Unofficial Frontiers: Welsh-English Borderlands in the Victorian Period

Abstract

Life on a shifting frontier was a defining experience for generations of Americans and one that received academic recognition by Frederick Jackson Turner in his seminal 1893 essay.¹ In Britain, by contrast, the sea has always been the most important and immutable border—separating the island from the European mainland. But Britain also has its internal borderlands, with their own history and peculiar character. For centuries the borderland between Scotland and England was as notorious for its lawlessness as the Wild West in its heyday. The border between England and Wales was also originally a place of contestation and conflict.