Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  The peace that Edward imposed on Llywelyn was humiliating. He did not remove his opponent, or even take away his title ‘Prince of Wales’. But by the time the king had finished restructuring the realities of power in the province, it hardly mattered what Llywelyn called himself. All the other Welsh chiefs now had to swear allegiance directly to the king. The prince was left with little more than his ancestral lands in Gwynedd. The united Wales he had been building for twenty years had been broken into pieces.

  Edward set about enforcing this settlement by building a string of new castles to hem the prince in. Two were built in the south at Builth and Aberystwyth, but little remains of either castle today. More substantial ruins survive at the two larger and more expensive castles that the king built in the north, at Rhuddlan and Flint. Rhuddlan was most expensive of all, a reflection of Edward’s intention that it should be the seat of royal government in north Wales.

  Rhuddlan.

  The castle was built to a typical thirteenth-century design. As at Caerphilly, there are high walls around a central courtyard, round towers and gatehouses. It is also, like Caerphilly, a concentric castle, but in this instance the moat is dry. In fact, the only major difference between the two castles is one of scale: Edward would not have thanked you for saying it, but Rhuddlan is a lot less impressive than the Earl of Gloucester’s giant castle in the south. From our point of view, however, it does have one great advantage. Because it was built by a king rather than an earl, Rhuddlan shows up in Crown records. Using these documents, we can look in detail at the processes involved in building a thirteenth-century castle.

  In comparison with the meagre amounts of information from earlier centuries, there is a huge amount of written evidence about castle-building under Edward I. Using original government rolls from the Exchequer, we can find out the names of the builders, the exact costs, the precise dates and more besides. In the case of Rhuddlan, these rolls reveal one especially amazing fact: as well as building the castle, Edward also straightened the River Clwyd.

  The location that the king chose for Rhuddlan was in many ways ideal – indeed, the remains of a Norman motte and bailey, which can still be seen to the south-east of the new castle, show that Edward was not the first to identify its strategic advantages. The king did, however, foresee problems in keeping the site supplied. The River Clwyd was far too winding to allow his large cargo ships to reach it. Edward’s typically audacious solution was a huge feat of medieval civil engineering. From the fens of Lincolnshire and East Anglia, the king recruited hundreds of diggers, ditchers and delvers. By September 1277 there was an army of 968 men working on what the records call ‘the great ditch’. Using only picks and shovels, their job was to make perfect what nature had left unfinished: to straighten the three-mile stretch of river that wound its way from the castle to the coast.

  Using satellite photography, it is still possible to make out the original loops and bends that Edward I’s engineers straightened seven centuries ago.

  Today, using mechanical digging equipment, the canalisation of the Clwyd might be achieved in five to six months, and would cost somewhere in the region of £5 million. Even by modern standards, therefore, what Edward had embarked upon was an enormous construction project. And by such feats of engineering, the king left the Welsh in no doubt – he was a man who would go to extraordinary lengths to get his own way.

  The new castles of Rhuddlan, Flint, Aberystwyth and Builth were permanent reminders of the humiliating defeat inflicted on Llywelyn in 1277. But the English victory did not end with the planting of fortresses. Edward was also determined to introduce English governmental practices and English law to Wales, and this, more than anything, provoked a widespread backlash. In letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Llywelyn and his courtiers complained about the unfair ways in which they were treated by English officials and, most of all, the way in which their national identity was being denied.

  ‘All Christians have laws and customs in their own lands – even the Jews in England have laws among the English,’ they reasoned. ‘We had our immutable laws and customs in our lands, until the English took them away after the last war.’

  In addition to these general grievances, there were certain Welshmen who, having supported Edward in the war, came to feel that their service had gone unrewarded. Although they had quickly flocked to the king’s banner, they had received only meagre handouts, while the richest pickings went to Edward’s English commanders. One man in particular who felt hard done by was Llywelyn’s younger brother, Dafydd ap Gruffudd. He and others like him, having helped bring down the prince’s oppressive regime, now found it replaced by the even more onerous and unsympathetic rule of foreigners.

