Meirionnydd

Coordinates: 52°45′29″N 3°50′06″W / 52.758°N 3.835°W / 52.758; -3.835

Meirionnydd is a coastal and mountainous region of Wales. It has been a kingdom, a cantref, a district and, as Merionethshire, a county.

Kingdom

Meirionnydd (Meirion, with -ydd as a Welsh suffix of land, literally Land adjoined to Meirion) was a sub-kingdom of Gwynedd, founded according to legend by Meirion (or Marianus), a grandson of Cunedda, a warrior-prince who brought his family to Wales from the 'Old North' (northern England and southern Scotland today), probably in the early 5th century. His dynasty seems to have ruled there for the next four hundred years. The kingdom lay between the River Mawddach and the River Dovey, spreading in a north-easterly direction.

Cantref

The ancient name of the cantref was Cantref Orddwy (or "the cantref of the Ordovices"). The familiar name coming from Meiron's kingdom.

The cantref of Meirionnydd held the presumed boundaries of the previous kingdom but now as a fief of the Kingdom of Gwynedd where it continued to enjoy long spells of relative independence. It was divided into the commotes of Ystumanner (administered from Castell y Bere at Llanfihangel-y-Pennant) and Talybont (possibly centred on Llanegryn where there is a mound). It was abolished in 1284 following the Statute of Rhuddlan and reorganised with the addition of some neighbouring cantrefi to form the county of Merionethshire.

Merioneth (UK Parliament constituency)

Merioneth, sometimes called Merionethshire, was a constituency in North Wales established in 1542, which returned one Member of Parliament to the House of Commons of the English Parliament, and later to the Parliament of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom. It was abolished for the 1983 general election, when it was largely replaced by the new constituency of Meirionnydd Nant Conwy.

Overview

Boundaries

The constituency consisted of the historic county of Merionethshire. Merioneth was always an almost entirely rural constituency, rocky and mountainous with grazing the only useful agricultural activity that could be pursued; quarrying was its other main economic mainstay. It was also a strongly Welsh-speaking area (a parliamentary paper in 1904 listed that just 6.2% of the population could only speak English, lower than in any other county in Wales), and by the 19th century was a stronghold of non-conformist religion.

Establishment

Like the rest of Wales, Merioneth was given the right to representation by the Act of Union 1536, and first returned an MP to the Parliament of 1542; however, unlike all the other Welsh counties, Merioneth had no towns sufficiently important in the 16th century to merit borough status, so the county MP was its only representative. The MP was chosen by the first past the post electoral system - when there was a contest at all, which was almost unheard of before the second half of the 19th century.