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This ground-breaking study explores the rise of a Welsh elite of administrators and military figures in the generations after the Edwardian Conquests of 1277–88. It shows how a ministerial aristocracy had developed in the Age of the Princes, before the Edwardian conquest threatened to impose English colonial administrations throughout the land. However, close documentary analysis reveals that Edward I (d.1307) emerged in his later life not as the vindictive conqueror of most accounts, but as a ruler dependent on Welsh support, ready to listen to and remedy Welsh grievances, and to encourage the revival of a Welsh governing class. In addition, the book includes the first detailed study of scores of members of that class throughout Wales in the first half of the fourteenth century. It concludes by exploring the mid-century crises that shook the Welsh establishment and set them on the road to the Glyn Dwr rising of 1400.