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Interested to hear the interview, Phil and Roy. I'm right, am I not, that the semi-circular ring of castles which still extends round from Pembroke through Carew to Haverfordwest is of edifices specifically designed by the Normans to keep the hostile Welsh out of the fertile region of South Pembrokeshire which he then peopled with Flemish immigrants - thus leaving the area with its distinctive Flemish-based accent and idiom and the sobriquet, to this day, of "Little England Beyond Wales".

You're right, Robert. The Landsker line runs right across the belly of Pembrokeshire from Amroth on the south coast to Newgale in the west. It was marked by a string of frontier forts/motte and bailey castles, places like Hayscastle and Henry's Moat - long gone now. The big stone edifices that we see today - Narberth, Llawhaden, Roch etc lie just inside the Landscer. It's a mysterious line of separation, quite as effective as Hadrian's Wall. South of it - the Englishry. North - the Welshry. Opinion is divided about whether or not the Normans undertook a policy of deliberate transplantation but the divide is clear. And we do know that they brought in settlers, Flemings and the like, to the south of the county. George Owen wrote about villages where they spoke Welsh on one side of the street, English on the other! Either way, it's a strnge phenomenon.

Phil mentions English as the language of South Pembrokeshire, but there would have been a strong element of Flemish as well. There are occasional references to Flemish being spoken in Haverfordwest as late as the 16th century, and certainly, in that town , I grew up using several words which I've later understood to have a Flemish origin: we'd refer to a tangled ball of string as "caffled" or "caffled up" (a Flemish term - they were weavers, of course) and "drang" for a small alleyway.

Am I right in thinking that the Domesday Book excluded Wales (or most of it), was there something similar ever done for Wales?
How did the ownership of land take place in Wales and is there any chance I could claim any, I know Ryan Davies offered to fight a landowner who claimed he'd acquired it from William the Conqueror? And the Mostyns put a fence round Llandudno after the Enclosure Act, but where were my ancestors when the land was shared out?