In the thirteenth century, one Cambro-Norman scholar and one Welsh prince both used rhetoric to claim an identity for the Welsh people that was separate from that of the English. The first of these, Gerald of Wales, was only a quarter Welsh, but during his career in the early thirteenth century he came to identify with the Welsh people, particularly regarding the call for ecclesiastical independence from England. Gerald, a scholar trained in Paris, used his formidable skills to support the claim for an independent Welsh archbishopric, at the expense of the archbishop of Canterbury and the English king. The second of these men, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales from 1255-1282, was not a scholar trained in Paris, but he also used rhetoric, arguing that the Welsh were a people with a distinct culture and legal system, and that they had every right to political independence from England. By the time Llywelyn made his argument, however, the blending of English and Welsh society along the border between the two lands was already evident. Welsh culture, which once had been a distinct holdover from the world of post-Roman Britain, had, by 1280, begun to blur into English culture. Welsh law, the foundation of Llywelyn’s claim to a separate Welsh identity, was no longer completely distinguishable from English law in the borderlands. Thus, despite Llywelyn’s and Gerald’s rhetoric concerning the identity of the Welsh people, the dissolution of that identity proceeded apace, even before Edward I conquered Wales militarily in 1282.