County town: Pembroke
Pembrokeshire was colonised by Flemish and English settlers under Norman patronage from the 12th century, creating the Anglicised 'Little England beyond Wales' in its south. It became a shire county under the Laws in Wales Acts of 1536.
Pembrokeshire is the most westerly county in Wales, its magnificent coastline — now a National Park — encompassing cliffs, sea stacks, islands, and sandy beaches. The county is divided between the Welsh-speaking north and the 'Englishry' of the south, where Norman and Flemish settlers established an English-speaking enclave so persistent that the linguistic boundary — the 'Landsker Line' — is still detectable today. Pembroke Castle, birthplace of Henry VII in 1457, is one of the finest Norman castles in Britain. St Davids, in the county's far west, was the site of a monastery founded by the patron saint of Wales and is the smallest city in Britain.
The historic counties of Wales were created under the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535–42, overlying a much older landscape of Welsh kingdoms — Gwynedd, Powys, Deheubarth, and Morgannwg — that had shaped settlement, culture, and lordship for centuries. The county of Pembrokeshire incorporates territory from these earlier political divisions, and its boundaries preserve traces of the medieval Welsh landscape.
Wales's 13 historic counties were created under the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535–42, which brought Wales into the English legal and administrative system. Based partly on medieval Welsh kingdoms and Norman lordships, they were the framework of Welsh administration until 1974.
An Aubrey report for a specific location in Pembrokeshire draws on historical maps, archaeological records, Domesday data and landscape history to tell the full story of any site in the county.
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