Townships in Montgomeryshire

Townships in Montgomeryshire are divisions of the ancient parishes of the county of Montgomery. In 1539 townships were grouped together in Hundreds. The Townships which were recognised were based on the older Welsh divisions of Tref, or plural Trefi, which had formed the Welsh administrative districts of the Commote. Not all of the former Tref were recognised and some smaller trefi were amalgamated into larger townships. A township was allocated to a particular parish, but townships were recognised as administrative districts, rather than the parishes.

The Townships have been mapped by Murray Chapman. The Townships were grouped into Hundreds, and this formed the basis for the Montgomeryshire Court of Great Sessions. The Court met for the first time in 1541, and established the civil and criminal administration of the new County of Montgomeryshire and also arranged for the election of the Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire. A Mr Sulyard was appointed as surveyor to define the new counties and presumably agree the new townships. The number of Trefi were reduced and many were grouped together. An example is the township named Trefor and Ffin in Kerry. In the large township of Rhandir in Llandyssil parish, the trefi of Coed-wig, Trefganol and Cefn-y-coed were all merged. Many names of Trefi were lost, but some are noted in Melville Richards study of administrative units. The exact extent of many townships can be recovered from many of the Enclosure Awards, but for some Montgomeryshire parishes such as Llangynog the information appears to be missing.

Townships have been studied in Wales and the Marches by Dorothy Sylvester. She has shown that in Montgomeryshire and North West Wales Parishes were normally larger in the Medieval period and would contain many townships, while in Southern and Western Wales, parishes would be smaller and often the extent of the Township will coincide with that of the parish. Sylvester notes that in 1811 there were 53 parishes in Montgomeryshire, with an average size of 15.8 square miles, making them larger than most parishes in other Welsh counties. There were about 239 townships, with an average of 4.5 per parish. Some Montgomeryshire township were within ecclesiastical parishes which were outside County. This is particularly the case along the Montgomeryshire Shroshire border and Sylvester’s figures may have to be modified. The pattern of local government for Montgomeryshire based on the Township, Hundred and the Court of Great Sessions survived until 1830, when the Court of Great Sessions was abolished while the Assises and Quarter Sessions remained. The responsibilities of Townships further declined with the establishment of the Poor Law Unions in 1834, which were organised on a parish basis. Townships in Montgomeryshire finally disappeared as a recognised administrative unit with the establishment of the Montgomeryshire County Council in 1886 and the Rural District Councils in 1894.

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