ABSTRACT
The March of Wales was an extensive frontier zone shaped by the character and chronology of the Anglo-Norman penetration and conquest of Wales. The habits of war and the mechanisms of peace in a fragmented frontier society are but part of a larger process of confrontation and accommodation between two societies and two cultures. The frontier arrangements and institutions of the March of Wales in the later Middle Ages were more sophisticated, complex, and regular than those of other part of the British Isles. In Wales similar institutions were eventually regularized and refined to cope with the problems of a fragmented society in an age of peace. Medieval Ireland was a society habituated to war. Ireland in the thirteenth century the term 'marches' came to be used regularly to describe the areas which lay between Gaelic-controlled and English-dominated areas, and soon terms such as 'marchers' and 'law of the march' became part of the common vocabulary of Irish life.
