Castle (19 page)

Constantinople
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At Conway and Caernarfon, Edward ordered Master James not only to build new castles, but also to lay out whole new towns. In each case, large new settlements were created, surrounded by handsome sets of town walls. These walls, which still stand today to a remarkable degree of completeness, were built in the earliest stages of the construction process, in order to protect the workers from attack while the rest of the work was carried out. Their impressive scale is reflected not only in their present appearance, but also in their original cost. The Caernarfon walls alone cost £2,100.

Edward wanted new towns in Wales for several reasons. On the one hand, building new boroughs was an attempt to make his castles self-sufficient. With a prosperous town on the doorstep importing goods from all over Europe, a garrison could be kept supplied with food, wine and other essentials throughout the year. Most of the things that English soldiers wanted or needed could not be bought locally, and this itself was a symptom of the larger problem that the new towns were intended to remedy: the Welsh. Seen through the eyes of thirteenth-century Englishmen, the Welsh were an utterly barbarous bunch. For example, rather than getting down to the serious business
of
cultivating fields and growing crops, they preferred to stand around all day tending sheep. Consequently, rather than enjoying a civilized English diet (which included, among other things, wine and bread), the Welsh had only meat and milk. Likewise, when it came to religion, they had Christianity so back to front that they could hardly be considered Christians at all. From an English point of view, the conquest was just about the best thing that could have happened to Wales. It was, admittedly, a strong medicine for the Welsh, but one that would eventually make them better people.

Towns, it was felt, were the best way to begin improving the moral fibre of the natives – even the Archbishop of Canterbury heartily endorsed the idea. Once exposed to civic life, the Welsh would come to experience English standards of decency, understand the way normal people behaved and, in time, it was hoped, start to act like upright Englishmen. This did not mean, however, that the Welsh were expected to actually
live
in the towns – good heavens, no! Edward’s new boroughs were inhabited exclusively by English colonists, who were given generous tax breaks to induce them to come and set up shop in Wales. The Welsh, it was intended, would come into the towns only to buy or sell goods, encouraged by laws that made it illegal to trade anywhere else. To any right-thinking person, this seemed to be a win-win situation. The English burgesses had a monopoly that would guarantee their prosperity, and the Welsh had no excuse not to come into town and be dazzled by the bright lights of civilization.

What it meant in practice, of course, was that the Welsh came to hate the towns. Obliged to trade within their walls, yet at the same time denied any of the privileges of the English mercantile elite, the Welsh quickly singled out the towns as the source of their oppression. If the subtler symbolism of polygonal towers, banded masonry and imperial eagles was lost on them, the overall message sent out by the castles and their attendant towns was abundantly clear: Wales was now a conquered nation, ruled by an arrogant alien power. Inevitably, it was a message
they
chose to resist. In 1294, the Welsh rose again as a nation, venting their fury on both the towns and the castles. In the winter of that year, Edward’s iron ring of fortresses was put to the ultimate test.

This revolt had a leader of sorts – a distant cousin of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd called Madog ap Llywelyn, who began styling himself as Prince of Wales. Madog, however, was only small fry; the rebellion he claimed to lead was actually much bigger than he was. It was a true national rising, a series of carefully co-ordinated attacks on the new English settlements. Harlech, Conway and Caernarfon were all targeted. The Welsh scored a major victory when the walls of Caernarfon, still not finished, were breached and thrown down. Both town and castle were overrun, the burgesses and royal officials massacred, and the fabric of the castle despoiled.

Edward, as you can well imagine, was livid when he heard the news. Apart from the fact that Caernarfon was his pride and joy, he was busy getting ready for a fight with the king of France; the Welsh uprising meant that this new war would now have to wait. However, with large numbers of men and equipment already mustered, the English king was well equipped to deal with the Welsh revolt. His response was, in fact, the largest deployment of troops in Wales so far, with numbers even exceeding those of the conquest campaign of 1282. A total of thirty-five thousand men were re-routed and sent west. From Chester, the king set out at the head of a northern army of sixteen thousand, determined to retake his castles.

Everything went smoothly until the king reached Conway, at which point disaster struck. The English supply lines, which stretched all the way back to Chester, were cut by an attack from the Welsh, trapping Edward and his large army in the town and in the castle. For the first time in decades, the Welsh had the upper hand, and it looked like the unthinkable might happen: the English king who never backed down might be forced into a humiliating surrender.

Edward tried to improve his chances of survival by dismissing half his army, but this purge still left him with eight thousand hungry mouths to feed. With the majority of men living in tents, in close quarters with animals and without proper sanitation, there was also the risk of losing hundreds, even thousands, to disease. To make matters worse, it was starting to turn bitterly cold. According to contemporary chroniclers, the winter of 1294 was particularly appalling.

