Cwm Ciddy Medieval Village

 

The town of Barry, despite ostensibly being a late Victorian creation has roots which go deeper into our past than the rows of uniformed Victorian terrace houses belie. Barry in fact has a rich medieval past. Although by and large being lost at the time of the Victorian period, there were a good number of these ancient sites from the medieval period within the Barry area which were waiting to be rediscovered.  

Until the twentieth century, our knowledge of the medieval past of the Barry area, in particular that of the villages was poorly, if at all understood.

On a national level, until the 1950s, archaeologists were primarily concerned with studying the higher examples of medieval archaeology, typically high-status buildings such as manor houses, castles and religious establishments, with village architecture regarded as primitive and not worth studying. This changed in 1952 with the creation of the Deserted Medieval Village Research Group, whereby vernacular architecture from the medieval period was beginning to receive the attention it deserved. It is from this period that we see the first professional excavations within the Barry area which aimed to investigate these fascinating places.

Both the writers of this blog studied archaeology in university and came across many excavation reports regarding lost medieval settlements from the Barry area in the library, buried deep in the form of grey literature. The author’s archaeological dissertation was regarding lost medieval settlements within the lowland Glamorgan area and as such, we have a particular interest in the medieval archaeology of the Barry and Vale area. Post university, disseminating what we regard as lost knowledge to a wider audience was in fact the original aim of Hidden Glamorgan when started in 2010.

A good number of medieval sites have been excavated within the Barry area throughout the years. The medieval villages of Highlight and Barry were excavated during the late twentieth century by noted archaeologists Howard Thomas and Gareth Dowdell and really served to enhance our knowledge of this period locally.

One of these sites is Cwm Ciddy. The present-day hamlet of Cwm Ciddy lies just west of Barry on the periphery of Porthkerry Park. The ancient lane that winds its way from the Toby carvery restaurant on Port Road through the rural outskirts of Barry to Porthkerry Park leads directly to this secluded hamlet. This tiny and isolated cluster of cottages, which is comprised of no more than five buildings is all that is left of one of Barry’s oldest settlements.

The area of Cwm Ciddy has changed little since the medieval period. The Rev J Evans on his sojourn to south Wales in 1803 took time to traverse the woods near Cwm Ciddy. The Rev it seems found the area enthralling.

 The Rev recorded:

‘Following the windings of the stream, we imperceptibly found ourselves in a deep ravine, the ground rising abruptly on each side, well wooded, the stream meandering in the bottom, amidst the thick brush wood to the sea. A neat white-washed cottage sprinkled about gave a pleasing effect to the confined, but singular beauty of Cwm Ciddy’

The area has changed so little since 1803 that the Rev J Evan’s description could still apply today.

(Facing NW toward old Comkedye Street, this pastoral landscape was once host to a lost medieval community)

To understand the history of the medieval village of Cwm Ciddy it is necessary to look back to the days of the Norman conquest of Glamorgan. In the wake of the Norman Conquest of England during the last decade of the eleventh century, a number of rapacious Norman knights decided to seize a large tract of land within the lowland coastal region of south Wales, which up until that time was comprised of a part of the ancient native Welsh kingdom of Morgannwg, and through right of conquest claim it for their own. It was at this moment that the medieval lordship of Glamorgan was established.

The knights who accompanied the leader of this Norman incursion, one Robert Fitzhamon (d 1107), were given large parcels of land with which to support them as the lord of Glamorgan’s chief retainers. These knights established manors, built manor houses and lived off the unpaid labour of the common serf to sustain themselves. These settlements would come to comprise the earliest villages within the Vale of Glamorgan.

During the medieval period Cwm Ciddy was a relatively small village comprising of 280 acres which fell within the lordship of Penmark. Cwm Ciddy itself though doesn’t appear to have been a lordship with an incumbent knight, as there is no evidence of a manor house ever being here, but it is likely it could have been a demesne (the lords own land within his lordship) run by a manorial official such as a reeve or a bailiff with the village itself being given parish status.  

The medieval village of Cwm Ciddy was located on the slope of the hill situated NW of Millwood. It was comprised of a central street with the houses of the village flanking this street. The street was roughly where the present lane is situated which leads up to the hamlet of Cwm Ciddy from Millwood and the remains of which are now represented as a sunken trail. The street was referred to in the seventeenth century as Comkedye Street when there were still a number of occupied dwellings there.

Physically the remains of medieval Cwm Ciddy are for the most part flanking the lane which leads up from Millwood to the present-day hamlet. There are a number of depressions here along old Comkedye Street which represent lost houses as well as the outlines of various enclosures denoting lost crofts.

