Towards the end of the 11th century, when the tide of Norman invasion swept upwards along the Wye valley, the district became a lordship marcher annexed to that of Brecknock, but was again severed from it on the death of William de Breos, when his daughter Matilda brought it to her husband, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore.
It was destroyed in 1260 by Llewellyn ab Gruffydd, prince of Wales, with the supposed connivance df Mortimer, but its site was reoccupied by the earl of Lincoln in 277, and a new castle at once erected.
Henry Percy (Hotspur) and his father, the earl of Northumberland, thought their services ill-requited, and finally made common cause with the partisans of Mortimer and the Welsh.
He was the original of Mortimer Collins's Canon Tremaine in Sweet and Twenty.
The next writer of note is John Mortimer, whose Whole Art of Husbandry, a regular, systematic work of considerable merit, was published in 1707.