ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the material and conceptual boundaries of households situated in their broader landscape contexts. The meaning of boundary breaking is employed during inter-household and neighbourhood disputes and, importantly, the complex demarcations of household space in upland settlements. Threats of impoverishment and dislocation, physically enacted through destruction of property, had a potentially destabilizing impact upon the material and spatial agency of the victim's household. Breaking the boundaries of house, field, locked chests and cupboards where written deeds and records were kept, and assaulting the bodies of victims, were deeply meaningful precisely. The repercussions, real and imagined, of forcible entry and attacks upon the boundaries and goods belonging to the household shed light on the contested nature of dwelling in the Welsh landscape at the turn of the seventeenth century. In the conflict over the right and title to dwell in the landscape, women were both agents and victims of forcible entry and disseisin.