The two lordships

The county of Glamorgan was created in the time of Henry VIII by merging two lordships: to Glamorgan proper was added the lordship of Gower and Kilvey, which lay west of the river Tawe. The new county's internal geography ensured that its culture would always be an amalgam of very diverse elements. The pre-Tudor divisions between east and west continued to exist because of the survival of the lordships of Gower and Glamorgan, each with their own lord claiming particular rights and dues. In the seventeenth century, this schism acquired political significance. While Gower was a possession of the catholic Marquis of Worcester, Glamorgan was held by the puritan Earls of Pembroke, and the repercussions of this will be a major theme of our study of Glamorgan's political history.

Of still greater structural importance was the enormous contrast between the barren pastoral area to the north of the county and the prosperous arable landscape of the south, which distinction was not recognised by any formal or legal boundary. The north, or Blaenau (uplands), is a plateau cut by deep valleys, an area which at its worst was a wilderness of barren moors and peat-bogs. Large parts of Glamorgan were dismissed by travellers as featuring only ‘horrid rocks and precipices’, and some of the coal-rich lands on which the country's Victorian prosperity was based were almost unvisited before 1800.