  In 1282, these accumulated tensions finally spilled over into concerted action. Late on the eve of Palm Sunday, the English lord Roger Clifford, one of Edward’s old friends and a major beneficiary of the 1277 settlement, was sleeping soundly in his bed in his new castle at Hawarden. Suddenly and without warning, the castle was stormed by a band of Welshmen, led by Dafydd. Clifford was dragged from his bed and carted off into captivity, while many of his household were killed. The same night, other English castles were attacked. It was clearly a well-conceived and well-executed uprising. Llywelyn, although he claimed not to have authorized the attacks, nevertheless soon assumed the leadership of what quickly became a national rebellion, and joined in the assault on Edward’s castles at Flint and Rhuddlan.

  When news of the uprising reached Edward, his response was swift. He immediately appointed commanders to three different armies, and ordered a general muster of troops for May. In military terms, it was the same strategy he had used five years before. The king personally led a large army along the north Welsh coast, while the two other armies, led by trusted lieutenants, pressed into mid and south Wales. Politically, however, the ante had been upped massively. Edward was now embarking not merely on an expedition to punish Llywelyn, but on a mission to destroy him. In a letter to his commanders, the king resolved chillingly ‘to put an end finally to the matter… of putting down the malice of the Welsh’.

  No one, however, was pretending it was going to be an easy operation. To begin with, delays in mustering his armies had left Edward contemplating something that no English king had ever dared to attempt before – a winter campaign in Wales. At first, the king’s bold move seemed like a bad decision. The southern army ran into trouble when the Earl of Gloucester was defeated, and another commander, William de Valence the younger, was killed in action. In early November, a group of English knights was sent to take Anglesey and create a bridge across the Menai Straits, but they met with disaster when they were ambushed by the Welsh and driven into the sea. Nevertheless, these remained setbacks rather than reverses. The armies on this occasion were twice the size they had been before, and total expenditure on the campaign dwarfed the cost of Edward’s earlier Welsh adventure. One modern estimate puts the 1282 figure at £150,000 – about seven times that of 1277. Everything indicates that this time, the king was bringing the full power of the English state to bear on his Welsh adversary.

  With such enormous resources ranged against him, Llywelyn’s future looked exceedingly bleak. In Snowdonia, the Welsh prince watched the relentless build-up of well-provisioned troops with dismay. He began to realize that his only hope of survival was to break free from the snare that Edward was drawing around him. The easiest escape route appeared to be to the south-east, towards an area of the border where English control seemed to be weak.

  His break for the border was Llywelyn’s last move. On 11 December 1282, within a few miles of the new castle at Builth, the prince and his companions were ambushed by a group of English knights. The Welshmen fought bravely but were ultimately bested, and Llywelyn, who remained unrecognized throughout, fell in the course of the fighting. Later, when his killers realized the significance of their deed, they hacked off the prince’s head and in jubilation sent it north to Edward. It was at Rhuddlan, where the north
ern army had paused in its march, that the two old adversaries came face to face for a final time. Having seen it for himself, the king sent Llywelyn’s head to London, for all his subjects to admire. From the start of 1283, and for many years later, it adorned a spike outside the Tower.

  As the news spread through Wales, the country despaired. ‘Is it the end of the world?’ asked one Welsh poet. What little resistance still remained now quickly crumbled, and the last native stronghold at Castel-y-Bere fell at the end of April 1283. Two months later, the fugitive Dafydd ap Gruffudd was captured, and treated to a far more elaborate and grisly death than his brother. After the pretence of a carefully staged show trial at Shrewsbury, Dafydd was dragged, hanged, disembowelled and quartered.

  With the native dynasty vanquished, Edward parcelled out some of the conquered lands to his followers, and confiscated all the remaining land in north-west Wales for himself. He set about securing his hold on his new territories by building three new castles: Harlech, Conway, and Caernarfon.

