ABSTRACT
The Barony of Abergavenny had been created for Edward Nevill , youngest son of the Earl of Westmorland. His successors in the barony and later earldom showed little interest in Wales, for their principal estates lay in the south of England and in the border counties. The Morgans of Tredegar Park near Newport were not to obtain a peerage until 1859, when Sir Charles Morgan, became first Baron Tredegar, but the family claimed descent from the eleventh-century Cadifor Fawr, lord of Cil-sant in west Wales. The growth and consolidation of the great estates in southeast Wales has still to be fully studied. Clearly the penchant of the old Welsh families for marrying their daughters into the English aristocracy much affected the composition of the landowning class. Agricultural rents, political preferment and auspicious marriages were the buttresses of oligarchy, and few of the magnates in south Wales showed any early appreciation of the mineral wealth of their properties.
