Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  The sense of drama at Caernarfon’s King’s Gate in fact extends to the whole castle. The fashion for towers in the thirteenth century, you will recall, was for round rather than square, and indeed we have seen round towers at Caerphilly, Flint, Rhuddlan, Harlech and Conway, as well as at Chillon, La Batiaz and Saillon. Caernarfon’s towers, however, are neither round nor square, but polygonal. Some of them have eight sides, and one has a total of ten. Moreover, in the Middle Ages it was typical to finish the walls of a castle with whitewash. At Conway and Harlech you can still see traces of this original finish (and imagine how different and glorious they would have looked in their heyday). Once again, however, Caernarfon was unusual. Instead of being covered over, the castle’s walls were left bare, in order to expose to the outside world the different coloured bands of stone in the masonry.

  Why was Caernarfon Castle so different to all the others? The answer, it seems, lies in Edward’s love of chivalric literature. The king was a big fan of the legendary King Arthur, and on several occasions we can catch him indulging his passion for all things Arthurian. In 1278, despite having plenty of other pressing business, he personally attended the disinterment of two bodies at Glastonbury Abbey, which the monks swore blind were those of Arthur and his queen, Guinevere. After the conquest of Wales in 1283, Edward was ceremonially appeased with a bauble known as ‘Arthur’s Crown’, which he subsequently presented at the high altar of Westminster Abbey. The following year, Edward organized a ‘round-table’ tournament in Wales; and the great round table on display in Winchester Castle has recently been scientifically dated to Edward’s reign. King Arthur, we should note, was according to legend not simply a king of England, but the king of a united island of Britain, and this alone would have made him an attractive role model for a conquering king like Edward. When he later wrote to the Pope to justify his right to rule Scotland, it was the historic precedent of Arthur that Edward cited in his defence.

  Edward’s enthusiasm for the mythical British past was evidently keenly felt, and without a doubt he had heard an ancient Welsh tale called The Dream of Macsen Wledig. It was first written down in the fourteenth century, but had already been current for several hundred years. The story recounts how Macsen (or Maximus), a Roman Emperor, dreamed of travelling from Rome to Wales, until he came to a point where the river met the sea, and saw a great castle, ‘the fairest castle that mortal had ever seen’. The location of this castle, the poet later reveals, was Caernarfon. Edward, therefore, by choosing to build his new castle there, was not only building on top of yet another hall of the Welsh princes; he was making this ancient legend come true by building his own fairy-tale castle, like the one in Macsen’s dream. Macsen’s status as a Roman emperor is reflected in the decoration of Caernarfon’s largest tower, which is topped with stone carvings of imperial eagles, and appropriately called the Eagle Tower.

  The cleverest part, however, is the message hidden in the banded masonry and the polygonal towers. According to the same Welsh legends, the Emperor Macsen was the son of the Emperor Constantine, celebrated not only as the first Christian emperor, but also as the founder of the new imperial capital of Constantinople (modern Istanbul). There is no indication that Edward ever visited this city, but someone in his entourage clearly knew what the walls there looked like. They have banded masonry, and polygonal towers. Caernarfon, even though it stands at the opposite end of Europe, is an unmistakable echo of Constantine’s imperial city.

  The big question is, of course, who came up with these ideas? It is totally unanswerable and therefore all the more intriguing. We might be tempted to ascribe all the invention to Master James, but it was clearly Edward himself and not his master mason who was inspired by King Arthur. We might imagine Master James coming over from Savoy with a set of sketches tucked under his arm, but again this is highly unlikely. At Harlech, Conway and Caernarfon, each castle is built to fit the platform of rock on which it stands, and therefore much of the design had to be worked out on the spot. Moreover, there is no indication from his work in Savoy that Master James had ever designed or built a twin-towered gatehouse before he came to England. The fact that he constructed such gatehouses at Harlech and Rhuddlan suggests he was open to new ideas, or tried hard to incorporate his patron’s wishes. Later, when Edward was at war with the Scots and needed a castle at Linlithgow, he wrote a letter to Master James telling him precisely what kind of design he wanted, specifying (among other things) the depth of the ditch and the number of towers. There is no doubt that Edward had similarly strong views about what he wanted in Wales, and gave equally detailed orders to his master mason.

  Polygonal towers and banded masonary: Caernarfon

  Constantinople.

  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 saf
ety.

  ‘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!’

  The letter obviously did the trick. Edward made sure that Master James got the money he needed, and building work at Beaumaris went on. At the same time, repairs were under way at Caernarfon – over £1,000 was spent rebuilding the town’s damaged walls, and the building of the castle continued apace. Notwithstanding the distractions in Scotland and France, and despite cutbacks in all other areas, the king continued to pour men and materials into Wales. Year by year, his two greatest castles grew steadily more grand.

  By 1305, Edward’s imperial vision had almost been realized. He had conquered Wales, eliminated its rulers, and crushed all trace of rebellion. Six great stone castles stood finished, and two more were nearing completion. By this date, Edward had also added Scotland to his dominions. The northern kingdom, after nine years of spirited resistance, had finally been bludgeoned into submission. Londoners who had grown bored gawping at Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s skeletal features could now venture down to London Bridge, where William Wallace’s freshly severed head was the latest grisly attraction. To us, his actions may make Edward seem like a bloody tyrant, a Caligula or a Stalin. But many contemporaries saw it differently. For patriotic Englishmen, Edward had become what he had always aspired to be – a new Arthur, ruling over a united kingdom of Britain.

  It was, however, a fleeting vision. Even as the king clutched at his dream, it slipped through his fingers. In 1306, the Scots rose in rebellion. Edward moved north to crush it, but he grew ill in the course of the summer and, although his armies had some notable successes, the revolt was not extinguished. Christmas was spent at Lanercost, and the following spring Edward crossed to Carlisle, planning to lead a fresh expedition into Galloway. At that point, however, time caught up with the sixty-eight-year-old king. On 7 July, at Burgh by Sands on the Cumbrian coast, Edward himself was conquered.