(This detail from a 1622 manorial map depicts a number of dwellings along old Comkedye Street. What was once the former parish church but by this point was a domestic residence can be seen on the hill to the left)

 

During 1974, the Barry and Vale Archaeological Group excavated a house here which seemed fairly typical of a village Cot from this period. Single room Cots from this period are commonly found in all medieval villages from the Barry and Vale area. They were often sub-divided by flimsy partitions, usually wood for either some degree of privacy or perhaps co-habiting with animals. This example though was partitioned by a drystone wall. The dwelling was some 18 metres in length by 6 metres wide. It also had internal drains, which were not uncommon. Within the occupation layer there was found pottery from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries giving us an idea of construction and occupation periods. In a manorial survey of 1622, the area was described as ‘a croft whereupon in tyme past there was seated a howse in comkedye.’ It would seem then that by the early seventeenth century the house itself was a ruin.

Another dwelling which had its origins in the medieval period was discovered in 1973 by accident during ploughing of the land. Discovered was a stone constructed building, which would put its origins as a medieval building sometime during the late thirteenth or fourteenth centuries when Cots in England and south Wales were no longer constructed from timber alone.  

The stone for the building was bonded with a limestone type of mortar and the dwelling had the seemingly standard rectangular form. Pottery of the late thirteenth to fourteenth centuries was found within the occupation layer, providing us with a firm time frame for the construction of the building. As with the previous example, what is particularly interesting about this building is that, thanks to the survival of the village after the Black Death and its continued occupation into the early modern period, there are written records regarding this structure.

In 1595, during the reign of queen Elizabeth I, this house was recorded as being a freehold (farm) with 50 acres of land which belonged to a Rhoose resident, William Griffin Esq. The building was sold in 1661 being described as a ‘tenement of arable, meadow, pasture and woods, containing one messuage, one bakehouse and 56 acres of lands called Combe-Kydy Farm in the parish of Barry.’ By 1780 this farm had increased in size to 122 acres and was then called ‘Lower Farm’. In 1800 the farm was occupied by Llewellyn Yorath for £130 per annum. By 1812 the farm had been absorbed into a larger farm called Castle Farm which was held by one John Spickett with the house itself being used as a labourer’s cottage. There are no further records of the building in the late nineteenth century and it was most likely abandoned or levelled in creation of the park.

The village church, located on the summit of the hill west of Comkedye Street was documented in the Norwich Taxation of 1254 and again in 1348, the same year the Black Death reached England. The church was comprised of a chancel and a nave, the form being typical of a small medieval parish church. There is the faint outline of a square enclosure which is some 38 metres – this could have been a boundary denoting consecrated ground as a number of burials were discovered within this enclosure in 1903. During the depopulation of the late 14^th century the church at Cwm Ciddy was reduced in status to a chapel. It went out of use as a religious establishment around 1599 being converted into a domestic residence.

Cwm Ciddy declined during the late fourteenth century, but was not completely deserted. At around this time the parish church was amalgamated with Barry and Porthkerry, most likely due to dwindling populations which were not enough to sustain one parish alone. Black Death was the main cause of abandonment and/or depopulation but famine due to a deteriorating climate and intermittent conflict within the Lordship of Glamorgan were also contributing factors. Cwm Ciddy did not suffer the same fate of Cosmeston and Highlight as these places were more or less completely abandoned. Instead, Cwm Ciddy made it out of the medieval period.

By the early seventeenth century, the village still contained eight houses, six of them farm houses with smallholdings. The number of houses shrank during the eighteenth century due to the amalgamating of a number of the smallholdings to form larger parcels of agricultural land to maximise efficiency. By 1812 there were just four houses left. By the 1840s the remainder of these houses were abandoned to create a private park by the Romily family.

(The lane to the right was once Comkedye Street. There were a number of houses to the left of this track just beyond the house directly ahead, a few survived into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but were gone by the time this photo was taken, which was sometime during the late nineteenth century. Credit, Peoples Collection Wales)

 

So next time you make a visit to the ‘Cwm Ciddy’ Toby carvery, have finished your meal and are heading out of the door towards the car park, why not take a left down the lane, and take a stroll down old Comkedye Street.

 Mark and Jonathan Lambert are archaeology graduates of Cardiff University and are published authors. They have been writing about and researching local history for the past 20 years and have a wealth of knowledge. All articles are original compositions - we hope you enjoy our content. Enquiries: hiddenglamorgan@outlook.com

 

 ©Jonathan and Mark Lambert 2023

The right of Jonathan and Mark Lambert to be identified as Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reprinted, reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic means, including social media, or mechanical, or by any other means including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the authors.