Castle (15 page)

In the end, there was not very much in the way of actual fighting – by this stage, Llywelyn had lost much of his earlier adhesive appeal. In order to defend his new principality, and pay the annual render to the English king, the prince had been forced to extort large sums of money from all classes of society – churchmen, burgesses, nobles and peasants. Understandably, his popularity had started to suffer. During the summer, even while the English army was still mustering, many Welshmen had surrendered, and transferred their allegiance to Edward: more than half the king’s northern army was made up of men from south Wales. In such circumstances, Llywelyn had little option but to seek terms. On 2 November he met with members of Edward’s council at his palace at Conway. One week later, peace was proclaimed.

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 northern 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 Castely-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.