MARCHERS

Marchers.Hist. Lords who lived on the borders of Scotland and Wales, and operated, with the permission of the English sovereigns, under their own private laws. • The laws were eventually abolished by the statute 27 Hen. 8, ch. 26. — Also termed Lords Marchers.

“Thus the Lords Marchers were practically independent potentates of a kind very unusual in England. From this two consequences flowed. In the first place there grew up in their jurisdictions a mixture of Welsh custom and English law known as the custom of the Marches. In the second place, although they held of the king, their allegiance sat so lightly upon them that it was necessary to declare in 1354 that ‘all the Lords of the Marches of Wales shall be perpetually attending and annexed to the crown of England, and not to the principality of Wales, in whose hands so ever the same principality be.’ ” 1 William Holdsworth, A History of English Law 121 (7th ed. 1956).

[Blacks Law 8th]