One chronicler, Walter of Guisborough, describes how, as the dead of winter approached, supplies of wine had almost run out. When only one barrel remained in the castle, the soldiers set it aside for the king. Edward, however (great guy that he was) would have none of it, and ordered instead that it be shared out among his men. The story is typically heroic stuff and probably a fabrication (Walter is a great storyteller, but his tales are notoriously tall). It does, however, serve to underline the increasing desperateness of the king’s situation. The days and weeks that Edward spent at Conway must have been dark ones. As he sat in his new great hall, trying to jolly his knights along, he must surely have remembered his father’s failures in Wales. Castles like Deganwy, then only recently constructed, had been besieged and destroyed. English troops, ill equipped and ill supplied, had frozen and starved to death. Royal armies, surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, were forced into ignominious retreat. Was history about to repeat itself? Were he and his army about to suffer the same fate?

The answer, in the end, was no – though in the early days it was a close-run thing. The king and his army ultimately survived for two reasons. In the first place, Edward could command enormous resources from the rest of his empire. It was a huge logistical exercise for his government ministers, but ships eventually sailed into Conway harbour carrying grain and vegetables, wine, chicken and fish. They came not just from English ports like Bristol and Chester, but from
the
king’s colonies further afield in Ireland and Gascony. Secondly, the ships on this occasion could actually get to the troops, because both the town and castle of Conway were located right on the sea-shore. Edward’s choice of site, when put to the test, proved to be a very good one. After three months cooped up in a city of tents, rather than suffering, the king’s troops actually ended up with more than they could eat. By the start of the spring, the town’s quayside was awash with unwanted food. Huge piles of grain had been dumped there and, having become wet in the April rains, had sprouted shoots; they now resembled little hills. The harbour stank of rotting fish that nobody wanted to buy, even at knock-down prices. Logistically, this is still extremely impressive stuff. Edward had fielded a total of thirty-five thousand men, and no one had gone hungry.

In the spring, the king’s army rode out to find the revolt practically over. Most of the fighting had been done by the other commanders while Edward was holed up in Conway. The king ordered the execution of the ringleaders – though not, surprisingly, Madog ap Llywelyn: he was carted off to London, destined for imprisonment in the Tower. Harsh penalties were inflicted on local communities, with hundreds of hostages being taken, and heavy fines imposed.

The community that suffered most from these repercussions was the town of Llanfaes. Situated on the eastern tip of the island of Anglesey, it had been the most prosperous native settlement in Wales. It had also been one of the centres of the rebellion, a fact that the townspeople had highlighted when they lynched their English sheriff at the start of the revolt. Anglesey had exposed itself as the weak link in Edward’s chain of defences, and the king responded accordingly. He decided to build one last great fortress, and made a deliberate point of destroying Llanfaes in the process. The result was Beaumaris – Master James of St Georges’ most perfectly conceived castle.

*

The name Beaumaris, which literally means ‘pretty marsh’, is an indication of the principal problem that the new site presented to the master mason. Unlike Caernarfon, Conway and Harlech, which all offered rocky platforms on which to build, the flat and marshy land around Llanfaes offered few natural advantages. It did, however, mean that there were no restrictions when it came to shape, and so Master James was able to create a perfectly symmetrical building. In the eyes of many, Beaumaris is the ultimate concentric castle, with two great gatehouses, drum towers on each corner, and an outer wall that runs for a quarter of a mile. The architect compensated for the absence of rock-solid foundations by surrounding the whole structure with a moat. He also provided the castle with its own deep-water harbour, so that ships of up to forty tons in weight could get supplies right up to the watergate.

Beaumaris
.

In terms of construction, Beaumaris was the biggest challenge to date. Not only did Edward demand that building was carried out at relentless speed; the castle’s island location meant that most of the stone had to be delivered by water, which caused costs to soar. In the first six months of building, the works absorbed £7,800, and over a quarter of this sum was spent on transportation of materials. At one point there were almost three thousand men working at Beaumaris, the biggest workforce yet deployed by a king who had already smashed all previous records.

By the late 1290s, Edward’s massive resources were stretched to breaking point. As well as pouring more men and money into Wales, the king was also engaged in wars against the Scots and the French. Fighting on so many fronts at once brought opposition from his subjects in England, who had become tired of footing the bill for such costly campaigns. Although Edward weathered the political storm, it left Master James trying to cope with an ever-worsening cash crisis. In February 1296, the architect wrote to the officials of the Exchequer in Westminster with a desperate plea for more money.

‘If our lord the king,’ he began, ‘wants the work to be finished as quickly as it should be, and on the scale which it has been commenced, we could not make do with less than £250 a week.’

Anticipating the objections of the money-men, he reminded them that he had to pay four hundred masons, two hundred quarrymen, thirty smiths, and three thousand others, including carpenters, plasterers, and general labourers. Moreover, fear was starting to get to these men. With Wales only recently pacified, they were surrounded by a deeply hostile population. Despite the presence of ten mounted
sergeants
, twenty crossbowmen and one hundred footsoldiers, Master James still had doubts about their safety.

‘As to how things are in the land of Wales, we still cannot be sure,’ he said. ‘As you know, Welshmen are Welshmen.’ Having put down his pen, the mason picked it up once more to add a heartfelt postscript. ‘My lords, for God’s sake be quick with the money,’ he scribbled. ‘Otherwise everything done up to now will have been to no avail!’