Castles in Wales

Edward I was a bad man to get on the wrong side of. From an English point of view he was a great warrior and lawgiver. To his enemies he was rather less attractive: grasping, vengeful, and peculiarly vicious – he is said to have personally come up with the idea of hanging, drawing, and quartering.

For proof of the darker aspect of Edward’s nature visit North Wales, where one man who got on his wrong side was Llywelyn ap Gruffydd... soon to be known as Llywelyn the Last.

In the 1250s, the Prince of Snowdonia committed the fatal error of handing the young Edward his first and only thrashing. Edward had been given command of north-east Wales by his dad, Henry III. He lost it to Llywelyn in two weeks flat, a humiliation he never forgot. In the 1260s Llywelyn made it worse by siding with the English barons in their revolt against Henry, taking advantage of the chaos to seize central Wales too.

Then in 1272 Henry III died, and Edward took up his new job with unfinished business in mind. If Llywelyn thought he’d been forgiven or forgotten, he was wrong. In 1277 Edward attacked central and north-east Wales and quickly recaptured Llywelyn’s gains.

Having won, Edward was all smiles; but the treaty that ended the war was so harsh that in 1282 the Welsh rebelled. The second war was even shorter than the first; during the course of which Llewelyn acquired the soubriquet “the Last” by being killed in a skirmish. His brother David was less lucky. Captured, he became the first person to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, a fate later shared by William Wallace.

This time there were to be no more chances: the heartland of Welsh resistance, Snowdonia itself, was to be choked into submission by a granite girdle of impregnable castles.

Edward was too clever to occupy the mountains, where the nimble Welsh would have the advantage over knights in armour. No guerrilla war for them: instead, strangulation. Edward started work on a ring of castles, all with access to the sea to allow for swift reinforcement should the Welsh rise again, and most of them complete with walled towns whose English settlers controlled Snowdonia’s economy. The Welsh had their sheep; but if they wanted grain, or salt, or iron, they got them on English terms. Rhuddlan, Flint, Beaumaris, Harlech, Conwy, Caernarfon – they’re tourist attractions now, especially the last two; but in the late 13th century they were links in a slave chain.

The approach to Conwy from the east on the A55 shows how the castles were as much political as practical. The black stone wall and its towers spread menacingly across the riverfront, a barrier both psychological and physical, its harsh outlines only marginally softened by Telford’s road bridge, the rail bridge, and the new road bridge. What you see is a bald statement of imperial ambition.

The English burghers of this small and pretty town – more a village, really – might have found their castle reassuring; but security had a price. The town still has a complete circuit of claustrophobia-inducing walls: they might have kept the Welsh out, but they just as surely kept the English in. Every time a 14th-century townsman looked up he saw those walls, a permanent reminder that somebody out there wanted him dead.

Conwy never really made it as a town, scarcely expanding beyond its walls. Its medieval street-plan, based on a diminutive market square, still survives; and despite the masonry that surrounds it, it’s a town of great charm. Caernarfon, though, is a different proposition.

At Conwy, and at the other four castles in the chain, Edward used up-to-the-minute techniques: concentric defences, heavily fortified gatehouses, and round towers that would deflect projectiles efficiently and didn’t have structurally weak square corners. But not at Caernarfon.

On crusade, Edward had seen the walls of Constantinople, militarily obsolete but still an icon of imperial grandeur. Caernarfon’s banded masonry, its polygonal towers with their squared corners, and its high towers are deliberate copies of Constantinople. It isn’t even concentric, being composed of adjoining wards that couldn’t give each other supporting fire in an attack.

In fact Caernarfon did fall to the Welsh in an uprising in 1295, before the work had been finished and when only a ditch divided town from castle. The insurgents easily stormed it and held out for a whole year; but it never occurred to them to replace the ditch with a wall; and when Edward got round to recapturing the place, guess how he did it.

Despite its evocation of imperial power, Caernarfon Castle doesn’t overshadow the town as Conwy does, because the town itself was always intended to be important and was planned and built on a far greater scale than Conwy. Before Edward invaded there had been a Welsh township here that might have originally been Roman. He razed it. This was to be an English town, and if the castle was to be the region’s political and military capital, then the town with its huge market square would be its economic hub.

To some extent, his ambition for the town came true. It became the county town of Caernarfonshire, boasting some fine civic and commercial buildings; and although the recession hasn’t been kind, it still has a certain elegance. But in one respect, Edward’s ambition failed: for the one thing Caernarfon isn’t is English. Go out of season, when the tourists have gone, and the only language you’ll hear in the street is Welsh. And the statue in the square commemorates not an English grandee, but a very Welsh one: Lloyd George.

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