  Just by looking at these locations on a map, you can appreciate that the king was choosing the sites for his new castles with care. They are separated by more or less equal distances, each castle being sited no more than a day’s march from its nearest neighbour. There was, however, a great deal more to the positioning of Edward’s new fortresses than this simple observation implies. For example, in choosing to build at Conway, Edward deliberately ignored the more obvious site of an earlier English castle just a few miles away at Deganwy. A comparison of the two sites is therefore very revealing, since it shows the way in which thinking about castles had changed, even in the space of Edward’s own lifetime.

  Today, very little remains of Deganwy castle. It once sat on the top of a twin-peaked hill on the eastern side of the Conway estuary. The highest point for miles around, with commanding views over the surrounding landscape, the site is an absolutely stunning defensive location. The site actually has natural crenellations – a series of smaller hills ringing the summit. From the point of view of protecting an army, this would seem to be the perfect spot. The Romans, who built a camp here in the first century AD, clearly thought as much. The princes of Gywnedd thought so, too: Llywelyn’s grandfather built a castle here at the beginning of the thirteenth century. And Henry III, Edward’s father, also thought Deganwy was by far his best bet. When he seized control of the area in 1245, he built an entirely new castle on the ruins of the old one.

  Edward I, however, thought otherwise. Fantastic defensive location it might be, but Deganwy has one very major drawback. Like Rhuddlan, it stands a long way from the sea. There was, however, no question of improving water-borne access on this occasion. The River Conway lies at the bottom of the hill, hundreds of fact below the castle site. Even as the crow flies, the river and the sea are half a mile away, and the path that winds its way from the shoreline to the castle is considerably longer – almost two miles. The result (as at least one TV film crew can testify) is that Deganwy is very difficult to supply. Being on top of a hill might make it easy to defend, but it also makes it very easy to surround. Once cut off from the sea and the river, it didn’t matter how strong the hill-top castle was; a besieging army would only have to wait for the defenders’ food to run out, then watch them starve.

  Such drawbacks were not acknowledged by Henry III when he began to rebuild the castle in the mid 1240s. They soon became apparent, however, to the soldiers who were stationed there during the initial stages of construction. Writing home, one soldier in the king’s army described the terrible conditions that existed in the English camp.

  ‘We dwell here,’ he said, ‘in watchings and fastings, in prayer, in cold and nakedness. In watchings, for fear of the Welsh, with their sudden raids upon us by night. In fastings for lack of victuals, since the halfpenny loaf cannot be got for less than fivepence. In prayer, that we may quickly return safe and sound to our homes. In cold and nakedness, for we live in houses of linen and have no winter clothes.’

  When supplies finally arrived, Deganwy’s disadvantages were all too apparent, for the English could not reach their own ships. A boat coming from Ireland was inexpertly steered into the Conway estuary, and became grounded on a sandbank. The English and the Welsh fought over the beached vessel for twenty-four hours, but eventually it was the Welsh who gained the upper hand and made off with its precious cargo. Such handicaps ultimately led to Deganwy’s destruction. In the autumn of 1263, the castle’s inadequacy was underlined for a final time when Llywelyn (then enjoying his glory days) captured the castle and razed it to the ground. The castle lies in ruins today largely because of the prince’s comprehensive demolition.

  So, when Edward I marched into the area in 1283, he decided that there was absolutely no point in following the ancient tradition of fortifying Deganwy by rebuilding his father’s castle. Like Napoleon, Edward understood that his soldiers marched on their stomachs. As the letter written in 1245 testifies, they also needed warm clothes, strong tents, and plenty of ammunition. The English king had conducted a successful winter campaign in 1282 and 1283 precisely because he had managed to keep his armies supplied with such basic necessities. If he was going to hold on to his conquests, he knew he had to keep his supply lines open. Deganwy was therefore left to decay, and a new site was selected. Forgoing the superb defensive position on top of the hill, Edward opted for a location on the opposite bank of the river, right on the shoreline. The result was Conway – a castle whose walls are lapped by the sea, enabling Edward to bring his cargo ships right up to the gate.

