The Salesburys of Rhug and Bachymbyd

Project Title: '‘Of Great Kindred and Alliance’: The status and identity of the Salesburys of Rhug and Bachymbyd, c.1475-c.1660'

Supervised by: Professor Huw Pryce and Dr Shaun Evans

Research supported by: This research project was generously supported by the Rhug Estate

Through a case study of one gentry family, the Salesburys of Rhug and Bachymbyd, Sadie’s doctoral thesis examines how the early modern Welsh gentry established and retained their status and Welsh identity. The Salesburys arrived in north Wales as English settlers in the thirteenth century and thus they present a particularly insightful example of how a family became assimilated into the Welsh gentry. The thesis encompasses a substantial proportion of the Salesbury family history, beginning with the earliest leases of the Bachymbyd estate in the 1470s and ending with the death of William Salesbury in 1660, who divided the family estates between his two sons. Spanning a number of decades before and after the Acts of Union (1536 and 1543), as well as the Reformation and the English Civil War, Sadie analysed how a period of major social and economic change affected the Salesburys’ social relations and estate management. She used a variety of sources, including estate archives, legal records, manuscript collections, praise poetry, and visual and material culture.

Sadie’s thesis used the example of the Salesburys to challenge the current understandings of gentry society in early modern Wales ‘anglicised’. Instead, she found that the Salesburys retained their Welshness after the Acts of Union, demonstrated in their continued use of the Welsh language and Welsh cultural practices, such as bardic patronage and widowhood provision. This continuity of Welsh identity was crucial to the Salesburys’ position as a focal point of local society, establishing social bonds with their monolingual tenants and servants, which in turn enabled the family to maintain their economic power.

Sadie published her doctoral research with University of Wales Press in 2024 under the title Gentitlity in Early Modern Wales: The Salesbury Family, 1450-1720. 

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After the completion of her doctoral project, Sadie was awarded the Economic History Society Postan Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research. She was then appointed Career Development Fellow in Early Modern History at The Queen's College, University of Oxford. At Oxford she examined early modern Welsh colonial activity in the British Atlantic world, particularly the colonies of North America. Her research built on the developing body of scholarship on Irish and Scottish involvement in early modern British expansionism while nuancing the debate by introducing Wales’ own unique relationship with the British state. Her project explicitly sought to incorporate the experiences of Indigenous people, presenting a full account of the impact of early modern British colonialism and its legacies.

Visit Sadie's website for more information.