. The epidemic struck again in 1361 and 1369.

The population collapse had far reaching consequences. The afflication led to morbid obsessions and millenarian hopes. Deaths among the taeogion created a demand for free labourers, thus undermining the differentiation between the free and the unfree.

Deaths among the boneddigion slowed and reversed the dividing up of their holdings. Many of them sought to hold their land according to English law, thus allowing them to bequeath their entire property to the eldest son, a process which encourages the growth of extensive landed estates. Distinction based on descent began to give way to distinction based on wealth.

A century after the Black Death, there were signs that the Welsh economy was recovering. A pattern of trade based on cattle and sheep became apparent, a pattern which would dominate the economy until the Industrial Revolution.

Drovers took cattle across Wales to the great fairs of the English cities, and cattle sales became the chief way of introducing ready money into the countryside. Fleeces were spun into yarn, and, with advent of fulling mills, woven into flannel and sold at the markets of the English border towns, Shrewsbury in particular.

With a reviving economy came better housing - the half-timbered buildings of the borderland, for example. By the early 16th century Wales had around 260,000 inhabitants, compared with perhaps 300,000 in 1300.

The earliest Welsh literary tradition is that of the Cynfeirdd, the earliest poets, which included the poets of the Welsh-speaking kingdoms of southern Scotland. The Gogynfeirdd, the not so early poets, belonged to the period 1100 to 1300 and received the patronage of the Welsh princes. The Elegy of Gruffudd ab Yr Ynad Coch to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is probably the finest of the poems of the Gogynfeirdd.

With the extinction of the princes, patronage passed to the gentry families. Their poets produced a distinguished body of verse; that of Dafydd ap Gwilym (c 1320-70) was of particular brilliance. The poets wrote in strict metre embellished with cynghanedd, the intricate system of sound chiming characteristic of Welsh poetry.

Prose writings included the Mabinogi cycle of stories, considered to be the Welsh people's greatest contribution to European literature, and a mass of religious, historical and mythical writings. In music, the greatest skill of the Welsh was their ability to sing in harmony, a skill remarked upon by Giraldus Cambrensis in the 1190s.

Wood carving reached superb standards, particularly in the rood screens of the 15th century. There are sculptured tombs of distinction at St Mary's, Abergavenny, for example. Churches, monasteries and castles offer evidence of the abilities of Welsh stone masons and Gresford, Wales' finest parish church, is a building of special delightfulness.