  Harlech.

  Edward sited all his castles in this manner so that they could be kept supplied at all times. Conway, Caernarfon and Flint all stand by the sea today. Harlech, although it now appears landlocked, was not always so isolated. The land below the castle has been reclaimed – the sea once ran right up to the base of the cliff. At Rhuddlan, we have already seen how the king canalized the river for exactly the same logistical reasons. By building castles where the water could lap at their walls, Edward made it impossible for the Welsh to deploy their traditional tactics. No longer could the king’s fortresses be blockaded and destroyed. From now on, the English would have a permanent foothold in Wales.

  In certain cases, choosing the optimum strategic position for a castle also enabled Edward to make a political point. When it came to grandstanding, the king was a master showman, with a ruthless eye for detail. As is well known, when he later invaded Scotland, Edward seized all the symbols of native power, including, most famously, the Stone of Destiny. It is less widely appreciated, however (precisely because, in this instance, the king was more successful), that he did exactly the same thing a generation before in Wales. After the conquest of 1283, Edward seized all of Llywelyn’s regalia – his crown, orb and sceptre – and had them sent back to Westminster. Similarly, he confiscated the prince’s seal-matrices and had them melted down to make a silver chalice.

  Conway.

  Caernarfon.

  But it is Edward’s castles that provide the most outstanding testimony to his determination to impose a new identity on Wales. Neither Caernarfon nor Conway were built on virgin sites; both, towns had been popular destinations for Llywelyn’s court. Edward flattened these settlements, removing or destroying the great halls of the Welsh princes, and building his new castles in their place. The old days of independence, the Welsh were to understand, were now over; a new and more powerful authority was rising in its place. At Conway, there had once stood a great Cistercian abbey, founded by Llywelyn’s grandfather and the last resting place of the prince’s ancestors. Edward levelled the building, and built Conway castle directly over their bones. With calculated callousness, the king literally erased the memory of Llywelyn’s family from the face of the earth.

  Construction at Harlech, Conway and Caernarfon started in the summer of 1283, in each case within days of the arrival of Edward’s army. The first task at all three locations was establishing the castle site and making it secure. At H
arlech and Caernarfon, this meant cutting ditches around the perimeter; no mean feat at Harlech, since this involved hacking through solid rock. Such work, like the ‘sea-ditch’ at Rhuddlan, required armies of labourers, and they were drawn from all over the country. Like those who built castles in the twelfth century, these men were paid a daily wage, mostly at the rate of one or two pence a day. The work, however, was backbreaking and dangerous, and for this reason many men had to be forcibly persuaded to accept the king’s offer of a job. The belief that large numbers were pressed into service is borne out by an entry on one of the building accounts, which records three mounted sergeants who were paid to escort three hundred diggers from Yorkshire, ‘in case they should flee while on the road’.

  With the ditches underway, a wooden palisade was put up around the castle site, and temporary wooden buildings were erected. These buildings were not just the medieval equivalent of Portakabins; they included suites of rooms for Edward and his household, evidently built to some standard of luxury. At both Conway and Caernarfon, separate chambers were built for Edward’s queen, Eleanor, and gardens were laid out for her enjoyment, the turf being shipped in specially. Although all the timber buildings would eventually be replaced by stone, the investment in wooden walls was nevertheless enormous – twenty shiploads of timber were sent from Liverpool to Caernarfon in the first few weeks of building.

  But the essential commodity, of course, was not timber, but stone. As we saw in Chapter Two, it made good sense to source the bulk of the material as locally as possible, but the expensive stone needed for window frames and fireplaces had to come from further afield. In the case of Edward’s castle at Aberystwyth, built after the first Welsh war, high-quality stone was shipped all the way round the Pembrokeshire coast from Bristol. Other commodities had similarly long journeys. Lead for roofing and plumbing the castles was mined in the mountains of Snowdonia and brought overland to the construction sites. Iron and steel were ordered from Staffordshire, and ropes were sent from Lincolnshire.